Vanadium redox flow batteries real-time State of Charge and State of Health estimation under electrolyte imbalance condition
Thomas Puleston, Andreu Cecilia, Ramon Costa‐Castelló, Maria Serra
Abstract
This paper presents a novel observer architecture capable to estimate online the concentrations of the four vanadium species present in a vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB). The proposed architecture comprises three main stages: (1) a high-gain observer, to estimate the output voltage and its derivatives; (2) a dynamic inverter, to obtain a set of concentration candidate solutions; and (3) a static selector, to determine the actual concentrations. The methodology does not rely on the classic assumption of balanced electrolytes, thus significantly widening the application range in comparison with most of the literature previous studies. Furthermore, to perform the estimation, only a single voltage and current measurements are required, which eliminates the need of including complex and costly additional sensors. To validate the proposal, comprehensive simulation tests are conducted. These tests take into account typical side reactions that cause imbalance in VRFB systems, such as vanadium crossover and V2+ oxidation. The observer shows a remarkable performance when dealing with these realistic conditions, allowing to estimate with high accuracy and robustness the four vanadium concentrations, the State of Charge and the State of Health with a relative error below 2%.