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Battery Management System Validation by OPAL-RT Technologies

Electric vehicle (EV) powertrain components and systems are rapidly evolving, and test teams must keep pace. For battery management system (BMS) test, engineers need to verify functionality with hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing by emulating battery cells and simulating sensors, I/O, and communication to other electronic control units (ECUs). To ensure that communication, safety functions, cell balancing, and fault monitoring algorithms are working properly, you need a highly adaptable, platform-based test approach that can:

 

  • Emulate individual cells within battery models with high precision
  • Conduct fault insertion and signal conditioning on individual cells and module/pack infrastructure
  • Implement ECU communications and sensor simulation on BMS controllers and cell monitoring devices
  • Be used across the product development process to accelerate test development, expand test coverage, and efficiently manage data and systems

Solution Overview

  • Emulate hundreds of battery cells with a high-precision battery cell simulation (BCS) unit connected to the system through NI SLSC platform or a NI PXI CAN interface module
  • OPAL-RT Cell Monitoring Device Emulation (CMDE) enables NI FPGA emulation of BMS chipsets from major providers such as ADI that can be daisy-chained via IsoSPI™
  • Integrate battery models configured to simulate most battery types with different discharge characteristics
  • Connect to third-party equipment and execute real-time tests with NI VeriStand
  • Take advantage of integration expertise and custom engineering for extra protection, shunt emulation, breakout boxes, and the incorporation of other controls and systems

Solution Advantages

  • NI real-time simulation system for developing and testing products and designs in a safe environment

  • Real-time simulation of battery models, high-fidelity power electronics and motors, and cooling or visual control units from MathWorks® MATLAB® software/ Simulink® software

  • Combine emulated battery cells with FPGA-based cell monitoring device emulation for reduced physical hardware spend and increased test coverage

  • High-precision emulation per cell with individual electrical and/or communication fault injection within a platform that can scale with your test requirements

“Testing a BMS in real time is not a very high technical challenge in terms of real-time simulation, but the safety and reliability, repeatability of tests, flexibility, and openness of the solution made the full difference for us.”

Julie Darrah, Senior Engineer, IAV Automotive Engineering

NI Partner Network

OPAL-RT is an NI Partner Network solutions partner specializing in hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing and power HIL/FPGA-based real-time simulation for automotive applications. This helps researchers prototype a wide variety of electric vehicle (EV) devices under test (DUTs) through open, flexible solutions that can adapt to changing research requirements for EV and BMS testing.

Learn More About This Solution

An NI Partner is a business entity independent from NI and has no agency or joint-venture relationship and does not form part of any business associations with NI.