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 real-time. 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.