Imposing Recovery Period for Battery Health Monitoring, Prognosis, and Optimization

The prevalence of battery-powered systems such as electric vehicles, smartphones, and IoT devices has made batteries crucial to everyone's daily life and business. Battery health, however, degrades over time, not only decreasing system reliability such as unexpected system shutoffs, but also causing overheating/gassing which, in turn, increases safety risks such as thermal runaway or even battery fire/explosion. To address these problems, we must monitor, prognose, and optimize battery health throughout the physical system life. However, existing battery management systems (BMSes) are usually treated as complementary system components attached/embedded to/in batteries, and are unable to make optimal health management decisions adaptively based on system dynamics or user requirements. In particular, no existing BMSes exploit battery relaxation, a physicochemical battery behavior that improves its health management, thus missing a golden opportunity for system optimization. To remedy this deficiency, we have been developing R-AWARE, a relaxation-assisted battery health management that schedules system operation while considering both system/user requirements and battery health. R-AWARE improves battery health via relaxation-assisted battery monitoring, relaxation-aware battery scheduling of battery charging/discharging, and relaxation-based thermal control, enhancing system performance in reliability, lifetime, operation time, and safety.