A Review of Management Architectures and Balancing Strategies in Smart Batteries

Abstract

Battery management systems (BMSs) play a critical role to ensure the safety and extend the lifetime of the Lithium-ion batteries. In the conventional BMSs, there are some disadvantages such as low scalability and insufficient flexibility. In order to enhance these performances and further increase their reliability, the smart batteries are proposed. The smart batteries are the cell-level BMSs, which are built by the integrated cell modules connected in series. Each integrated cell module can monitor its own states, control the bypass circuit, and can communicate with the master controller, thus they are also called smart cells. This paper presents the state-of-the-art of management architectures, communication implementations, bypass circuits, and bypass decision strategies in the smart batteries. Four different existing smart batteries are compared. According to the comparison, future trends of the smart batteries are provided.