Design and Development of Low-cost Active Battery Balancing Technique for Electric Motorcycles

Abstract

With growing emphasis on environmental sustainability, electric mobility (E-Mobility) systems are gaining traction worldwide. These systems depend heavily on battery storage to deliver the energy needed to power their drive mechanisms. Lithium-Ion battery cells are used to build the battery modules and packages, where the module contains battery cells and the package includes all battery modules that are configured and connected in different configurations. To keep these batteries running smoothly and safely during charging and discharging, a battery management system (BMS) is indispensable for oversight and protection. This research dives into the design and development of balancing techniques for these battery setups, exploring both passive and active methods. SIMULINK/MATLAB tool is used to model and simulate different battery package configurations to assess their performance, and the simulation results pointed clearly to the strengths of active balancing over its passive counterpart. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the novel active balancing, incorporating magnetic coils and power converters to decrease power losses with respect to the passive balancing technique. The proposed BMS is developed for E-Mobility systems, whereas the novel active battery balancing technique optimizes the power consumption by 64% with respect to convention (passive) methods in considering of the cost prospective.