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Modeling of lead-acid battery capacity loss in a photovoltaic application

Jungst, Rudolph G.

The authors have developed a model for the probabilistic behavior of a rechargeable battery acting as the energy storage component in a photovoltaic power supply system. Stochastic and deterministic models are created to simulate the behavior of the system components. The components are the solar resource, the photovoltaic power supply system, the rechargeable battery, and a load. One focus of this research is to model battery state of charge and battery capacity as a function of time. The capacity damage effect that occurs during deep discharge is introduced via a non-positive function of duration and depth of deep discharge events. Because the form of this function is unknown and varies with battery type, the authors model it with an artificial neural network (ANN) whose parameters are to be trained with experimental data. The battery capacity loss model will be described and a numerical example will be presented showing the predicted battery life under different PV system use scenarios.