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.

In-person teaching engagements:

• Fall 2022: A video guest lecture for Prof. Pete Ostafichuk for the MECH 328 course at UBC. Prof. Ostafichuk described the lectures as "fantastic, and totally hit the mark in terms of what we were hoping for," applauding one particularily tricky section as "a masterful job in explaining a difficult concept." ( (Watch the videos here.)
• Jan 2023: An in-person lecture for Bill Rawlings's MECH capstone class at UBC
• Jan 2023: An in-person 3 hour lecture for Prof. Colin Copeland's graduate course on energy storage systems at SFU's School of Sustainable Energy Engineering.
• Fall 2023: Four in-person 3 hour lectures and associated assignments, constituting about a third of the semester, for Prof. Gordon McTaggart-Cowan's course SEE894 at SFU's School of Sustainable Energy Engineering.