Hybrid Battery-SC and Battery-Battery Multistage Design and Energy Management for Power Sharing

The core technical challenges faced by the battery industry is lifespan, cost, and toxic lead recycling. Increase in battery’s health and use life is a research hotspot to reduce cost and delay recycling. In the first part, a battery-supercapacitor (SC) hybrid is designed and simulated. In this two-stage design, the SC protects the battery from fatal damage and deep discharge. A simple decision-based control strategy is employed to proportionally share the power delivery capabilities of hybrid battery-SC storage units. Later, the rate-limiting strategy is simulated using the fresh and weak batteries for a scaled 125W load with a peak of 1000W in a typical rural home. The simulated results show effective coordination of such a low-cost fresh and weak battery-battery combination for handling light load variation. The proposed hybrid configuration demonstrates practical and economic advantages and best suits community electrification with an increased social acceptance.