Applied Energy 307 (2022) 118172

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Applied Energy
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apenergy

Detection of voltage fault in the battery system of electric vehicles using

statistical analysis☆
Zhenyu Sun a, b, Yang Han c, *, Zhenpo Wang a, d, *, Yong Chen e, Peng Liu a, d, Zian Qin b,
Zhaosheng Zhang a, Zhiqiang Wu a, Chunbao Song a
a
Collaborative Innovation Center for Electric Vehicles in Beijing & National Engineering Laboratory for Electric Vehicles, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081,
China
b
Department of Electrical Sustainable Energy, Delft University of Technology, Delft 2628 CD, Netherlands
c
Department of Mathematics, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
d
Beijing Institute of Technology Chongqing Innovation Center, Chongqing 401120, China
e
Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing 100192, China

H I G H L I G H T S

• Three-layer voltage fault detection method for lithium-ion batteries is proposed.

• Box-Cox transformation approach is used to normalize the raw voltage data.
• The computation process has been significantly simplified by the improved K-means.
• Real accident vehicles and normal vehicles data are both applied to verify the method.

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: It is vital to detect the safety state and identify faults of the battery pack for the safe operation of electric vehicles.
Electric vehicle The voltage faults such as over-voltage and under-voltage imply more serious battery faults including short-
Lithium-ion battery circuit and thermal runaway. The voltage abnormal fluctuation is a warning signal of short-circuit, over-
Fault diagnosis
voltage and under-voltage. This paper proposes a scheme of three-layer fault detection method for lithium-ion
Three-layer detection
batteries based on statistical analysis. The first layer fault detection is based on the thresholds of over-charge
Confidence interval
Improved K-means and over-discharge of a battery pack. In the second layer, confidence interval estimation is applied to identify
risky cells. In the third layer, correlation and variability of all cells in one battery pack are analyzed by using an
improved K-means method to identify abnormal voltage fluctuation over a certain period. The validity and
feasibility of the proposed method are verified by real vehicle data from the National Big Data Alliance of New
Energy Vehicles.

1. Introduction parallel-series configuration to form a battery pack. However, it brings

The electrified transportation has become an important initiative to
promote economic transformation, optimize energy structure and
improve air quality [1]. Due to high power, high energy, long life-cycle,
lithium-ion batteries are the most suitable energy storage devices for
electric vehicles (EVs) [2]. To achieve the output voltage and driving
range required by EVs, hundreds of battery cells are connected in
great challenges to battery safety to pursue high energy densities and
capacities. A chain exothermic reaction caused by faulty cell poses a
significantly more hazards [3]. Recently, a mass of reported accidents
has attracted much attention, which hinders further promotion and
application of EVs [4,5]. For instance, spontaneous combustion of the
Tesla battery pack took place in Shanghai in April 2019. Thus, it is of
great practical significance to diagnose battery failures.

The short version of the paper was presented at ICAE2020, Dec 1–10, 2020. This paper is a substantial extension of the conference paper.
☆

