Effectiveness of Active Balancing on High Dispersion Batteries

These investigations examine the benefit of an active balancing system based on an LTC-3300 IC with help of an arbitrarily configurable battery. The used structure allows creating batteries with different cell to cell variations in a 12S1P setup and to test it with the active balancing system. In total, three different combinations with varying degrees of cell to cell variation are tested. The usable capacity of the cell combinations is compared with and without balancing. In all three tests, the capacity could be significantly increased and stabilized with help of the active system. These studies indicate that the additional benefit of an active balancing system could play a major role in the field of second-life batteries. Furthermore, the system can ensure the usability of a battery in case of cell failure.