Power Line Communication Management of Battery Energy Storage in a Small Scale Autonomous Photovoltaic System

International audienceToday an increasing number of batteries areequipped with a digital Battery Management System (BMS)either for safety issues, lifetime improvement, or both. In order toavoid the use of dedicated wiring for communicating with theseBMS, a Power Line Communication (PLC) solution is proposedto communicate through the DC power line inherent in thesesystems. This solution is also designed to be directly compatiblewith the existing Controller Area Network (CAN) controllersintegrated in a large number of commercially availablemicrocontrollers. It uses a single carrier generator in order togenerate a shared carrier signal on the bus. Each modem canmodulate this common carrier signal by switching the impedanceit presents on the bus. In a first part, this paper proposes anoverview of the industrial context of this PLC solution, includingsimulation results and discussion of the theoretical limits of thesystem. Then, the digitization stage interfacing the controller tothe power line is described and a first prototype is validatedthrough discussion of experimental results obtained within anactual industrial environment