* Corresponding authors at: Department of Mathematics, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK (Y. Han). Collaborative Innovation Center for Electric
Vehicles in Beijing & National Engineering Laboratory for Electric Vehicles, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China (Z. Wang).
E-mail addresses: yang.han@manchester.ac.uk (Y. Han), wangzhenpo@bit.edu.cn (Z. Wang).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2021.118172
Received 30 April 2021; Received in revised form 1 November 2021; Accepted 2 November 2021
Available online 27 November 2021
0306-2619/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Z. Sun et al.
Fig. 1. Data collection process.
The power battery faults triggered thermal runaway (TR) mainly
include over-charge, over-discharge, internal short-circuit, and external
short-circuit, the root causes of which are electrical abuse, thermal
abuse, mechanical abuse, and the interaction between them [6]. To cope
with TR, the most intuitive way is to study the triggering mechanism and
propagation process of battery system under different abuse conditions.
Faults like battery short circuit [7], overcharge [8] and over-discharge
[9], etc. may cause the side reactions of a battery pack, such as solid
electrolyte interface (SEI) decomposition, cathode decomposition reac­
tion, electrolyte decomposition reaction, and so on [10]. The lithium-ion
batteries may experience the abnormal changes of voltages and current,
the abrupt rise of temperature during a thermal runaway process
[11,12]. Therefore, many researchers diagnose faults by using temper­
ature and voltage data.
Remarkable endeavors have been dedicated to fault diagnosis of
batteries. The existing methods are usually divided into two categories:
1) electrochemical model-based 2) non-model-based [13].
The electrochemical model-based method utilizes battery models to
generate residuals, and determine whether the system is faulty through
residual evaluation [14]. According to the difference of the residual
generation method, it is divided into status estimation [15] and
parameter estimation [16]. The equivalent circuit model (ECM) in
electrochemical models is currently the most widely used due to its
excellent predictive performance. Sidhu et al. [17] proposed extended
Kalman filters (EKF) to estimate the terminal voltage of the ECM and
generate the residual. Then multiple model adaptive estimation (MMAE)
is used to diagnose over-charge and over-discharge faults. Liu et al. [18]
adopted a sensor fault detection scheme using adaptive extended Kal­
man filter (AEKF) and the second-order ECM. The electrochemical and
thermal models have also been used together. Feng et al. [19] built a 3D
electrochemical-thermal model to detect the internal short circuit of a
large format lithium-ion battery. However, electrochemical-thermal
models are difficult to meet the needs of online fault diagnosis with
restriction to the complexity and accuracy of the model [20].
The non-model-based methods, including statistical methods [21-
23], machine learning [5,24-26], signal processing methods [27-31],
can diagnose faulty cells and do not require an accurate battery model.
Statistical methods are widely employed to depict the battery fault. The
method in [21-23] require that data obey Gaussian distribution which
was not verified in the previous literature. Yao et al. diagnosed battery
connection fault by wavelet neural network [5] and a grid search sup­
port vector machine [26]. Li et al. [24] combined the long short-term
memory neural network (LSTM) and the ECM to predict voltage. Then
the level of voltage abnormality was defined by the difference between
the estimated voltage and the true voltage. The disadvantage of the
methods in the previous literature is they all require large sample size
and high computation cost.
The entropy-based approach is one of the signal processing methods,
and it has been applied to the field of battery fault diagnosis with the
advantage of evaluating the similarity of patterns in time series.
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Applied Energy 307 (2022) 118172
Through battery connection fault experiments, Shannon entropy was
employed to identify cells with abnormal internal resistance and fault
voltage [27,28]. Hong et al. [29] applied the improved entropy method
to capture over-voltage faults in actual EVS. To identify more types of
faults, Shang et al. [30] proposed a modified sample entropy method to
diagnose short-circuit and open-circuit faults. Although these methods
can be used to diagnose battery system faults and analyze fault levels,
they cannot capture real thermal runaway accidents timely and thus
some fault information are either missed or incorrectly recorded [32].
Furthermore, the signal processing methods of correlation coefficient
have been widely utilized to extract useful features from sample data.
Xia [31] and Li [33] put forward Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC)
and interclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of adjacent battery cells to
detect short circuit faults respectively. Xia et al. [34] also proposed an
interleaved voltage measurement topology for robust differentiation
between sensor and cell faults. Based on the same measurement topol­
ogy, Kang et al. [35] proposed an improved correlation coefficient
method to detect multi-faults of battery pack system, such as short cir­
cuit fault, connection fault and sensor fault. These methods are appli­
cable to nonlinear systems, but not suitable for systems with multiple
and interactive components. In addition, no criterion for choosing time-
window length is available for selecting cells’ voltage, which affects
diagnostic results directly and leads to poor system robustness for
different EVs.
There is a different layout between the voltage sensor and the tem­
perature sensor in the actual battery system of EVs due to space limi­
tation and manufacturing cost limitation. Usually, the voltage values of
all cells can be obtained from individual voltage sensors, but not every
cell has a temperature sensor [6]. Therefore, the fault diagnosis method
proposed in this paper is based on voltage data. This paper proposed a
three-layer fault diagnosis scheme of a lithium-ion battery system for
EVs. All EVs data are collected from the National Big Data Alliance of
New Energy Vehicles (NDANEV) in Beijing. Firstly, maximum voltage
and minimum voltage are monitored to prevent over-charge and over-
discharge. Secondly, the battery cells in poor health state are screened
based on confidence interval estimation. Thirdly, the correlation and
variability of voltage curves are measured. Battery cells are then clas­
sified based on the correlation and variability parameters using the K-
means algorithm. To improve the calculation efficiency of the K-means,
the cell with the highest risk will be initialized as the clustering center of
abnormal categories. Then, the battery cell can be located by the eval­
uation parameters of clustering results. The main contributions in this
paper are as follows.
(1) We use the Box-Cox transformation approach to normalize the
raw voltage data and guarantee the updated dataset used in the
following analysis are Normally distributed, so that confidence interval
estimation can be applied to quantify the evaluation of the risk of cells.
(2) The computation process has been significantly simplified since
we choose the cell of the max risk as the clustering center of the K-means
method.
Z. Sun et al.
Fig. 2. Fault detection scheme.
(3) The methodology proposed in this paper does not require a high
cost of hardware such as sensor of voltage and circuit of a battery pack,
therefore is more feasible in practice.
(4) The effectiveness of our fault diagnosis approach has been veri­
fied through real-world EV data with fault occurrence and thermal
runaway accidents.
The content of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents
the data source and processing. In Section 3, the detailed flow of the
battery fault diagnosis method is proposed. To test the validity of the
method, Section 4 discussed two different fault problems of lithium-ion
batteries. The conclusions are drawn from this research in Section 5.
2. Data source
Accidents of EVs can weaken the confidence of users and become the
main obstacle in the large-scale application of EVs. In order to ensure the
safety of EVs, an effective system called China’s big data platform for
EVs is built to monitor and analyze data. The architecture of the big data
platform has been introduced in previous work [36]. The process of the
EV data collection used in this work is illustrated in Fig. 1. We utilize the
datasets of the NDANEV supported by the big data platform. The data of
the battery system include temperature, current, voltage, state of charge
(SOC). It is very common to have invalid values and missing values in
the original data. Data cleaning including deduplication and deletion is
an important step in the entire data analysis process.
3. Diagnosis method
A battery system is an extremely complicated and non-linear system.
Due to technological limitations in battery manufacturing and usage, the
inconsistency of li-ion battery packs is unavoidable. Usually, cells with
more consistent state are grouped into one battery pack. However bat­
tery cells work under a complicated charge and discharge condition for a
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Applied Energy 307 (2022) 118172
long time, so the uneven loading current, thermal distribution and depth
of discharge (DOD) will further aggravate inconsistency of the initial
parameters such as capacity, internal resistance, self-discharge rate and
terminal voltage [37]. During the operation of the battery system, the
current stays the same, and the changing trend of the terminal voltage is
theoretically consistent for the series-connected battery pack. If a cell
has faults, its voltage trend will be different from others. Thus, through
the correlation coefficient and detrended fluctuation analysis, cluster
analysis will be used to identify faulty cells. A flow chart of the proposed
method is illustrated in Fig. 2. The first layer algorithm is applied every
time. Three conditions need to be met before layer 2 and layer 3 are
activated. Firstly, abnormal behavior has not been detected by the first
layer. Secondly, the number of sampling points in the charge and
discharge process needs to be greater than 50, Thirdly, maximum
voltage range in charging/ discharging cycles is more than 50 mV.
3.1. The first layer algorithm
The first layer is to prevent over-charge and over-discharge of a
battery pack. The cell with the highest voltage first reaches charging cut-
off voltage. On the contrary, the cell with the lowest voltage first reaches
discharging cut-off voltage. If the charge/discharge cut-off condition is
determined based on the total voltage, the cell is prone to have over-
charged or over-discharged fault. Therefore, two cells with maximum
voltage and minimum voltage need to be monitored.
The voltage matrix of all cells from the time t0 to te is represented as
⎡ ⎤
ut11 ⋯ utn1
⎢ ⎥
Ut1 − te = ⎢
tj
⋮ ⎥ (1)
⎣ ⋮ ui ⎦
ut1e ⋯ utne
t
where uij is the voltage of cell i at time tj, j = 1,2,…,e and n represents the
t t
number of all cells. Let umax
j
, umin
j
represent the maximum voltage and
Z. Sun et al. Applied Energy 307 (2022) 118172

