  The future evolution of technological systems dedicated to improve energy
efficiency will strongly depend on effective and reliable Energy Storage
Systems, as key components for Smart Grids, microgrids and electric mobility.
Besides possible improvements in chemical materials and cells design, the
Battery Management System is the most important electronic device that improves
the reliability of a battery pack. In fact, a precise State of Charge (SoC)
estimation allows the energy flows controller to exploit better the full
capacity of each cell. In this paper, we propose an alternative definition for
the SoC, explaining the rationales by a mechanical analogy. We introduce a
novel cell model, conceived as a series of three electric dipoles, together
with a procedure for parameters estimation relying only on voltage measures and
a given current profile. The three dipoles represent the quasi-stationary, the
dynamics and the istantaneous components of voltage measures. An Extended
Kalman Filer (EKF) is adopted as a nonlinear state estimator. Moreover, we
propose a multi-cell EKF system based on a round-robin approach to allow the
same processing block to keep track of many cells at the same time. Performance
tests with a prototype battery pack composed by 18 A123 cells connected in
series show encouraging results.
