Advanced Wireless Battery Management System for Electric Vehicles: Design, Application and Perspective

Conventional battery management system suffers from the heavy copper harness for connection and transformation within the battery pack, and has difficulties on achieving light-weight and safety. In this article, an advanced wireless battery management system is proposed for vehicular application, and detailed systematical designs for hardware and software are presented from industrialization. The high ability of computing for the main controlling chip and low-cost wireless connection chip for hardware are highlighted for achieving long-time operation on the battery pack. The layered software architecture is developed for assembling application software, where further algorithms including state of health estimation or power controlling can be easily deployed on boards without revision of current software. Moreover, the main online state of charge estimation algorithm is introduced. The results confirm that the designed master–slave wBMS boards can meet the vehicular requirements, and the maximum error of state estimation can be limited within 3%. The proposed wireless battery management system is confirmed for online application for electric vehicles and energy storage systems, and the future promotion is discussed based on other energy storage systems such as multiple packs on commercial vehicles or power stations.