Impact of Battery Pack Power Limits on Vehicle Performance

The Battery Management System (BMS) has the function of ensuring the safe and reliable operation of lithium-ion battery packs in electric vehicles. This is usually achieved by providing the powertrain with power limits that represent the maximum power that the battery pack can fulfill in charge and discharge before voltage, current, and SOC limits are exceeded. If these limits are exceeded, the BMS will open contactors and the battery pack will be isolated from the rest of the powertrain. Various power limit estimation methods are available in the literature and used to predict the peak and continuous power limits of the battery pack. In this paper, a vehicle simulator is used to study the impact of the application of the power limits to the vehicle performance, such as velocity tracking, usage of friction brakes, and thermal management requirements.