Open Hardware/Software Modular Battery Emulator for Battery Management Systems Development and Functional Testing

Lithium-ion Batteries are widely used in several applications but require complex management systems to ensure their safe and effective usage. Algorithm development and functional testing are among the most complex and time-consuming phases of lithium-ion battery management system design. Furthermore, the use of real batteries in those phases introduces safety hazards. The hardware-in-the-loop approach allows the designers to overcome these limitations by replacing real batteries with hardware emulators. This article presents a low-cost battery emulator platform to reproduce the main electrical and thermal behaviors of elementary battery cells. The platform allows the user to manually control the emulator outputs or automatically reproduce specific voltage, temperature, and current profiles. In addition, the platform can independently reproduce the battery cell behaviors by using a customizable 2-RC equivalent electrical model. The functional testing and the balancing algorithm assessment of a custom battery management system are used as a case study to evaluate the developed battery emulator platform. Results demonstrate the effective advantages of the developed platform to assess the battery management system safety functionalities and algorithms. Finally, the platform is made freely available to accelerate research and innovation in the field of energy storage technology.