Reconfigurable Battery Management System for Microgrid Application

Abstract

Battery packs are formed by the interconnection of a greater number of battery cells. These battery packs are used in many electrical and electronics applications like sustainable energy systems, robotics, electric/hybrid vehicles and energy storage system in microgrid and smart grids. As a result, battery-based applications require a well-designed battery pack. Most of the research articles deal with the protection circuit, cell-balancing approach and battery management system. Nowadays, researchers are looking into reconfigurable based battery pack design to overcome the issues faced by the traditional system and conjunction with battery management systems like safety problems, low reliability, less energy efficiency and short lifetime. The most important characteristics of a reconfigurable battery management system are the arrangement of battery dynamically reconfigured concurrently depending upon the current status of battery cells using switching control according to load demand. Numerous research articles pertaining to reconfigurable battery pack techniques have been designed and implemented in real-time that makes the cell balancing condition at the time of charging/discharging cycle and also offer the fault-tolerant capability. This proposed chapter gives an overview of the reconfigurable battery system along with its challenges.