Technical Articles

A Simple, Effective Lead-Acid Battery Modeling Process for Electrical System Component Selection

By Robyn A. Jackey, MathWorks


Determining electrical system capacity for conventional vehicles can be expensive due to repetitive empirical vehicle-level testing. Electrical system modeling and simulation have been proposed to reduce the amount of physical testing necessary for component selection.

To add value to electrical system component selection, the electrical system simulation models must regard the electrical system as a whole. Electrical system simulations are heavily dependent on the battery submodel, which is the most complex component to simulate. Methods for modeling the battery are typically unclear, difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.

This paper describes the implementation of a simple, fast, and effective equivalent circuit model structure for lead-acid batteries to facilitate the battery model part of the system model. The equivalent circuit model has been described in detail. Additionally, tools and processes for estimating the battery parameters from laboratory data were implemented. After estimating parameters from laboratory data, the parameterized battery model was used for electrical system simulation. The battery model was capable of providing accurate simulation results and very fast simulation speed.

This paper was presented at SAE World Congress.

Read full paper.

Published 2007

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