Ania's Battery Management Systems (BMS) Course

Instructor: Ania Mitros, PhD

Motivation: Addressing climate change requires a transition to sustainable energy, and sustainable energy presently requires batteries. I offer this course as my contribution to the path to sustainable energy.

Goals: Upon completion of this course, an electrical engineering student should be able to design good Battery Management System (BMS) hardware. Specifically, this includes skills to analyze system trade-offs for a BMS for an electric car, or a stationary home battery, or smaller and less safety-critical applications.

Course Description: Batteries underly the transition to sustainable energy. Safety and battery longevity require good battery management. This course on battery monitoring system (BMS) hardware and system design will explain BMS functions and their performance metrics, then dive deeper into safety analysis and reliability. We will discuss state of charge estimation, safety analysis, value of accuracy, robustness to system noise, thermal trade-offs, accelerated lifetime testing and the Arrhenius equation, selection of cell balancing current, and optimizing for battery size and cell chemistry. Each student should finish the course with the skills to analyze system trade-offs for a battery management system for an electric car or a stationary battery, or smaller and less safety-critical applications. Prerequisites are an understanding of voltage and current (V=I×R) and capacitance (I=C×dV/dt).

About the Instructor: Dr. Mitros has worked as an electrical engineer on BMS hardware since 2006. At Maxim, she designed analog circuits inside battery monitoring chips for both handheld and automotive applications. At Tesla, she was responsible for defining and bringing into production the BMS chips in the Model 3 battery. At Continental, she worked in the BMS group and saw mainstream manufacturers' approach to automotive electronics including heavy reliance on the ISO-26262 standard. At Lunar Energy, she helped architect and bring to life a BMS for a home energy storage system. Recently, she has given three in-person guest lectures for various classes at UBC and SFU, and a video guest lecture for Pete Ostafichuk for the MECH 328 course at UBC.

Lesson content is under development. See "Ania's Battery Mangement Systems (BMS) Course on YouTube, or follow the links below.

Topic

Lectures

Slides

Why What Who

Why What Who (8:00) on YouTube

  • Why I'm teaching and you might be interested
  • What topics I cover
  • Who I am

Updated 28 Feb 2023

Mitros-BMS-why-what-who.pdf

Introduction

Introductory lecture (23:44) on YouTube
Updated 13 Feb 2023

Mitros-BMS-Intro.pdf

BMS functions

BMS functions lecture (1:02:12) on YouTube
Updated 13 Feb 2023

What is a body diode? (5:04) bonus lecture on YouTube
Created 7 Nov 2022

Mitros-BMS-functions.pdf
what-is-a-body-diode.pdf

Cell behaviors

Cell behaviors (23:43) on YouTube
consisting of the following chapters:

Updated 16 Feb 2023

Mitros-BMS-cell-behaviors.pdf

Algorithms

State estimation algorithms (31:30)

Updated 9 March 2023

Mitros-BMS-Algorithms.pdf

Accuracy

Value of cell voltage accuracy is sub-divided into:

  1. Value of Accuracy
  2. Value of Accuracy in Cell Voltage Measurement
  3. Accuracy in BMS Chip Datasheets
  4. Value Accuracy in Current Sensing

Updated 11 March 2024

Mitros-BMS-Accuracy.pdf

Temperature measurement

Temperature measurement (11:53)

Created 2 October 2023

Mitros-BMS-Temperature.pdf

Balancing current

In 4 videos:

  1. Intro and sources of imbalance
  2. Passive vs active balancing
  3. Thermal considerations for PCB and chip
  4. When to balance

Uploaded 31 May 2024

Mitros-BMS-Balancing.pdf

Safety

In 4 videos:

Uploaded 10 May 2024

Mitros-BMS-Safety.pdf

Reliability

 

 

Noise

 

 

Communications

 

 

Application trade-offs

 

 

A look inside BMS chips

 

 

Exothermic behavior

 

 

In-person teaching engagements:

Last updated 1 March 2024
© Anna Mitros
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