PEDS2009

Fuzzy-Control-Based Five-Step Li-Ion Battery Charger

Jia-Wei Huang
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology No. 43, Sec.4, Keelung Rd., Taipei, 106, Taiwan, R.O.C D9707203@mail.ntust.edu.tw

Yi-Hua Liu
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology No. 43, Sec.4, Keelung Rd., Taipei, 106, Taiwan, R.O.C yhliu@mail.ntust.edu.tw

Shun-Chung Wang
Lunghwa University of Science and Technology No. 300, Sec.1, Wanshou Rd., Guishan, Taoyuan 306, Taiwan, R.O.C. wangsc@mail.lhu.edu.tw

Zong-Zhen Yang
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology No. 43, Sec.4, Keelung Rd., Taipei, 106, Taiwan, R.O.C D9707204@mail.ntust.edu.tw

Abstract--Nowadays, commercial lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are playing important roles as supplies for mobile phones, laptop computers and other electronics. In order to maximize the performance of Li-ion batteries, advanced charger is required. The main objective of an advanced battery charger includes short recharge times, high charging efficiencies and improved battery cycle life. This paper presents the design and implementation of a dsPIC-based fuzzy five-step Li-ion battery charging system. To obtain the optimal charging performance for the Li-ion battery, fuzzy-control-based fivestep charging algorithm and a simple power stage is used in the proposed system. Using this control, the performance of the proposed system can be improved. In addition to the hardware, a graphical user interface is also presented in this paper. According to the experimental results, the proposed charger is capable of charging the Li-ion batteries with higher efficiency and lower temperature rise.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, the number of portable consumer electronics such as mobile phones and laptop computers has grown rapidly. These developments have resulted in massive demand for batteries [1]-[2]. Secondary batteries are often used in these equipments because they are cost-effective over the lifetime of the product. For secondary batteries, three chemistries are commonly used in today's portable consumer electronics: nickel-cadmium, nickel-metal hydride and Li-ion batteries. Among them, Li-ion batteries are the most popular type of battery for portable electronics, due to their high energy-to-weight (volume) ratios, no memory effect, high open circuit voltage and lower self-discharge rate. However, to make full use of the battery, high performance charger is often required. The traditional method of charging Li-ion batteries is to apply constant current followed by a constant voltage. This method is often called constant current-constant voltage (CC-CV) charging method. Constant current is applied at the beginning of a battery charging when the battery voltage is low. When the battery voltage rises to a predefined value (4.1 or 4.2 V), the charger switches to constant voltage until the charging current decreases to a predetermined small value. During the constant voltage phase, current drops exponentially due to the sum of battery resistance and any resistance in series with the battery. Therefore, full charge takes a long time. Moreover, the constant voltage charging reduces the cycle life of the battery. To deal with this problem, many battery charging algorithms are investigated and proposed in the literatures [3]-[6]. Among them, the multistage constant-

current charging algorithm is proven to have the advantages such as prolonged cycle life, enhanced charge/discharge energy efficiency and reduced charging time. Moreover, this method can easily be incorporated into ICs [7]. However, due to the complex electrochemical characteristics of Li-ion batteries, the optimal current setting value for each stage is very difficult to obtain. On the other hand, the primary goals of a high performance battery charger include high charging efficiencies and improved battery cycle life. In which charging efficiency is usually expressed as a percentage representing the amount of power got out of a battery when compared to the amount put into it during charging. Typically, higher charging efficiency will result in longer battery cycle life because high charging efficiency can translate into lower power loss and lower temperature rise. In this paper, a dsPIC-based fivestep Li-ion battery charger combined with a fuzzy-controller which can improve the charging efficiency is proposed. The proposed charger takes the temperature rise and the deviation of temperature rise of battery into account, and the current setting level is determined using a fuzzy controller. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed charger, a prototype of the dsPIC-based Li-ion battery charger is designed and realized. In order to reach the fully-digital design goal, the state-space representation of the programmable power source is first developed; digital proportional-integral-derivative control (PID-control) algorithm is then designed accordingly. According to the experimental results, the proposed charger is capable of charging the Li-ion batteries with higher efficiency and lower temperature rise. II. THE HARDWARE CONFIGURATION Fig. 1 shows the block diagram of the proposed charger system. In Fig. 1, the dsPIC microcontroller from Microchip Corp. is used to implement the digital control algorithm, provide the required gating signals for the power switches in the power source and then gather and analyze data from the data acquisition circuit. PWM modulation strategies and interfacing IC driving signal is also realized using the dsPIC chip to achieve better performance. The proposed dsPIC controller attempts to meet the flexibility, ease of use and low cost requirements for most consumers and industrial applications. From Fig. 1, the whole system can be divided into three major parts: input/output interfacing

