Active management of a heterogeneous energy store for electric vehicles

The successful introduction of electric vehicles continues to be stifled by the high cost and limited performance life of battery technology. We assert that a disruptive improvement in systems-level cost-of-performance is possible by employing a rate-heterogeneous energy storage system, combining low-rate batteries and high-rate supercapacitors, that is mated to a predictive control system that optimizes power management by exploiting topographic information, traffic history, and specific driver performance. Such predictive power management, optimizing energy storage throughout episodes of vehicle acceleration and regenerative braking, has the potential to significantly decrease the total energy duty on the vehicle's batteries.