A novel modular voltage balancing topology for active battery management system

This paper proposes a novel modular voltage balancing topology for an active battery management system (BMS). The proposed topology consists of two power stages. The first stage is composed by a switch network, which is responsible for selecting the battery that will provide energy and the battery that will receive energy. In the switch network, for each battery, are used two cells, which allow the operation with bidirectional current flow and bipolar voltage. The second stage is composed by a capacitor used as energy storage element, which consists in the component used to link both batteries. The switch network control and its interaction with the energy storage element is performed by a digital controller. The paper presents the main computer simulations, as well as the main experimental results obtained to validate the proposed voltage balancing topology for an active BMS.This work has been supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia in the scope of the project: PEst-UID/CEC/00319/2013. Mr. Vítor Monteiro was supported by the doctoral scholarship SFRH/BD/80155/2011 granted by the FCT agency