An online battery–state of charge estimation method using the varying forgetting factor recursive least square - unscented Kalman filter algorithm on electric vehicles

Accurate and fast estimation of the state of charge is important for the battery management system of electric vehicles. This paper proposes a method to estimate the state of charge of Lithium-ion batteries by the variable forgetting factor recursive least square (VFFRLS) – unscented Kalman filter (UKF) algorithm in real-time without the off-line battery testing data. Since the state observation requires an accurate model, an equivalent circuit model was constructed. Then, the VFFRLS algorithm is used to identify online the battery model parameters based on voltage and current measurements. An advantage of this algorithm is that it requires less initial information and shorter identification time than offline parameter identification. After the model parameters are well identified, the unscented Kalman filter estimates the state of charge and minimizes noise characteristics and uncertainty in the parameter identification process. The VFFRLS algorithm applied in this paper has shown a good result with the model output error of less than 1%, and the identification achieves real-time response. The state of charge obtained by the UKF algorithm has shown satisfactory estimation results with fast convergence speed and small errors. The UKF filter provides the results with a 1.5% error from the reference and converges after 10 cycles.