Incremental Capacity Analysis on Commercial Lithium-Ion Batteries using Support Vector Regression: A Parametric Study

Incremental capacity analysis (ICA) has been used pervasively to characterize the degradation mechanisms of the lithium-ion batteries, and several online state-of-health estimation algorithms are built based on ICA. However, the stairs and the noises in the discrete sampled voltage data obstruct the calculation of the capacity differentiation over voltage (d Q /d V ), therefore we need methods to fit the sampled voltage first. In this paper, the support vector regression (SVR) algorithm is used to smooth the sampled voltage curve using Gaussian kernels. A parametric study has been conducted to show how to enhance the performances of the SVR algorithm, including (1) speeding up the algorithm by downsampling; (2) avoiding overfitting and under-fitting using proper standard deviation σ in the Gaussian kernel; (3) making precise capture of the characteristic peaks. A novel method using linear approximation has been proposed to help judge the accuracy of the SVR algorithm in tracking the ICA peaks. And advanced SVR algorithms using double σ and using cost function that directly regulates the differentiation result have been proposed. The advanced SVR algorithm can make accurate curve fitting for ICA with overall error less than 1% (maximum 3%) throughout cycle lives, for four kinds of commercial lithium-ion batteries with LiFePO 4 and LiNi x Co y Mn z O 2 cathodes, making it promising to be further applied in online SOH estimation algorithms.