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unit, main control unit and energy conversion unit. Detailed descriptions about each unit will be given in the following sections:

GUI

Record VI Temperture Power Source Power Charge Current

Battery

Fig. 2 Block diagram of the controller unit

PWM Signal dsPIC30F2020 Feedback VIT

Fig. 1. Block diagram of the proposed charger

a. Input/output interfacing unit: I/O interfacing unit includes display circuits which display the charger status; feedback circuit which is used to measure the voltage, current and temperature signals from the output side (battery side) of the energy conversion unit; and signal conditioning circuits which performs amplification and range adaptation on feedback signals. b. Main control unit: the block diagram of the dsPIC-based control unit is shown in Fig. 2. Main control unit controls the voltage/current command according to the measured data. dsPIC gathers and analyzes battery status data (voltage and current) from the A/D module. After obtaining the required charging status (voltage, current), necessary gating signals are then determined through the built-in fuzzy controller. The digital PID-control algorithm is also implemented in the dsPIC controller. dsPIC controller computes the gating signals of buck converter according to the feedback current command and current feedback information. In addition to implementing the main battery charging controller, a graphical user interface (GUI) is also developed to offer a user-friendly operating/monitoring interface of the proposed charger, the above-mentioned GUI is shown in Fig. 3. c. Energy conversion unit: energy conversion unit is used to supply the electric power to Li-ion batteries. Fig. 4 shows the topology of the energy conversion unit. In Fig. 4, a simple buck type DC/DC converter is used as the charging unit. By adequately controlling the PWM gating signal, the energy conversion unit can transfer the required energy to the Li-ion battery pack.

Fig. 3 GUI of the proposed charger

Fig. 4 The topology of the energy conversion unit

III. THE SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION In this section, the software configurations of the proposed charging system will be provided. Fig. 5 shows the software flowchart of the proposed controller. From Fig. 5, the main tasks of the dsPIC controller include: Performing digital filter and digital controller Provide the gating signals of buck converter Performing fuzzy controller Control the interfacing circuits. It can be observed from Fig. 5 that the digital filter and digital controller is performed every 20s. Therefore, the switching frequency of the proposed power stage is 50 kHz. The digital filter used in the proposed system is a 48-order

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finite impulse response (FIR) filter. The equation describing a FIR filter can be expressed as in (1).
Main Start
Current Command

y[n] = ak x[n k ]
k =0

T 1

(1)
Initial

Trigger Every 20us AD Interrupt

Sample VoltageCurrentTemperature FIR Filter PID Control

where x is the filter input, y is the filter output and ak is the corresponding coefficient of the designed FIR filter. The digital controller is used to calculate the required PWM command. A simple PID controller is utilized in this paper and the PID control algorithm can then be designed as in (2). n e(n) e(n 1) (2) u (n) = K e(n) + K e(i)T + K
P I

Enable A/D Conversion Timer2 Interrupt

Update New Temperature Update output current command

Trigger Every 0.5s Timer2 Interrupt

T Voltage

i= 0

Enter Loop

where e(n) is the error signal, T is the sampling time and u(n) is the output of the PID controller. To achieve higher charging efficiency, a fuzzy controller is used in this paper to determine the charging current setting level. The fuzzy controller is calculated every 0.5 s. Fig. 6 shows the block diagram of the implemented fuzzy controller. In this paper, the input of the fuzzy controller is the temperature rise T and the deviation of temperature rise T. The membership function of the inputs T and T for the proposed charger is illustrated in Fig. 7. Fig. 7(a) shows the membership function of the input variable T and Fig. 7(b) depicts the membership function of the input variable T, respectively. Both T and T are in triangular form. Fig. 7(c) is the membership function of the output current command, which is described by singleton types. The singleton type used is to minimize the computational load of the microprocessor used in the proposed system. It should be noted that five-step charging algorithm is employed in this paper. Therefore, there are five groups of output membership functions. From Fig. 7, each of the input variables T and T is mapped into 5 different linguistic values. Therefore, the proposed fuzzy rule will consist of 25 different rules. The complete set of fuzzy control rules for the proposed system is tabulated in Table 1. The defuzzification method used in this paper is the commonly used center of gravity method and is shown in (3).
y=

Fuzzy Control

Fig. 5.

dsPIC controller software flowchart

Output Membership Function

Io1 Io2 Io3 Io4 Io5

Io1 Io2 Io3 Io4 Io5

Io1 Io2 Io3 Io4 Io5

Io1 Io2 Io3 Io4 Io5

Io1 Io2 Io3 Io4 Io5

Io1 Io2 Io3 Io4 Io5

T1

T2

T3

T4

T5

Fuzzification

Rule Base Rule1

T5

Output Io

T/dt

T1

T2 T3 T4

Rule25 Defuzzification Inference Engine

Fuzzification

Fig. 6.