Fig. 3. (a) Frequency distribution histogram and (b) Likelihood function of λ.

minimum voltage of all cells at time tj respectively. The voltage ⎡ ⎤

extremum matrix can be expressed as ut1 ⋯ utn,(λ)
1

⎢ 1,(λ) ⎥
⎢ ⎥
(6)
t1 − te t
⎡ ⎤ U(λ) =⎢ ⋮ j
ui,(λ) ⋮ ⎥
utmax
1
utmin
1 ⎣ ⎦
⎢ ⎥ ut1,(λ)
e
⋯ utn,(λ)
e

Utmax,min
1 − te
=⎢
⎣ ⋮ ⋮ ⎥ ⎦ (2)
t
utmax
j
uminj
t
where ui,(λ)
j
is the normalized value of voltage for cell i at time tj.
The threshold δcha and δdis of the charge and discharge cut-off voltage The two-step 95% confidence intervals with Z = 1.96 are used to
are determined according to the battery pack test. obtain the risky cell. The first step is to reduce the influence of extreme
values on the mean. The second step is to find the data center for cri­
3.2. The second layer algorithm terion building. Its steps are as follows:
Step 1: Remove the normalized matrix Ut(λ) 1 − te
data outside the 1.96
In the second layer, confidence interval estimation is applied to t j
σ (1) range of each time tj, and then construct a new normalized data
identify risky cells. Currently, the 3σ screening strategy is widely
adopted to the Normally distributed data [23]. However, normality test matrix:
is an essential step before employing the 3σ principle to screen the fault ⎡ ⎤
vt1,(λ)
1
⋯ vtn,(λ)
1
data. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (K-S test) is used to test whether ⎢ ⎥
⎢ ⎥
(7)
t
data conform to normality assumptions. In this paper, the significance
t1 − te j
V(λ) =⎢ ⋮ vi,(λ) ⋮ ⎥
⎣ ⎦
level of K-S test was 0.05. The voltage data from a normal EV for a total vt1,(λ)
e
⋯ vtn,(λ)
e

