Design of Bluetooth Communication-Based Wireless Battery Management System for Electric Vehicles

The wireless Battery Management System (BMS), one of the emerging technologies, offers advantages over the conventional wired BMS by enabling the reduction of battery pack weight and size, ease of maintenance, and improving communication speed limitations. Also, in addition to the communication reliability of the wired BMS, the wireless BMS can enhance the reliability during the battery pack design/manufacturing, as well as the reliability of fault response in the event of battery pack malfunctions and failures. Consequently, active research on the wireless BMS is being conducted in the mobility sector, for electric vehicles (EVs) and railway vehicles and such, where BMS performance enhancement is critical. However, most previous studies in the mobility field have focused primarily on methodologies. Also, actual battery pack configuration and the operational environment of the wireless BMS is not sufficiently considered in previous studies. This paper studies the design of a wireless BMS that incorporates Bluetooth communication technology and targets the EV, which is a representative application in the mobility sector. This research comprehensively analyzes the design requirements and considerations for designing and implementing an efficient wireless BMS environment for EVs. Specifically, this study focuses on: analysis and selection of wireless communication methods; optimization of battery module case design for wireless BMS; and analysis of wireless communication constraints along with strategies to mitigate them. Based on the results of our study, we propose an optimized theoretical design method. Subsequently, the proposed design method is validated through various experiments conducted under simulated EV operating conditions.