Design of Resonant Filters for AC Current Magnification : Heating of Li-ion Batteries by Using AC Currents

Abstract: Using alternating current in order to heat batteries at sub-zero temperatures is a method,which is investigated in-depth by an increasing number of study groups. The thesis considersthe resonance phenomenon with the intention to use alternating current amplificationand battery’s impedance in order to induce power dissipation inside the battery, and in thisway increase its temperature. A battery cell is thereby modelled as an impedance transferfunction, estimated from electrochemical impedance spectroscopy measurements, whichare taken for a LiNi 13Mn13Co13O2 cell. Note that at 1 kHz and room temperature (20 ◦C),the ohmic resistance of the selected cell amounts to only 0.76m. Five resonant circuitsare investigated and one of them is selected for further investigation, and as a basis for afilter design. The chosen resonant circuit lead to an LCL filter with current magnification.The experimental setup used for conducting practical experiments, offers the possibilityof operating the voltage source converter both as a Full-bridge and as a Half-bridge, withand without current control. For each possible configuration, an LCL filter and a currentcontroller are designed, taking into account the corresponding limitations in frequency,current and controller voltage. The filter design is based on a multiobjective optimizationmethod used to determine filter components that yield the highest gain value for everyconfiguration. The method minimizes two objective functions in order to find an optimalsolution. The first objective is the reversed absolute value of the gain, whereas thesecond one is the absolute impedance of the circuit, consisting of the filter and batterycells. The gain is thereby defined as the ratio between the induced cell current and thecurrent entering the circuit. The obtained results of the proposed method are experimentallyvalidated. Depending on how the filters were physically designed and taking intoaccount the corresponding voltage source converter configuration, gains of 16 were experimentallyachieved. Finally, the three investigated configurations are compared againstthe reference case (Half-bridge voltage source converter with current control and a singleinductor) regarding their power efficiencies. The power measurements showed that despitehigh obtained gains, the overall filter power losses remained approximately in thesame range, compared to the power losses of the reference case. This is due to the factthat stray resistances of the designed LCL filters easily reached values of around 40m,which hindered an efficient power transfer with the chosen voltage source converter andthe used battery cells. This further indicates the importance of building filters with lowstray resistances and in this thesis, it represents a primary source of improvement.