Novel cost-efficient contactless distributed monitoring concept for smart battery cells

The market breakthrough of electric vehicles is mainly delayed by the still too high costs of the battery system. The novel distributed battery cell monitoring and management concept presented in this paper allows a significant reduction of the final battery pack costs. Further, due to economies of scale, it provides reduced development costs and much lower time-to-market. The proposed concept provides a contactless cost-efficient data transmission interface with capacitive coupling, thus making the development of a battery monitoring circuit for each battery module type needless. The costs are mainly reduced thanks to the high volume manufacturing approach of novel smart battery cells integrating all the sensors of the monitoring electronics together with passive cell balancing and cell heating function. This paper describes the possibilities offered by the proposed concept and shows implementation examples of such a contactless distributed battery cell monitoring.