2020 IEEE Pune Section International Conference (PuneCon)

Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, Pune India. Dec 16-18, 2020

Performance Analysis of Electrical Equivalent

Circuit Models of Lithium-ion Battery
Rushali R.Thakkar Y.Srinivasa.Rao Rajendra R.Sawant
Electronics Department EXTC Department EXTC Department
Sardar Patel Institute of Technology Sardar Patel Institute of Technology Sardar Patel Institute of Technology
2020 IEEE Pune Section International Conference (PuneCon) | 978-1-7281-9600-8/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/PuneCon50868.2020.9362386

Mumbai, India Mumbai, India Mumbai, India

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Abstract—Electrical equivalent circuit models of battery helps of the battery, accurate battery information such as charging
us to understand the behavior in terms of its electrical char- status, current and voltage are crucial. The two RC parallel
acteristics, charging status and battery capacity to improve the network battery has proven to be highly accurate and capable
system performance and increase the overall efficiency. In this
paper different models of lithium-ion battery are discussed and of predicting battery runtime and current-voltage performance.
their performance analysis is studied along with the benefits and Battery state of charge (SOC)s are calculated based on usable
demerits which will help us to select an ideal model which will capacity value. The model parameters considered are SOC and
suit best to a power electronics application. It is also observed current.
that accurate electrical equivalent model is best suited for power The choice between the first order and the second order RC
applications as it takes into account the battery life time in
its model. Charging and discharging characteristics of an ideal electrical equivalent models is a compromise between the
lithium-ion battery model are plotted using matlab to match the complexities, precision and computational cost of modeling.[5]
performance with the battery model specifications of lithium ion 1RC and 2RC models under constant current discharge con-
battery. ditions were set up for collecting current and voltage data
Index Terms—Lithium-ion battery, battery modeling, V-I char- from the lithium-ion battery. An electrochemical cell’s general
acteristics, state of charge, electrical equivalent circuit
model is discussed, in which the circuit elements are modeled
I. I NTRODUCTION using a look up table for flexibility to match experimental
data[6].
Renewable energies play a major role in the power appli- In this paper, different models of lithium ion battery are
cations of emerging technologies. Batteries are considered as discussed. Rest of paper is organized as follows: Section
one of the important energy storage elements that are used in II comprises of different electrical models in detail. Section
various applications, representing low to high power. To fit the III describes the charging and discharging characteristics of
load requirements, batteries are connected in series and parallel lithium ion battery model used for simulation in matlab.
combination. Lithium-ion batteries have the advantage of light Section IV simulation results obtained is discussed and finally
weight, high energy density and low discharge rates. They section V concludes the paper.
are widely used in high-power applications, such as electric
vehicles and electric hybrids. Lithium-ion batteries have 3- II. ELECTRICAL EQUIVALENT BATTERY MODELS
4.2 volt terminal voltage and they can be connected in series Various electrical equivalent battery models are proposed
and/or parallel to meet the power and energy requirements by different authors. A lithium-ion battery model shows the
required by high power application [1]. mathematical relationship between the elements of lithium-ion
Battery models are significant as they predict system’s effi- batteries and their V-I characteristics, SOC, internal resistance,
ciency. Based on different applications of battery, the mod- operating cycles and self-discharge. The equivalent circuit
els are classified as electrochemical model, thermal model, model of a lithium-ion battery is a performance model used
coupling model and performance model based on operations. to simulate the dynamic characteristics of lithium-ion battery
However for power electronic applications it is seen that using one or more parallel combination of resistance and
electrical model is best suited to simulate the dynamic charac- capacitance and other circuit components to form an electric
teristics of battery using resistor, capacitor and voltage source circuit. The most widely used electrical equivalent models
to form an electric circuit. Different models like first/second are obtained through time domain analysis[7-10]. Following
order RC model, thevenin model, modified thevenin model, are the models used for lithium-ion battery to determine the
impedance based universal equivalent circuit model are often performance on the system.
used to describe the performance of the battery [2-4].
For circuit designers to manage the energy consumption of A. Simple Battery Model/Rint Model
the battery powered system and to forecast the characteristics The most commonly used model for battery is shown in
Fig. 1. It comprises of an ideal battery with V0 as open-circuit

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voltage (OCV), a constant equivalent internal resistance Rint
and the terminal voltage represented by Vt .
Terminal voltage can be obtained from the measurement of the
open circuit, and Rint can be measured by connecting a load
and measuring both the voltage of the terminal and current,
when fully charged as represented by equation (1)[5].

V (t) = OCV z(t) − i(t)Rint (1)

dz i(t)
=− (2)
dt Q

1 t
z(t) = z(t0) − i(T )d(T ) (3)
Q t0 Fig. 2. Resistor thevenin battery model with 1 RC branch.

Fig. 3. Resistor thevenin battery model with 2 RC branch.

Fig. 1. Resistor thevenin battery model C. An accurate Electrical Battery Model

The model was proposed as shown in Fig. 4. A capacitor
At the point when a battery is completely charged, its open and a current controlled source, models the battery capacity,
circuit voltage is higher than when it is discharged. State of charging status and run time. Like in thevenin’s model, RC net-
charge is characterized as a battery’s z (t) given by equations work simulates the slow and fast dynamics transient response.
(2) and (3), is 100 % when battery is completely charged and To overcome the barrier between SOC and OCV, a voltage
is 0 % when battery is discharged completely. controlled voltage source is utilized which is the function of
The Rint model appears to be very simple, but due to tem- state of charge. The voltage at the capacitor reflects the state
perature, state of charge and electrolytic concentration it does of charge. The dependent source current represents the current
not take into consideration the varying nature of the internal which the load requires [1].
resistance. This type of model can only be utilized to simulate
certain circuits and it cannot be utilised for electric vehicles
and electric hybrids applications.

