Intelligent Li-ion Battery Management System

This paper explores a new topology for Power Electronics converters utilized in an Intelligent Lithium-Ion Battery Management System (BMS) with the possibility of minimizing most of the common challenges in current BMS topologies. The core functionality in a BMS includes balancing, protection and monitoring of cells to calculate battery performance parameters (such as SoH and SoC). Our topology, in addition, helps design scalable, modular pack structures which allow aggregation without the need of matched SoH of other modules. In addition, the flexibility of setting the interface characteristics of the pack through the BMS allows the same physical configurations to be used in the rendering of different terminal voltages. This is achieved by using a single parallel string of cells and using a high voltage conversion ratio topology for energy provisioning that has been tested for a terminal voltage range of 12V to 96V. To increase the capacity, multiple packs can be used in parallel simultaneously. Moreover, our proposed algorithm enables energy extraction from each pack that is proportional to the health of the pack. This overall arrangement not only protects each module from over discharge, overcharge, overcurrent, and short circuit but also makes the overall pack independent from the requirement of matching the modules that make up the battery packs. For proof of concept, detailed analysis, design, simulation and fabrication of the proposed architecture was done and the results were validated on Lithium Ion cells to create modules and the modules to create the pack.