Abstract

The battery/supercapacitor (SC) hybrid energy storage system (HESS) is widely applied in electric vehicles (EVs) in recent years due to the hybrid system which combines the benefits of both devices. This paper proposes an adaptive power distribution scheme for battery/SC HESS to maximise the usage of SC according to its stored energy and load current. In the approach, the low-pass filter is developed with adaptive algorithm to calculate the suitable cut-off frequency to allocate the power demand between the battery and SC. The approach can adjust the cut-off frequency but not change the structure of the control system, and thus its original property of simple implementation and stability is not affected. The comprehensive simulation study verifies the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive power distribution scheme in a battery/SC HESS and its stability is further validated using Lyapunov method. The result shows that the adaptive method performs better than a traditional control system with 20%–40% less battery energy throughput during operation and can adjust the dynamic response of the HESS according to the energy capacity of SC to further improve system efficiency. The proposed adaptive power distribution scheme is verified able to extend the service life of the HESS system in EV applications.