Long-term Evaluation of the State-of-Health of Traction Lithium-ion Batteries in Operational Buses

In this paper, we present and evaluate a novel methodology to estimate the usable capacity and state-of-health (SOH) of lithium-ion batteries in battery-electric buses (BEV). This methodology is designed to be applicable to any BEV in normal operation, independently of battery chemistry, and without requiring complex electrochemical models or large data sets. We have tested the proposed methodology on two vehicle fleets with a total of 105 vehicles, for which we have been acquiring data for up to three years. Additionally, we have analysed the operation of the fleets in terms of daily distance driven and the charging strategies chosen by the operators.The monitored vehicles are part of fleets currently in normal operation in Europe. The data collection is done with a third-party data logger that is connected to the vehicles’ Communication Area Network (CAN) buses, and no additional changes were made to the vehicle’s hardware or software. The results show that the proposed methodology shows significantly lower variance in SOH estimation than the alternative methodologies. It also shows similar accuracy in the long-term and smaller short-term deviations from the typical capacity fade model.