Optimization of Lithium Iron Phosphate Battery Charging and Performance

Abstract

The goal of this project is to efficiently and safely charge a 5kWh battery pack in 15 minutes. Since the project is still in progress, this report describes experiments on a 56Wh battery. Experiments were performed to investigate various charging algorithms (Section 5.2.3), temperature effects (Sections 5.1.1-5.1.3 and 5.2.2) and long term health of the battery pack (Section 5.2.4). An introduction describing the motivation for the project is given in Section 1. Section 2 gives a detailed description of the equipment used including: cells, data acquisition devices, software, sensors, power sources and temperature control. Calculations performed on the data using Matlab are explained in Section 3. The methods for running experiments are described in Section 4. Section 5.1 gives the results for single cell experiments while Section 5.2 gives results for the battery pack. Some conclusions are drawn in Section 6. The report is followed by a few appendices which contain extra graphs.