Analysis and Estimation of the Maximum Switch Current during Battery System Reconfiguration

Batteries are interconnected in series and/or parallel to meet wide-range power or energy demands in various industrial applications. To pursue the benefits of multiple connection structures in one system, reconfigurable battery systems (RBSs) have recently emerged for safe and efficient operation, extended energy storage and delivery, etc. Switches are the essential elements to enable the battery system reconfiguration, but selecting appropriate switches for RBS designs has not been systematically investigated. To bridge this gap, analytical expressions are derived in this paper to estimate the maximum switch current and its upper limit to facilitate the selection of RBS switches. An RBS prototype based on H-bridges is set up and experimental results verify the effectiveness and advantage of the proposed estimation method. These analytical expressions, relying only on resistances of batteries and switches, are readily applicable to practical RBS design and much more efficient than conducting numerous circuit experiments, simulation tests, or circuit analyses, especially for large-scale systems. Moreover, the analysis framework and estimation method proposed for series-parallel mutual conversion can be adaptively extended to other complex system reconfigurations to facilitate various RBS designs.