A correlation based fault detection method for short circuits in battery packs

This paper presents a fault detection method for short circuits based on the correlation coefficient of voltage curves. The proposed method utilizes the direct voltage measurements from the battery cells, and does not require any additional hardware or effort in modeling during fault detection. Moreover, the inherent mathematical properties of the correlation coefficient ensure the robustness of this method as the battery pack ages or is imbalanced in real applications. In order to apply this method online, the recursive moving window correlation coefficient calculation is adopted to maintain the detection sensitivity to faults during operation. An additive square wave is designed to prevent false positive detections when the batteries are at rest. The fault isolation can be achieved by identifying the overlapped cell in the correlation coefficients with fault flags. Simulation and experimental results validated the feasibility and demonstrated the advantages of this method. •A novel correlation based fault detection method is proposed for short circuits.•The moving window correlation coefficient calculation is adopted recursively.•The fault detection process does not require hardware or analytical redundancy.•The proposed method is robust to cell inconsistencies in SoC and SoH.•Simulation and experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and advantages.