Design and Experimental Validation of a Safe Control Strategy for Reconfigurable Batteries

In this article, we present a novel control strategy for optimizing the management of reconfigurable batteries, particularly in electric vehicles (EVs) and energy storage systems. Our approach uniquely integrates control allocation (CA) with control barrier functions (CBF) to enhance operational efficiency while enforcing electrothermal safety constraints. Specifically, the proposed control scheme regulates the output voltage and ensures state-of-charge (SoC) balancing across battery modules, addressing the common weakest-module problem. Additionally, it dynamically adjusts power distribution to provide over-temperature protection, mitigating the risk of thermal runaway. Our feasibility analysis establishes the conditions under which the CBF-based safety constraints are satisfied, ensuring the existence of feasible control actions. Furthermore, we define comprehensive performance metrics to evaluate and compare the controller’s effectiveness. This includes CBF gain tuning based on feasibility results. We perform scalability analysis, demonstrating the controller’s effectiveness in systems with a large number of modules, which is critical for EV applications where computational efficiency is paramount. Finally, experimental validation on a small-scale prototype showcases the practical capability of our CBF-based optimal controller.