B. Resistive Thevenin Battery Model

The circuit diagram for resistive Thevenin battery model
with 1RC and 2RC parallel network are shown in Fig. 2 and
Fig. 3. The model is characterised by the equation (4). This
model has two types of internal re-sistances, R0 and R1 , which Fig. 4. Accurate electrical battery model.
are related with the charging and discharging characteristics
of the battery, respectively. These two parameters R0 and
III. COMPARISON OF ELECTRICAL EQUIVALENT
R1 model all types of losses including electrical and non-
BATTERY MODEL
electrical losses. Although this model is better than Rint model,
the capacitance effect like transient current conditions is not The parameters used for comparison of these different mod-
taken into account. Consequently this model is non-dynamic els are SOC, subsystems, algorithms used for SOC calculation,
in nature and is not suited for electric vehicles and electric current profile and circuit elements. Different circuit elements
hybrids applications [6]. are considered for the battery models described which takes
into account different features. The features and circuit ele-
V (t) = OCV z(t) − i(t)Rint − Vc1 (t) (4) ments used for different models are tabulated in Table I.

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 TABLE I
COMPARISON OF ELECTRICAL EQUIVALENT BATTERY MODELS.

Battery model Features Circuit elements

Rint model Model is static Battery Internal Resistance
Thevenin electric model Does not consider the dependency of
state of charge Predicts battery response • Battery ohmic internal resistance
to transient load at particular SOC • Polarization internal resistance
• Capacitance is the polarization
capacity

Second order RC thevenin model Model works only at particular SOC Parallel RC network to describe the
and temperature condition. non-linear polarization response.
Accurate electrical equivalent model Model consider the battery life time.
SOC of battery is calculated based on • Curent controlled current source
value of usable capacity and capacity or run time model
• RC network simulates transient
response.
• Voltage controlled voltage source
bridges SOC to OCV

IV. ELECTRICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF

LITHIUM-ION BATTERY

Lithium-ion battery specifications used for battery model:

LIR18650mAH are given in the following Table II.

TABLE II
BATTERY MODEL SPECIFICATIONS LIR18650MAH

Nominal Voltage 3.7V

Internal Impedance 70mΩ
Discharge cut off voltage 3.0V
Maximum Charge Voltage 4.20+0.05V
Standard Charge/Discharge Current 0.52A
Rapid Charge/Discharge Current 1.3A
Maximum Pulse Discharge Current 2.6A

A. Charging Characteristics Fig. 5. Rate charge characteristics.

In general constant current constant voltage method is used

for charging lithium-ion battery. The battery is charged with
constant current until the battery reaches 4.2 volt and continues
with constant voltage until the current decreases to zero.
The voltage shots up rapidly when the battery is initially
put to charge. The battery capacity increases slowly when
the internal impedance battery is completely energized. The
charging characteristics are shown in Fig. 5 [9].

B. Discharging Characteristics

In a precharge stage, a battery is regulated to set up a large

current for fast charging. The electrical energy is restored
to the battery in a constant current charge state. A battery
undergoes final adjustment in a constant voltage charge level;
so that the battery capacity can be increased as shown in Fig. 6
[9]. Fig. 6. Rate discharge characteristics.

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 V. SIMULATION RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The charging and discharging curves for the model are

developed in matlab. For the lithium-ion battery type, the gen-
eralized model uses the equations (5) and (6). The charge and
discharge model is a function of constant voltage(E0 ), polar-
ization voltage(V), battery capacity(Q), charge current(i), ex-
ponential voltage(A) and exponential capacity(B) and time(t).
It is seen that polarization voltage can be modeled in terms
of internal resistance to determine the variation of terminal
voltage with respect to OCV. The change in polarization
constant changes the rate charge characteristics.
Discharge mode(i∗ ≥ 0)

Q Q
f 1(it; i∗; i) = Eo − K i ∗ −K + Aexp(B − it)
Q − it Q − it
(5)
Charge mode(i∗ ≤0) Fig. 8. Discharging characteristics.

Q Q
f 1(it; i∗; i) = Eo−K i∗−K +Aexp(B−it) VI. CONCLUSION
it + 0.1Q Q − it
(6) Different electrical equivalent circuit models of battery are
The following Table III shows that the characteristics devel- studied along with its features. It is observed that Rint model
oped by mathematical electrical model of battery in matlab and does not describe charging and discharging characteristics of
are close to the actual characteristics of Lithium-ion battery the battery. Thevenin electric model does not consider the
model LIR18650 2600mAH. dynamic behavior, and fails to take state of charge dependency
into account. The parameters like temperature and capacity
TABLE III are also not considered during the modeling.The model with
BATTERY MODEL CHARACTERISTICS current controlled source and voltage controlled voltage source
Characteristics Mathematical Modeling LIR18650 specifications
considers the life of battery and simulates transient response
Rate Charge 3.7V-4.15V 3.2V-4.2V as well. Simulation results obtained in matlab shows that
Discharge 4.3V-2.6V 4.2V-3.0V the mathematical model developed considering a generalised
model produces the similar charging and discharging charac-
teristics as that of the specification of lithium-ion battery.
The following graphs in Fig. 7 and Fig. 8 shows the charging
and discharging characteristics using generalized model. R EFERENCES
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