External cell balancing for the repair of an HV battery

Currently, the vehicle’s HV battery has to be replaced as a whole, even if only one cell is defective. This is neither resource-saving nor cost-efficient. An external cell balancer, on the other hand, allows for a targeted repair of the actually defective parts and thus leads to significantly more resource and cost efficiency. An additional environmental effect arises from the elimination of hazardous goods transports that are currently incurred by the central maintenance system.

If a part of the cells or a module in a lithium-ion HV battery of a vehicle is defective and needs to be replaced, the defective cell must first be identified and removed. The newly inserted cell must first be brought to exactly the same state of charge as the remaining intact cells of the battery. If this were not taken into account, the weakest cells would be destroyed, and in extreme cases this could cause a fire. A cell balancer offers the possibility of conditioning individual modules in the workshop and thus repairing the HV battery on site.