An improved speed-dependent battery/ultracapacitor hybrid energy storage system management strategy for electric vehicles

Battery/Ultracapacitor (UC) Hybrid Energy Storage Systems (HESS) for Electric Vehicles (EVs) have been frequently proposed in the literature to increase battery cycle life. The HESS consists of a Power Management Strategy (PMS) and an Energy Management Strategy (EMS). Existing EMS are quite empirical, such as setting constant target UC energy levels regardless of load. This work presents an improved complete HESS management strategy. The EMS involves a more comprehensive method of setting the target UC energy level using a speed-dependent band. This allows the UC to achieve two goals – contain sufficient energy for future accelerations and have sufficient space for capturing energy from future regenerative braking – without knowledge of the future drive profile. The PMS involves a speed-dependent battery power limit, which also achieves two goals – better UC utilization and allowing the battery to supply the steady state power. Simulations show existing works cannot achieve the four goals simultaneously unless their UCs are sized twice as large compared to the proposed rule-based HESS. In addition, the proposed HESS extends battery cycle life by up to 42% compared to a battery-only system. Lastly, a reduced-scale experiment was built to show that the proposed HESS is able to run in real-time.