of 398,487 sampling points were applied for the K-S test. The number of
samples that conformed to a normal distribution was 128,516, ac­ Step 2: Compute each mean μ(2)
j
and standard deviation σ (2)
j t
of all
t

counting for 32%, while the number of samples that did not conform to a voltage data at each time tj. The risky cell is counted from the time t0 to te
normal distribution was 269,971, accounting for 68%. As a result, by:
improving normality of a distribution is a key step. In this paper, the
Box-Cox transformation is adopted to normalize data [38]. Its form can F t1 - te
= [ F1 , ⋯, Fi ] (8)
be expressed as: ⎧ ⃒ ⃒
⃒ tj tj ⃒ tj
⎧
∑e ⎨ 1,
⎪ ⃒ui,(λ) - μ(2) ⃒⩾1.96⋅σ (2)
⎪ λ tj t
⎨ y − 1, λ ∕ =0 where Fi = j=1 fi and fi j = ⃒ ⃒ . Then, we
y(λ) = λ (3) ⎩ 0, ⃒⃒uti,(λ)
⎪ j tj ⃒
- μ(2)
tj
⃒. < 1.96⋅σ (2)
⎪
⎩
logy, λ = 0
can get the risky frequency of all cells is
where y > 0. Let y = (y1, y2, …, yn) be the data on which the Box-Cox pt1 - te
= [ p1 , ⋯, pi ] (9)
transformation is to be applied. After the Box-Cox transformation of
the formula (3), the variable y is expressed as where pi is the risky frequency of the cell i, and pi = ∑Fni . The cell with
F
i=1 i

y (λ)
= ( yλ1 , ⋯, yλn ) (4) maximum of matrix p - t1 te
carries the highest risk.

The choice of λ value can be estimated by the maximum likelihood 3.3. The third layer algorithm
method, which can be expressed as:
[
∑
]
∑ According to the perspective of consistency evaluation, the cells with
n n
(y(λ) (λ)
i − yi )
n
(λ)
L = − ⋅ln + (λ − 1)⋅ lnyi (5) poor consistency can be given by the second layer, but the cells of the
2 n
i=1 i=1 voltage abnormal fluctuations in the time dimension are difficult to
∑ effectively obtain. Therefore, it is necessary to screen voltage anomaly in
where y(λ) = 1n ni=1 yi . For each λ, the corresponding L(λ) can be ob­
(λ)
time dimension. The clustering method is used for outlier detection. If
tained. According to the relationship between λ and L(λ), the λ with the we find that the data sample number of some clusters is much smaller
largest L(λ) is optimal value. Voltage data are randomly selected at than that of other clusters, and the feature of the data in this cluster is
19:10:31, 2018–05-17, and its frequency distribution histogram and the also very different from other clusters, the sample points in these clusters
maximum likelihood value at different λ are shown in Fig. 3. The optimal are considered outliers. As a common unsupervised machine learning
λ is − 20. According to the formula (3) to (5), the normalized voltage algorithm, the K-means algorithm is improved for faulty cell identifi­
data are expressed as: cation. In this section, the clustering algorithm contains two input
characteristics including correlation and variability parameter.

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Z. Sun et al. Applied Energy 307 (2022) 118172

Table 1 Table 2
Specification of battery pack for model 1 and model 2. Detailed information of studied vehicles.
Item Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Vehicle number Model Fault categories Fault causes

Battery type NCM NCM NCM No.1 vehicle model 1 Sudden fault Short circuit
Total energy (kWh) 43.5 53.6 52.56 No.2 vehicle model 1 Sudden fault Short circuit
Battery pack structure 1P95S 1P98S 1P96S No.3 vehicle model 2 Progressive fault Poor voltage consistency
Charge cut-off voltage (V) 4.25 4.25 4.25 No.4 vehicle model 3 Sudden fault Short circuit
Discharge cut-off voltage (V) 3 3 3 No.5 ~ 14 vehicle model 1 Normal /

3.3.1. Correlation standardized. The formula of z-score normalization is

The Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) in statistics is used to
a− a
measure the correlation between two variables [31]. Since series- (16)
′
a =
σa
connected battery packs have the same load current, the reflected
voltage responses among cells are similar unless the appearance of a where a, σ a is the average and standard deviation of the variable a. The
fault. A low correlation coefficient means that one of the cells is more major procedure of conventional K-means algorithm is shown in Ap­
likely to have a problem. The PCC is described as: pendix Table 1.
cov(x, z)
∑n If there is an abnormal cell, all cells in battery pack will be divided
i=1 (xi − x)(zi − z)
ρx,z = = √̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅ √̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅
̅ (10) into two categories. In this paper the default value for k is 2 to distin­
σx ⋅σz ∑ n ∑ n
(xi − x)2 ⋅ (zi − z)2 guish between normal and abnormal cells. In order to optimize the K-
means algorithm, the highest risk cell in the second layer will be
i=1 i=1