The block diagram of the proposed fuzzy controller

W B
i i=1 n

(3)

(a) Membership functions of T

W
i=1

where Wi is the inference result of rule i, Bi is the corresponding output of rule i, and y is the output.
(b) Membership functions of T

(c) Membership functions of Io Fig. 7. Membership functions of T, T and Io

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Table 1 The complete fuzzy control rule for the proposed system Table 2 Output membership function setting value (unit : A) Membership Function Io1 Io2 Io3 Io4 Io5 Step1 0.8 0.9 1.0 1.1 1.2 Step2 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0 Step3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 Step4 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 Step5 0.05 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4

IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS In order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments are carried out on commercially available Li-ion batteries. Table 2 shows the setting value of the output membership function Io used in this paper. Fig. 8 shows the output current profiles of the proposed fuzzybased five-step charging algorithm, the conventional five-step constant current charging method and the commonly used CC-CV charging method, respectively. From Fig. 8, the setting values of the five-step charging algorithm equals to the setting value of the center value (i.e. Io3) of the output membership function. From Fig. 8, the current of the conventional five-step constant current charging method can accurately follow the current command, and the current waveform of the proposed method will vary according to the temperature rise of the battery. Fig. 9 shows the temperature rise of the aforementioned three charging method. From Fig. 9, the proposed method has the lowest temperature rise comparing to the other two charging method. Table 3 shows the experimental results on charging time, charging efficiency and charged capacity of these three charging methods. From Table 3, the proposed method has the highest charging efficiency. However, the charging time of the proposed method is higher than the conventional five-step charging method, and the charged capacity of the proposed method is the lowest. V. CONCLUSION In this paper, a fuzzy-based five-step battery charger for Li-ion batteries is presented. The proposed charger can adjust the charging current level according to the battery temperature rise and a five-stage current setting base value. The proposed charger is capable of charging the Li-ion batteries with higher efficiency and lower temperature rise comparing to conventional five-stage and CC-CV charging methods. It should be noted that the setting value of the output membership function will affect the charging efficiency and the charging time of the proposed method, this will be investigated in the future work.

Fig. 8. Output current of three different charging method

Fig. 9.

Temperature rise of three different charging method

Table 3 Experimental results of the three charging methods

Table 4 Comparison of the three charging methods conventional fiveCC-CV proposed algorithm stage discharge high low medium capacity (574.7 mAh) (564.8 mAh) (623.5 mAh) long short medium charge time (4978 s) (3403 s) (3457 s) temperature high low medium average rise (1.803) (1.52) (2.033) low medium high efficiency (95.45%) (96.28%) (96.623%)

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VI. REFERENCES
on Industrial Electronics, vol. 51, no. 6, pp. 13441346, Dec. 2004. [2] H. J. Chiu, L. W. Lin, P. L. Pan, and M. H. Tseng, A novel rapid charger for lead-acid batteries with energy recovery, IEEE Trans. on Power Electronics, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 640647, May 2006. [3] L. R. Chen, A design of an optimal battery pulse charge system by frequency-varied technique, IEEE Trans. on Industrial Electronics, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 398405, Feb. 2007. [4] L. R. Chen, J. J. Chen, N. Y. Chu, and G. Y. Han, Current-pumped battery charger, IEEE Trans. on Industrial Electronics, vol. 55, no. 6, pp. 24822488, June 2008. [5] Y. C. Chuang, and Y. L. Ke, High-efficiency and low-stress ZVT PWM DC-to-DC converter for battery charger, IEEE Trans. on Industrial Electronics, vol. 55, no. 8, pp.30303037, Aug. 2008. [6] L. R. Chen, R.C. Hsu, and C. S. Liu, A design of a grey-predicted Liion battery charge system, IEEE Trans. on Industrial Electronics, vol. 55, no. 10, pp. 36923701, Oct. 2008. [7] Y. H. Liu, J. H. Teng, and Y. C. Lin Search for an optimal rapid charging pattern for lithium-ion batteries using ant colony system algorithm, IEEE Trans. on Industrial Electronics, vol. 52, no. 5, pp. 13281336, Oct. 2005.

[1] L. R. Chen, PLL-based battery charge circuit topology, IEEE Trans.

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