What Is a Battery Management Systems (BMS)?

Lithium-ion battery packs are the predominant energy storage systems in aircraft, electric vehicles, portable devices, and other equipment requiring a reliable, high-energy-density, low-weight power source. The battery management system (BMS) is responsible for safe operation, performance, and battery life under diverse charge-discharge and environmental conditions. When designing a BMS, engineers develop feedback and supervisory control that:

• Monitors cell voltage and temperature
• Estimates state-of-charge and state-of-health
• Limits power input and output for thermal and overcharge protection
• Controls the charging profile
• Balances the state-of-charge of individual cells
• Isolates the battery pack from the load when necessary

Simulink^® modeling and simulation capabilities enable BMS development, including single-cell-equivalent circuit formulation and parameterization, electronic circuit design, control logic, automatic code generation, and verification and validation. With Simulink, engineers can design and simulate the battery management systems by:

• Modeling battery packs using electrical networks whose topology mirrors that of the actual system and scales with the number of cells
• Parameterizing equivalent circuit elements using test data for accurate representation of cell chemistry
• Designing the power electronics circuit that connects the pack with the controls
• Developing closed-loop control algorithms for supervisory and fault detection logic
• Designing state observers for state-of-charge and state-of-health online estimation

Using Simulink, engineers can exercise the battery management system over a range of operating and fault conditions before committing to hardware testing. You can generate C code from Simulink models to deploy your control algorithms for rapid prototyping of systems or microcontrollers. Simulink generates code from the battery and electronic component models, letting you perform real-time simulation for hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing to validate your BMS before hardware implementation.