State of Charge Estimation in a High Temperature Sodium Nickel Chloride Battery Using Kalman Filter

Abstract: In today’s heavy industry there are applications demanding high power supply in certain periods of a working cycle. A typical case might be startup of heavy machinery or just keeping a certain point in a distribution network at a certain energy level. To deal with this different techniques might be used, one way is to introduce a battery as an energy reserve in the system. One battery studied at ABB for this purpose is the so called High Temperature Sodium Nickel Chloride battery and a model of this battery has been developed at ABB. When operating a battery of the mentioned type in an application it is important to keep track of the energy stored in the battery. Earlier tests has shown that this is difficult in a noisy environment. This master thesis investigates if a Kalman filter may be used to estimate the energy stored in the battery. The investigation is performed in steps, starting with a simplified model of the battery and then expanding to a more complete model. Evaluation of the methods and algorithms used is made by simulations and based on the assumption that there is a good model available. The model is special in such a way that it has a varying number of states despite that the number of outputs remains the same. Some comparisons with actual measurements are also made and an analysis of the parameters in the model along with an introduction to the system identification problem is discussed, assuming that the structure of the model is correct.