Electric vehicle battery management system using bluetooth low energy technology

Wireless Battery Management Systems (WiBMS) became a great topic of interest for researchers recently, as it seems a viable substitution for conventional wire-based BMS. While the conventional BMS faces quite severe problems including safety concerns like electric faults and wire connection complexities that cause added weight and higher costs for manufacturing and maintenance, wireless-enabled BMS offers an alternative solution to these problems. This thesis work discussed problems that challenged conventional battery management systems and explained why WiBMS is a solution. A Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) based wireless BMS was developed. A VDA battery module of 12 cells with 44.4V voltage, battery capacity of 156 Ah and energy capacity of 6.96 kWh is used. Two BLE-enabled microcontrollers named CC2640R2F have been used for wireless interfacing. BQ76PL455A-Q1 ASIC was used to monitor and gather voltage data from the battery modules. The code for the Bluetooth stack as well as Real Time Operating System (RTOS) running on CC2640R2F MCU was developed on Code Composer Studio (CCS) development environment by Texas Instruments (TI). The Bluetooth LE stack implements the communication link between the two MCUs. One MCU functioning as a slave or peripheral connected to the BQ76PL455A-Q1 device reads the voltage data from the battery module and sends it to the other master or central MCU over BLE. In all cases, all data sent from the slave MCU to the central one was successfully transmitted and no data loss was observed. It was suggested that further research should be done about this research area as it has a promising future for improving BMS for EVs.