Battery management network for fully electrical vehicles featuring smart systems at cell and pack level

Current limitations of battery systems for fully electric vehicles (FEV) are mainly related to performance, driving range, battery life, re-charging time and price per unit. New cell chemistries are able to mitigate these drawbacks, but are more prone to catastrophic failures due to a thermal runaway than current solutions. Therefore, new and more advanced management strategies are necessary to be able to safely prevent the energy storage system from ever coming into this critical situation. In this paper, a novel battery management system (BMS) architecture is introduced, which will be able to meet these high requirements by introducing a network that has smart satellite systems in each macro-cell or even in each individual cell. In addition, the issues of safety and reliability to be considered for the integration and packaging technologies of the smart satellite systems will be described as well. The work reported is part of the European project 'Smart-LIC', which is supported by EPoSS, and the German project 'HotPowCon'.