Distributed reconfigurable Battery System Management Architectures

This paper presents an overview of recent trends in Battery System Management Architectures (BSMAs). After introducing the main characteristics of large battery packs, the state of the art in BSMAs is discussed. Two emerging concepts are in the focus of this contribution. On the one hand, there is a development from centralized battery management architectures with a single control entity towards decentralized management where the computational resources are distributed across the battery pack and, hence, move closer to the individual battery cells. This enables a more scalable and modular battery system architecture, while, at the same time, posing challenges regarding hardware and management algorithm design. On the other hand, the static setup of the series-and parallel-connected cells forming the battery pack may be developed towards a reconfigurable architecture such that the electrical topology of the pack can be adaptively changed. Such reconfigurability could increase the reliability of battery packs and reduce management efforts such as cell balancing. At the same time, limited energy efficiency of the additional hardware poses a challenge. We give an outlook how these two trends could be combined into distributed reconfigurable BSMAs. This introduces a set of challenges which have to be solved in order to benefit from the increased scalability, reliability and safety such designs could offer.