where cov(x, z) is the covariance of variable x and z. The σx and σz are the regarded as the center of one cluster.
standard deviation of variables x and z. x and z are the mean of variables The ratio of the abnormal cells to the normal cells is defined as ka.
x and z. nabnormal
ka = ⋅100% (17)
In this paper, the similarity between the two voltage curves is nnormal
measured by the PCC. The variables x and z express the cell voltages of
cell i and cell m during sampling time t0 to te. Thus, the PCC of cell i to all where nabnormal and nnormal represent the number of abnormal and normal
other cells is expressed as: cells. The Euclidean distance between two cluster centers is
⎡ ⎤
ρ1,2 ⋯ ρ1,n d = euc(γ0 , γ1 ) (18)
ρ t0 − te
= ⎣ ⋮ ρi,m ⋮ ⎦ (11)
If ka and d is greater than the ks and ds, k is equal to 2 and the number
ρn,1 ⋯ ρn,n− 1
of abnormal cells will be given. In contrast, there are no abnormal cells,
where ρi,m is the PCC of cell i to cell m and i ∕
= m. The maximum PCC and k is equal to 1. Through a large amount of the verification on other
for each cell is expressed as: real-word operation data by using the trial-and-error method, the safety
threshold of ks and ds, can be determined as ks = 80% and ds = 11.
R = [r1 , r2 , ⋯, rn ] (12)

where rn represents the maximum PCC of cell n to other cells. 4. Results of abnormal voltage detection

3.3.2. Variability According to their characteristics, faults can be generally classified

The variation trend of terminal voltage is influenced by the load into two categories: sudden fault and progressive fault [16]. To validate
mode. To find out more about the voltage pattern of each cell, the the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method for above two
detrended fluctuation process will be used. Therefore, it is necessary to faults, three model are selected from the NDANEV in Table. Data sets
obtain the detrended voltage (DV) by the difference value between the contain 14 EVs’ data with the sample frequency of 0.1 Hz. Among them,
voltage value and the median voltage at each time. The DV of cell i from ten vehicles are normal without any faults. The faulty vehicle No.1, No.2
the time t0 to te can be expressed as: and normal vehicles (No.5 ~ 14) belong to the same model 1. The faulty
vehicle No.3 and No.4 is from model 2 and model 3 respectively in
(13) Table 2. Their battery cathode materials are NCM (Li(NixCoyMnz)O2).
t
DVit0 − te =[dvti0 , ⋯, dvij ]
The algorithm code studied in this paper is written and compiled based
t t
where dvij = uij − utj , and utj is the median voltage of all cells at the time on Python 3.7.5. The method was implemented on a PC (processor AMD
tj. The DV standard deviation of cell i can be calculated by: Ryzen 7 4800H with Radeon Graphics CPU @2.9 GHz).
√̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅ The faults are classified into two categories: sudden and progressive,
√∑
√ te based on the duration of fault occurrence. The progressive fault reflects
√ (DV ti − DV)
√t=t0 the inconsistency and degradation issues, while the sudden fault in­
si = (14)
l dicates the battery short circuit [32]. The proposed method will be
verified in the presence of such two types of faults in the following
where l denotes the number of sampling points, and DV denotes the section.
average value of DV for cell i from the time t0 to te. The DV standard
deviation is a measure of the amount of variation or dispersion of DV. 4.1. Sudden fault diagnosis
The volatility parameter is the set of DV standard deviations for all cells.
It can be represented as a vector The battery pack of faulty vehicle No.1 with 95 cells connected in
S = [s1 , s2 , ⋯, sn ] (15) series caught fire at 14:27:52, July 5, 2019. The faulty source is No.17
cell with the short-circuit during charging process. Table 1 gives the
3.3.3. Diagnosis rule specification of battery pack. The whole-life-cycle data of this battery
In order to eliminate the dimensional effect between features in­ pack have 1,420,230 acquisition time points from May 26, 2018 to July
dicators, the input parameters of correlation and variability need to be 5, 2019. The total operating mileage is 70087 km. There are 632
charging cycle and 762 discharging cycle. The curves of current, SOC,

5
Z. Sun et al. Applied Energy 307 (2022) 118172

Fig. 4. The changing curve of (a) current and SOC, (b) temperature and (c) voltages (cell1 to cell 95) for faulty vehicle 1.

