As battery cells age, their total capacities generally decrease and their resistances generally increase. This week, you will learn WHY this happens. You will learn about the specific physical and chemical mechanisms that cause degradation to lithium-ion battery cells. You will also learn why it is relatively simple to estimate and track changes to resistance, but why it is difficult to track changes to total capacity accurately.

Total capacity is often estimated using ordinary-least-squares (OLS) methods. This week, you will learn that this is a fundamentally incorrect approach, and will learn that a total-least-squares (TLS) method should be used instead. You will learn how to derive a weighted OLS solution, to use as a benchmark, and how to derive a weighted TLS solution also.

Unfortunately, the weighted TLS solution you learned in week 2 is not well suited for efficient computation on an embedded system like a BMS. As an intermediate step toward finding an efficient weighted TLS method, you will first learn a proportionally weighted TLS method this week. You will then learn how to generalize this to an "approximate weighted TLS" (AWTLS) method, which gives good estimates, and is feasible to implement on a BMS.

So far this course, you have learned a number of methods for estimating total capacity. This week, you will learn how to implement those methods in Octave code. You will also explore different simulation scenarios to benchmark how well each method works, in comparison with the others. The scenarios are representative of hybrid-electric-vehicle (HEV) and battery-electric-vehicle (BEV) applications, but the principles learned can be extrapolated to other similar application domains.