Adaptive unscented Kalman filtering for state of charge estimation of a lithium-ion battery for electric vehicles

An accurate battery State of Charge estimation is of great significance for battery electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles. This paper presents an adaptive unscented Kalman filtering method to estimate State of Charge of a lithium-ion battery for battery electric vehicles. The adaptive adjustment of the noise covariances in the State of Charge estimation process is implemented by an idea of covariance matching in the unscented Kalman filter context. Experimental results indicate that the adaptive unscented Kalman filter-based algorithm has a good performance in estimating the battery State of Charge. A comparison with the adaptive extended Kalman filter, extended Kalman filter, and unscented Kalman filter-based algorithms shows that the proposed State of Charge estimation method has a better accuracy. ► Adaptive unscented Kalman filtering is proposed to estimate State of Charge of a lithium-ion battery for electric vehicles. ► The proposed method has a good performance in estimating the battery State of Charge. ► A comparison with three other Kalman filtering algorithms shows that the proposed method has a better accuracy.