Fig. 5. (a) the risky count of every day and (b) the risky frequency of all cells from July 1 to July 5.

temperature and cell voltages for July 2019 are shown in Fig. 4. It should
be pointed out that the current is negative during charging and positive
during discharging in Fig. 4a. The maximum discharge current and
charging current are 195.3A and − 144.4A respectively. At the 1420220-
th sampling point (14:27:22, 2019–07-05) in Fig. 4b, we can find that
the maximum temperature had a rapid increase reaching 50℃. The
voltage data of the No.1 ~ 95 cell for faulty vehicle 1 are shown in
Fig. 4c. The red dashed line and dash-dotted line represent the upper
limit voltage with 4.25 V and lower limit voltage of the battery with 2.8
V. At the 1420221-st sampling point (14:27:32, 2019–07-05), the
voltage of No.17 dropped to 0.003 V (less than 2.8 V), the alarm of over-
discharge can be given in the first layer. Before the 1420201-st sampling
point, the voltage of all cells does not exceed the charge/discharge cut-
off voltage in Table 1, so the first layer algorithm cannot raise any alarm.
Using the two-step 95% confidence intervals, every risky cell for the
faulty vehicle No.1 at each time can be counted. Taking the data of a
battery pack from July 1 to July 5 before the fire accident as an example,
the frequency of risk cells is carried out according to the daily dimension
in Fig. 5a. It is obvious that there is a highest frequency on July 2
compared with the other four days. The risky frequency of each cell in
these five days can be obtained in Fig. 5b. The risk frequencies of the top
three are 0.36, 0.35 and 0.23, and battery cell numbers are No.76, No.67
and No.26. This indicates that there is poor consistency within the
battery pack. The No.76 cell is considered as a center of cluster because
it has a highest risky frequency.
Fig. 6 shows the fault diagnosis result based on the improved K-

6
Z. Sun et al. Applied Energy 307 (2022) 118172

Fig. 6. Distance between two cluster centers for (a) charging cycle and (c) discharging cycle; ratio between the two categories for (b) charging cycle and (d) dis­
charging cycle of faulty vehicle No.1. (f) the standardized correlation and variability of cell voltages during the 632-nd charging cycle.

means of cell voltages for all charging cycles and discharging cycle. It
can be observed that the distance d between two cluster centers of 632-
nd charging cycle is the largest at 13.2, and the distance d for other
cycles is less than 11 in Fig. 6a and Fig. 6c. There are three alarms when
ratio ka between the two categories exceeds 80%, which occur in the
189-th, 614-th and 632-nd charging cycle respectively in Fig. 6b. Since
the result of the 632-nd charging cycle satisfies the two conditions of ka
> 80% and d > 11 at the same time, it is considered an abnormal
segment. As shown in in Fig. 6c and Fig. 6d, the ka exceeds 80% at 633-
rd discharging cycle, but the distance d between two cluster centers in all
discharge cycles is less than 11. Therefore, k should be adjusted to 1 and
no abnormal fragments are selected from the all discharging process.
Voltage data are selected from 1419923-rd to 1420220-th sampling
point during the 632-nd charging cycle. The corresponding time is from
13:37:42, July 5, 2019, to 14:27:22, July 5, 2019. As shown in Fig. 6f,
cluster centers of the improved K-means method using standardized
correlation and variability are C1(-9.6, 8.8) and C2(0.1, − 0.1). The
Euclidean distance between them is 13.2. The No.17 faulty cell can be
accurately identified and it takes 5 seconds to complete the calculation.
The selected 632-nd cycle contains 299 sampling points. The value of ka
and d during the 632-nd charging cycle can be calculated under the
requirement of data length greater than 50. From the 260-th sampling
point to the 299-th sampling point, it can be found that the No. 17 cell
can be identified in Fig. 7.
The faulty vehicle No.2 has the same battery structure as faulty
vehicle No.1. Its data include 841 charging cycles and 1030 discharging

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Fig. 7. The value of ka and d of data length from charging start to different endpoints during the 632-nd charging cycle.
Fig. 8. Distance between two cluster centers for (a) charging cycle and (c) discharging cycle; the ratio between the two categories for (b) charging cycle and (d)
discharging cycle of faulty vehicle No.2.
cycles. Its whole operating time is from June 28, 2018, to December 19,
2019. And the faulty source of faulty vehicle No.2 is the No.1 cell with a
sudden voltage drop during the three discharging processes. It is worth
noting that the voltages of all cells in case of faults do not touch the
charge and discharge cut-off voltages. Fig. 8 shows the result of the
improved K-means method at different cycles of the faulty vehicle 2.
Because the maximum of d is 6.1 and the maximum of ka is 37% in
Fig. 8a and Fig. 8b, no faulty cell is given during the charging process in
the third layer. During the discharging process in Fig. 8c and Fig. 8d, the
No.1 cell was screened and identified in the 148-th, 291-st and 606-th
cycle.
Fig. 9a to 9c show the voltage curves of the above three discharging
processes. In Fig. 9a, the one-fault takes place and resulted in a sudden
voltage drop of 0.53 V for the No.1 cell voltage curve at the 250-th
sampling point. At the 407-th time in the 291-st discharging cycle, the
No.1 cell voltage drops from 3.94 V to 3.65 V in Fig. 9b. Compared with
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Applied Energy 307 (2022) 118172
faults during the 148-th and 291-st cycle, there is the largest voltage
drop with 0.57 V in the 606-th cycle in Fig. 9c. The No.1 cell voltage gets
recovered rapidly after one-off fault due to self-repair and internal cir­
cuit equalization. In Fig. 9d to 9f, the highest risk cells calculated by the
second layer are 83, 83 and 81 respectively. These three cells are
respectively used as the initial clustering centers of abnormal clusters in
the 148-th, 291-st and 606-th cycle. The correlation and variability for
three discharging processes are shown in Fig. 9g, 9h and 9i. The distance
of two centers for three discharging processes is>11, and the ratio of the
abnormal cells to the normal cells is 94%. Their calculation time is 4.9 s,
4.8 s and 5.5 s within 10 s. At this time, it is obeying the assumption that
all cells are divided into two categories, and the final clustering center of
abnormal clusters is the No. 1 cell. The proposed method can accurately
identify the faulty cell.
Z. Sun et al. Applied Energy 307 (2022) 118172

