Voltage measurement-based recursive adaptive method for internal short circuit fault diagnosis in lithium-ion battery packs

Internal short circuit (ISC) has been identified as a major cause of thermal runaway in lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery systems, making the investigation of ISC fault diagnosis a focal research topic in electric vehicles and battery energy storage systems. Recently, several studies have applied multivariate analysis techniques to analyze abnormal behavior in cell voltage measurements and achieved an accurate diagnosis of ISC faults. However, model parameter variations under different operating conditions and state of charge (SOC), which results in unacceptable false alarm rates, is yet to be fully considered. To effectively address this problem, this study introduces a recursive approach on the basis of principal component analysis (PCA) to update the monitoring model and adapt to parameter changes. Moreover, an adaptive threshold with fusion factors is devised to reduce fault false alarm rates. In particular, this study employs sliding window techniques to amplify weak fault features to tackle the challenge of early-stage detection difficulty for ISC faults and provides an optimal window width determination algorithm based on fault-free data. Experimental results on a real Li-ion battery pack test platform under various operating conditions and SOC levels demonstrate that the proposed method maintains extremely high fault detection rates for ISC faults of different intensities. Furthermore, it is established that the adaptive updating of the model in the absence of faults greatly reduces false alarm rates.