Reduction in the number of gate drive power converters for a cell voltage equalizer using an LC series circuit

Abstract

Cell voltage equalizers are important for the batteries of electric vehicles and other energy storage systems in order not to be reduced their capacity. The authors have proposed a cell voltage equalizer using an LC series circuit; however, the equalizer requires a lot of bi-directional and multi-stage connected switching elements to equalize the voltage across each battery cell. This paper proposed a novel gate drive circuit configuration and a control method which has compatibly with high performance and low costs using “MOS-FETs” and verified the effectiveness of the proposed method by the simulations and experiments.