Real time balancing for modular passive Battery Management System

This paper deals with the design and the thermal performance optimization of a passive Battery Management System (BMS) for automotive application. A modular architecture has been developed for the BMS. Each equalization unit is based on two boards, control and power boards, which allow balancing a battery module of six battery cells and monitoring the temperatures of cells and the unit. The power board has been designed with the aim of achieving high performance in terms of heat dissipation, due to passive balancing, equalization time and volume. To meet these requirements, an Insulated Metal Substrate (IMS) solution has been adopted. Numerical and experimental analyses have been carried out to determine the optimal number of simultaneous cells in balancing that has to be considered for obtaining the minimum equalization time in real-time operation.