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Verify, validate, and test battery management system (BMS) controllers and hardware components using hardware-in-the-loop testing (HIL) and battery cell emulators

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

  • Model stacked battery cells in Simulink® and test them using real BMS hardware with ready-to-use battery cell emulators. For example, replicate the electrical and thermal behavior of up to 252 battery cells during fault and overheating conditions.
  • Access more than a thousand electrical modeling components and examples in Simulink, Simscape Electrical™, Powertrain Blockset™ or Motor Control Blockset™. Reuse battery models from desktop simulation in real-time at different levels of fidelity in the same Simulink environment.

  • Execute Simulink and Simscape Electrical™ models on multicore CPUs and Simulink-programmable FPGAs. Include the electrical and thermal behavior of battery cells and battery packs.
  • Emulate temperature sensors for each battery cell and programmatically test different fault conditions.
  • Monitor real-time signals (on the CPU or FPGA), including ripples and switching harmonics directly from within Simulink.
Cycle testing  Battery cell testing Battery pack testing Cell balancing

Cycle testing 

Battery cell testing

Battery pack testing

Cell balancing 

 


Featured Application Use Cases

HIL Testing of BMS Controls

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 

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Battery Cell Emulation

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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). 

 

Frequently Used I/O Interfaces

Simulink Application Resources 

Battery Pack Emulation

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. 

 

Frequently Used I/O Interfaces

Simulink Application Resources 

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Powertrain Blockset and Simscape Electrical

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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.

 

Frequently Used I/O Interfaces

Simulink Application Resources 



Testing Workflows​

Rapidly prototype control designs by applying rapid control prototyping, test embedded controllers with
hardware-in-the-loop simulation of digital twins, and leverage Speedgoat systems as embedded controllers.

Early Design
Rapid Control Prototyping
Implementation
Hardware-in-the-Loop
Embedded Deployment

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