A Hybrid Method for Remaining Useful Life Estimation of Lithium-Ion Battery with Regeneration Phenomena

The lithium-ion battery has become the primary energy source of many electronic devices. Accurately forecasting the remaining useful life (RUL) of a battery plays an essential role in ensuring reliable operatioin of an electronic system. This paper investigates the lithium-ion battery RUL prediction problem with capacity regeneration phenomena. We aim to reduce the accumulation of the prediction error by integrating different capacity degradation models and thereby improve the prediction accuracy of the long-term RUL. To describe the degradation process more accurately, we decoupled the degradation process into two types: capacity regeneration and normal degradation. Then, we modelled two kinds of degradation processes separately. In the prediction phase, we predicted the battery state of health (SOH) by using the relevance vector machine (RVM) and the gray model (GM) alternately, updated the training dataset according to the prediction results, and then updated the RVM and GM. The RVM and GM correct each other’s prediction results constantly, which reduces the cumulative error of prediction and improves the prediction accuracy of the battery SOH. Experimental results with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) battery dataset demonstrated that the proposed method can accurately establish the degradation model and achieve better performance for the RUL estimation as compared with the single RVM or GM methods.