Voltage-fault diagnosis for battery pack in electric vehicles using mutual information

The safety of battery system is compromised by the abusive operation and aging, potentially resulting in the abnormal voltage levels. Rapid detection and accurate diagnosis of voltage fault are crucial for ensuring the safety of battery packs. A battery voltage fault diagnosis method is proposed by using the mutual information in this work, which can identify faulty cells timely. Specifically, the voltage of battery pack in an electric vehicle is collected, and the mutual information of voltages between each paired-cells is calculated. The presence of faulty cells disturbs the original distribution of mutual information. Therefore, the Ryan Joiner (RJ) test is used to judge whether the normal distribution of calculated mutual information or not. The interquartile test is used to detect the outliers. The faulty cell is diagnosed by matching the cell corresponding to the outliers. The defaults resulting from an internal short circuit and mechanical vibration are analyzed and diagnosed. The method can avoid misdiagnosis caused by the mutual influence between different faults. Furthermore, the fault diagnosis capability of presented method is discussed under various states of aged cells. The experimental results verify the effectiveness, robustness, model-free, and easiest-to-implement of the presented method.