Development of a Combined Battery System for Electric Vehicles with Battery Lifespan Enhancements

We propose a combined battery system (CBS) for low cost electric vehicles (EVs) to enhance battery life. The EVs popularly called as Neighborhood Electric Vehicle or Low-Speed-Electric-Vehicle are spreading in developing countries. Conventionally the EVs batteries consist of high energy density cells, and we call it as energy cells (EC). A major issue with the EVs is high operational costs mainly due to high battery cost and short lifespan of the ECs. In this study, we develop a CBS consisting of a combination of following two kinds of batteries: i) EC which is the main energy source for the EV, and ii) a battery having high power density also called as power cells (PC) which is more suitable to bear high charge-discharge currents. The key feature of the proposed system is to minimize the size of additional battery by using our high power lithium ion battery. We performed experiments to estimate EC life for several capacity values of the PC. We found that the EC life can be doubled by combining with a PC having a capacity under 1/20 of the EC. WLTP results showed that using this capacity ratio, combined battery system reduced the load on the EC, leading to lifespan enhancement by a factor of 2 for the EC.