Hardware-in-the-Loop Test Rig for Rapid Prototyping of Battery Management System Algorithms

Testing the performance of a battery management system (BMS) is extensive and crucial due to its importance for the overall battery safety and performance. In this paper, a hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) test bench is presented for rapid prototyping, testing and evaluation of BMS algorithms in realtime. The system is designed to work with real cell packs without any additional electronics or casing. This approach avoids the high cost and effort of building a full battery system and therefore simplifies algorithm testing on different cell types and cell pack topologies. An extended Kalman Filter based state-of-charge-algorithm is developed and compiled in C-Code in MATLAB/Simulink to run on a digital signal processor (DSP) in real-time. The capabilities and advantages of the setup are shown with experimental HiL tests of the developed BMS algorithm in comparison to software-in-the-loop (SiL) tests.