Battery Management System Evaluation within a Complete Electric Vehicle Model with Software-in-the-Loop and Hardware-in-the-Loop Approaches

A detailed battery pack model has been developed within Simcenter Amesim by Siemens Industry Software. The model illustrates the Battery Management System (BMS) control development process from Model in the Loop (MiL), Software in the Loop (SiL) to Hardware in the Loop (HiL). The battery pack model has been integrated in a validated vehicle model, which corresponds to an existing vehicle developed by Voltia, named the Voltia eVan. This originally diesel engine powered light duty trucks have been electrified. The electrified version has been tested on the roller bench at the Eindhoven University of Technology. The interest of detailing the battery pack model is to have access to a multiple virtual temperature and voltage sensors, which allows validating the balancing methodologies that could be integrated in a BMS. A real-time analysis of the model has been conducted to ensure the model is compatible with the control constraint of the BMS. Finally, the complete model has been connected to a functional BMS in order to validate the approach. For that purpose, several BMS functions have been implemented in the control model developed with MATLAB/Simulink, such as the state of charge (SOC) estimation, the cell balancing, the charge/discharging and the thermal management. Once the cosimulation in SiL environment has been validated, a test on HiL platform has been done in real-time condition in order to reproduce realistic cell balancing and to study charging strategies, which are key functions to ensure better lifetime of the battery.