Research Projects

A battery management system (BMS) is basically a battery computer which manages and monitors the functioning of a battery pack in an electric vehicle. The BMS performs continuous monitoring of the battery pack and manages its overall functioning, through an inbuilt algorithm based on parameters specific to the battery chemistry. Cell as well as pack level current, voltage and temperature are the key measurement inputs to the BMS. Also, monitoring the batteries is a challenging task owing to their complex electrochemical nature and non-linear behaviour influenced by various internal as well as external conditions. Furthermore, monitoring becomes increasingly difficult due to the aging induced changes in battery characteristics. Hence, precise and reliable battery monitoring is a key requirement of a good BMS. Also, since the performance of the cells as well as the battery pack significantly depend on the ambient conditions, primarily temperature, the same BMS algorithm fails to accurately predict the battery pack vitals when the pack is operated at varied ambient temperatures. Therefore, development of BMS algorithms which are based on real-time indigenous test data obtained by subjecting the battery packs to Indian driving and climatic conditions is the need of the hour. For handling complex physics and non-linear behaviour as associated with the Li-ion batteries, Soft Computing based algorithms such as fuzzy logic, neural networks, and genetic algorithms, seem to be a promising way forward. Hence, this work shall primarily focus on the development of models based on soft computing techniques for state/condition monitoring of electric vehicle battery packs for Indian climatic conditions. A state-of-the-art battery pack cycling and testing setup shall be developed and the data required for developing the models shall be obtained from experiments on battery packs based on real drive cycles at varied ambient conditions relevant to the Indian climate. The developed models shall be interfaced with the BMS hardware and the performance of the BMS shall be optimized and validated against real time conditions. This study, at an application level, would lead to the development of a systematic approach of condition monitoring for battery packs of varying form factor and chemistry subjected to different operating conditions (driving cycles/ambient conditions).