Fig. 9. Voltage of cell 1 to cell 95 for faulty vehicle No.2 at (a) 148-th, (b) 291-st, (c) 606-th discharging cycle; The risky frequency of cell 1 to cell 95 for faulty
vehicle 2 at (d) 148-th, (e) 291-st, (f) 606-th discharging cycle; The correlation and variability at (g) 148-th, (h) 291-st, (i) 606-th discharging cycle.

Fig. 10. (a) distance between two cluster centers and (b) ratio between the two categories for charging cycle of faulty vehicle No.3.

4.2. Progressive fault diagnosis
The faulty vehicle No.3 has no thermal runaway but has poor voltage
consistency due to the large self-discharge rate of No. 71 cell. It is a
different model from faulty vehicle No.1, and the battery pack is
composed of 98 cells in series. The selected data cover from February
2019 to July 2020 with a total of 2,417,233 sampling points. The
maximum voltage range is 0.64 V in 1150645-th time on September 13,
2019. One battery equalization strategy is adopted on October 1, 2019.
The voltage range is reduced from 0.32 V to below 0.1 V. However, the

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Z. Sun et al. Applied Energy 307 (2022) 118172

Fig. 11. Distance between two cluster centers for (a) charging cycle and (c) discharging cycle; ratio between the two categories for (b) charging cycle and (d)
discharging cycle of vehicle No.5.

battery gradually deteriorates until the battery pack is replaced on
November 24, 2019.
The voltage data of the whole life cycle is within the normal range,
and the first layer will not give an alarm. Fig. 10 presents the fault
diagnosis result based on the improved K-means of cell voltages for all
charging cycles cycle. There are 83 alarms in a total of 504 charging
processes when d > 11 and ka > 80% in Fig. 10a and Fig. 10b. It can be
observed that the distance d between two clusters has four stages: stage 1
(A to B), stage 2(B to C), stage 3(C to D), stage 4(D to E). In stage 1, the
distance d shows a gradually increasing trend from the 100-th cycle to
the 166-th charging cycle, and the maximum d is 13.9. As the increasing
running mileage of fault vehicle No.3, there is the gradual deterioration
of the cycle performance of No.71. In stage 2, the distance d decreases
from 13.3 to 2.1, which indicates that the battery equalization plays a
good effect. In stage 3, the distance d reaches 13.9 from 167-th to 179-th
cycle. This demonstrates that the battery is again in a very poor state of
health. In stage 4, no abnormal voltage fluctuation alarms occur after
changing the battery pack of faulty vehicle No.3.

Fig. 12. (a) Voltage of cell 1 to cell 96, (b) distance between two cluster centers and (c) ratio between the two categories of faulty vehicle No. 4.

