Towards Performance Enhancement of Lead-Acid Battery for modern Transport Vehicles

Abstract

Lead-acid batteries (LABs) have a short lifespan due to operational requirements of modern vehicles such as high power, storing regenerative braking energy, start/stop functionality amongst others as compared to other energy storage devices such as Lithium-Ion and Supercapacitors. As a result, this paper seeks to enhance the performance of LABs through hybridization with Supercapacitors in terms of lifespan to effectively support the enhanced usage and performance of modern transport vehicles. This is done by integrating energy storage units using active parallel topology approach through DC/DC converters. The proportional-integrate-derivative in a parallel form is used to control the charge and discharge of the LAB and Supercapacitor, thus, improving the performance of LABs. Also, Matlab/Simulink simulation tool is used to model the system integration, and the results indicate that the battery voltage is well stabilized at 12V and State-of-Charge is kept within 90-96%, thus, enhancing the battery lifespan significantly.