Design Automation for Energy Storage Systems

Abstract

Electrical energy storage (EES) systems, specifically in the form of high power lithium-ion (Li-Ion) battery packs, are gaining more importance mainly due to the increased penetration of renewable energy sources and the rapid proliferation of electric vehicle (EV) technologies. Battery management is a critical functionality in an EES, which maintains safe operation and also improves the efficiency of the system. With the increasing number of applications using battery packs and the demand for shorter time to market, the system integration aspects are gaining more attention. This has resulted in a natural trend towards decentralization of the battery management system (BMS) where the sensing, computation, and control units are distributed close to each cell, providing a high degree of scalability and customization-free plug and play integration. However, there exist several open challenges in the development of such distributed systems that requires special set of design automation tools to be developed. One of the major requirements for accelerating the design of such decentralized BMSs is prototyping where custom hardware and software implementations are required to be developed increasing the overall design time and cost. To overcome this, in this chapter, we present a modular hardware/software development platform for decentralized BMSs that can be used for evaluating the functionality of different BMS circuit architectures, active cell balancing topologies, and decentralized battery management algorithms. All design files of our proposed development platform are made publicly accessible and can be easily reproduced thereby saving the effort and time required for developing custom prototyping platforms.