Open, flexible and extensible battery management system for lithium-ion batteries in mobile and stationary applications

The various application scenarios of a battery system lead to versatile, often conflicting requirements for hardware, software and mechanical design. The intended use of a lithium-ion battery system in mobile and stationary applications determines a lot of restrictions such as design space and ambient conditions. Additional hardware and software requirements are dictated by engineering constraints like the safe operating area for a specific battery cell. This paper presents a flexible and extensible battery management system (BMS) for lithium-ion battery packages, which aims at addressing these issues. The flexible approach in the software architecture is therefore mandatory. The structure of the embedded hardware platform is introduced, and its modular setup is presented. An easy-to-use, yet powerful framework for building the software and its documentation is shown. With a view to being useful to a large community of developers and users, the hardware design and the software will be open-source and freely available. As a result, the presented BMS serves as an easy-to-use platform for academia research and as a development platform for industrial users.