Functional assessment of battery management system tested on hardware-in-the-loop simulator

A Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) simulator renders possible to conduct on-line tests on Battery Management Systems (BMSs) with an emulated battery pack instead of a real one. In this case, the BMS can be repeatedly evaluated under the exact same experimental scenarios, with safety and accuracy, or under a flexible and beyond the normal operation area range, with less cost and time efforts. For this purpose, a multi-cell Li-ion battery pack consisting of 32 cells in series has been implemented and validated based on experimental results, converted into C code and emulated through the HIL simulator. The BMS under test is interacting in real-time with the emulated battery pack and several of its functions such as current, voltage and State of Charge (SOC) estimation are evaluated. Also, passive balancing experiments are conducted during charging in order to assess different balancing settings of the BMS as far as their respective balancing times and deviations in SOC are concerned. Finally, the energy efficiency of the BMS is accurately measured which, depending on the requirements, can achieve more than 99% of efficiency. In general, it is demonstrated that the HIL setup can provide representative outcomes at minimum resources and time requirements.