Battery-driven electric powertrains are gaining importance in various industries. Electric cars, electric aircraft, e-bikes, and automated guided vehicles all rely on battery packs. As battery packs require battery management systems to operate safely and reliably, it is important to test safety features and robustness of algorithms for the state of charge (SOC) and state of health (SOH) at an early stage to reduce both costs and development time. Therefore, leveraging automated HIL testing and a Model-Based Design workflow allows engineers to identify design flaws in an early development phase of the BMS.
Battery cell emulators that use various industrial protocols and interfaces allow performing automated HIL testing without having access to physical batteries. They also can be employed to test critical scenarios in a fully automated manner safely. The same workflow can then be leveraged for large-scale automated production testing.
"Speedgoat together with MathWorks® products offer a very efficient workflow to design, test and validate algorithms for Battery Management Systems" Marc Lucea, Senior Application SW Engineer, Leclanché Energy Storage Solutions
"Speedgoat together with MathWorks® products offer a very efficient workflow to design, test and validate algorithms for Battery Management Systems"
Marc Lucea, Senior Application SW Engineer, Leclanché Energy Storage Solutions
A HIL testbench with battery cell emulation leveraging industrial protocols such as CAN and SPI enables automated testing during the development or production phases. Safety features such as overvoltage and overcurrent protection, and cell balancing of a BMS controller can be tested without risking hardware damage. Automated testing also allows evaluating the robustness of state of charge (SOC) and state of health (SOH) algorithms in different operating conditions such as varying cell degradation or different fault conditions.
Frequently Used I/O Interfaces
Simulink® Application Resources
Speedgoat’s battery cell simulator enables the emulation of hundreds of individual cells as part of battery modules and battery packs with voltages reaching up to 1.3 kV. Additional features include failure insertion units (FIU) and isolated temperature sensor emulation for each cell. Such features enable BMS HIL testing for research and development and series production involving tests like state-of-charge (SoC) estimation and critical surface charge (CSC).
Battery cell emulation can be extended to battery pack emulation with power amplifiers capable of sinking and sourcing tens or hundreds of kilowatts. Speedgoat’s Power HIL solutions offer a versatile power lab that allows the emulation of battery packs, power grids, or different electric motors. Also, our real-time solutions support a wide range of commercial power amplifiers.
Use your desktop models in Simulink® and Simscape™ for real-time simulation and testing. Simplify your daily work by leveraging the full spectrum of MathWorks® toolboxes and blocksets such as Powertrain Blockset™ or Simscape™ Electrical™ for battery cell and battery pack emulation.
Success Stories
Leclanché SA: Developing the next generation Li-ion battery packs - Success Story
Scientific Aviation Association: Accelerate hybrid powertrain testing - Success Story
Aalto University: Students' mission to get Finland's first satellite into orbit - Success Story
Relevant Resources
Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing of Battery Management Systems - Webinar
Demo: Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing of Battery Management Systems - Reference Example
Introduction to Simulink®: Quadcopter Simulation and Control - Webinar
Accelerating Drone Research with a Ready-to-Fly Hexacopter and Flight Control Software - Technical Article
Rapidly prototype control designs by applying rapid control prototyping, test embedded controllers withhardware-in-the-loop simulation of digital twins, and leverage Speedgoat systems as embedded controllers.
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