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Z. Sun et al.
Fig. 13. (a) Voltage curve, (b) clustering parameters of faulty vehicle No.3.
5. Discussion
5.1. Reliability analysis based on normal vehicles
No.5 ~ 14 vehicles are used to verify the reliability of the proposed
method. The normal vehicle No.5 is selected to demonstrate the fault
diagnosis effect proposed in this article. Its data are from May 28, 2018
to December 27, 2019. The total operating mileage is 75681 km. There
are 528 charging cycles and 624 discharging cycles. The first layer will
not give an alarm because all voltages are greater than the discharge cut-
off voltage and less than the charge cut-off voltage. Fig. 11 shows the
distance between two cluster centers and the ratio for different charging
and discharging cycle. As shown in Fig. 11a and Fig. 11c, the maximum
distances between the two centers of different charging and discharging
cycles for the normal vehicle No.5 are 5.3 and 4.5 respectively. Their
distances between the two centers are all less than 11. As shown in
Fig. 11b and Fig. 11d, the maximum ratio between the two categories of
different charging and discharging cycles for normal No.1 are 22.8% and
12.6% respectively. Since ka > 80% and d > 11 cannot be satisfied, the
proposed method indicates there is no faulty cells. The diagnosis result
shows that the fault diagnosis method is high accuracy.
5.2. Robustness analysis based on faulty vehicles
The final discharging process of the faulty vehicle No. 4 is selected to
verify the robustness of the proposed method which can be applied to
other vehicles. The voltage data of faulty vehicle No.4 are collected over
162 time points. As shown in Fig. 12a, the thermal runaway of faulty
vehicle No. 4 is triggered by the No.72 cell (solid orange line) at the 162-
nd sampling point from the incident investigation by professional
personnel. We can get the distance between two cluster centers and ratio
between the two categories in Fig. 12b and Fig. 12c, from which it is
clearly noted that the distance d exceeds 10 and the ratio value ka rea­
ches 95% at the 121-st sampling point. The red dotted line represented
the faulty cell is found by the ka > 80% and d > 11 at the 122-nd
sampling point. The first layer will give an over-discharging alarm
when the voltage of the No.72 cell is below the lower discharge
threshold voltage (3 V) at 145-th sampling point. At the 122-nd sam­
pling point, the voltage at is still within safe range, i.e., not exceeding
the upper and lower voltage thresholds and so abnormality is not picked
up by the first layer model, however by using the third layer, this faulty
cell can be accurately identified by our model. If we do not take mea­
sures and continue to monitor the voltage data after the 122-nd point, it
is shown that at 145-th sampling point, the abnormal voltage can be
picked up by the first layer model, which is twenty seconds delayed than
it is initially detected by the third layer model at the 122-nd point.
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Applied Energy 307 (2022) 118172
5.3. Comparison of common and improved K-means methods
Fig. 13a shows the voltage of all cells for faulty vehicle 3 during 97-th
charging process with a sampling frequency of 0.1Hz. The voltage data
are from 15:30:31 on July 22, 2019, to 16:55:01 on July 14, 2019. By
using the proposed method, two clustering centers C1(-9.7, 8.7) and C2
(0.1, − 0.1) can be obtained. And we can get ka = 97% and d = 13.17.
The clustering results are two types, and No.71 cell can be identified as a
fault cell in Fig. 13b. The common K-means calculation time is 0.13 s
with 8-step calculations to find the centroid, while the improved method
only costs 0.04 s with 2-step calculations. Therefore, the proposed
method is more efficient. Meanwhile, the two types will be automati­
cally synthesized into one type when no alarms, all of which are normal
cells. This can realize the automatic adjustment of k.
6. Conclusions
This paper has proposed a three-layer fault diagnosis method of the
battery system. In the first layer, the over-charge and over-discharge of
cell voltages can be prevented by monitoring both maximum and min­
imum voltages. In the second layer, confidence interval estimation based
on voltage at each time is regarded as a secondary analysis of poor
health state of battery pack. The most frequently selected cell by our
fault screening scheme is considered as the highest faulty risk. In the
third layer, two parameters of correlation and variability are adopted to
capture the abnormal voltage fluctuation. The improved K-means
method is used to identify faulty cells based on two diagnosis rules
including center distance and the ratio of points of the two categories.
The faulty cell with highest risk in the second layer is considered as
center of the faulty cluster, and this procedure shortens the calculation
time significantly, around 3 times better than available methods in the
previous literature. The proposed method is capable to accurately detect
different types of faults, such as progressive fault and sudden fault. The
effectiveness, reliability and robustness of the proposed fault diagnosis
approach has been verified through real-world EV data with fault
occurrence and thermal runaway accidents.
Author contribution
Zhenyu Sun: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Writing –
original draft. Yang Han: Writing – review & editing, Supervision.
Zhenpo Wang: Resources, Data curation, Project administration. Yong
Chen: Writing – review & editing. Peng Liu: Writing – review & editing,
Supervision. Zian Qin: Review & editing. Zhaosheng Zhang: Review &
editing. Zhiqiang Wu: Data processing, Formal analysis. Chunbao
Song: Data processing.
Z. Sun et al. Applied Energy 307 (2022) 118172

Declaration of Competing Interest 202006030153), and the Ministry of Science and Technology of the
People’s Republic of China (Grant No. 2019YFE0107900).
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper. Declaration of Competing Interest

Acknowledgements The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
This work is supported by the China Scholarship Council (Contract the work reported in this paper.

Appendix A

Table 1 Steps of the common K-means method

Number Specific operation

Step 1 Assuming the data are {q1 , q2 , ⋯, qi , ⋯, qm }, qi ∈ Rn .

Step 2 The cluster centers {γ1 , γ2 , ⋯, γh } are randomly selected, where h is equal to 1 to k.
Step 3 The Euclidean distance between the sample qi and each cluster center γ is calculated. The sample qi is classified to the cluster center with the minimum distance principle
c(i) : = argminh ‖qi − γh ‖2
∑m { (i) }
Step 4 c = h qi
For category h, its cluster center will be recalculated: γh : = ∑i=1
m (i) = h}
i=1 {c
Step 5 The process from Steps 2 to 4 is executed cyclically until the cluster center does not change.

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