Modular Battery Emulator for Development and Functional Testing of Battery Management Systems: The Cell Emulator
Roberto Di Rienzo, Alessandro Verani, Federico Baronti, Roberto Roncella, Roberto Saletti
Abstract
Battery Management Systems are fundamental components of the present battery generation. The development and characterization phases of a BMS often require an emulator of the battery cells with which the Battery Management System functions can be assessed with no safety risks as it would instead happen using a real battery. This work describes the design and characterization of a modular cell emulator circuit to be used as platform for the Hardware-in-the-loop test of a Battery Management System. The design constraints and choices are first described. Then, the experimental characterization of the cell emulator is shown and discussed. The proposed circuit shows a voltage resolution of 76 μV, an accuracy of 2.17 mV, and a setting time of 340 μs. Its cost is around 40 USD. The circuit results to be a very good trade-off between performance and cost. The Project is available to the scientific community as open hardware platform freely downloadable. It could be useful to small-size laboratories to self-produce a low-cost battery emulator with good performance for the development and the functional test of custom Battery Management Systems.