BMS

About The Client

Our client is leading a power and energy solutions company with electric vehicles for telecom and renewable sectors. It also has the largest supplier of Li-ion batteries with the deployment of battery solutions. The company has successfully deployed AC and DC Fast Chargers for various customers including government PSU’s, fleet operators and Auto OEM’s etc.

About The Project

Challenges

Maintenance and monitoring of batteries
Regulation of charging and discharging of batteries
Detection of battery types
Operation of power consumption

Innovation at Bellurbis

Bellurbis proposed a Battery Management System (BMS) that would assist with the regulation of charging and discharge of batteries. The planned system was complex enough to include the detection of battery type, voltages, temperature, capacity, state of charge, power consumption, remaining operating time, charging cycles, and more characteristics.

The Bellurbis team used a network protocol called MQTT and used it to publish data on a given topic every few seconds and we subscribe the data from there, process it through Kafka and a few of our microservices, and store/send all the data points/packets to our Time Scale database which stores it and further displays the battery parameters on a BMS web-portal for the user to analyze and keep a track of all the activities related to current, voltage, temperature and many more parameters of a battery.

Benefits of Battery Management System

Solution Architect

Ability to adopt new customers and allow them to manage their users and apps.
Customers identify their user roles and assign customers with the user.
Defining the protocol to communicate between Battery and MQTT Protocol.
Support all the protocols and store the data in the Time Series database.

Technology Stack

Web Portal will be composed of different components as follows:

Portal with custom features like User Management, Role Management, FOTA etc.
Backend – JAVA Microservices & Web Services
Frontend – Angular
Database – PostgreSQL / Timescale
Kafka / Zookeeper

SD Card Reader

This is a feature on the web portal where a battery field engineer can visualize and analyze the battery parameters for any required set of batteries they want. What makes it even better is that they use this tool even in the offline mode i.e. without the internet as well.

How do we do it?

Each battery is having a memory SD card attached to it when the batteries are dispatched to the production floor. This SD is there to read and store all the pings/data packets that are being generated by the battery. Sometimes, if a battery loses its connection with the server and is not able to send data across, a user can retrieve that time data from this SD card.

So, once we have the SD card with us, we copy the encrypted text file from the SD card and save it. This encrypted file can then be uploaded on the web portal and can be visualized after a series of steps.

There is also a desktop application that we have created for the users to analyze the data on the systems without the internet. Also, they can anytime sync all their progress to the server once They are online and can visualize their saved data on the web portal anytime.

How the updates work ?

In the web portal, if a user wishes to track the exact location of a production/allotted battery they can do so by entering the IMEI/unique identification number of the battery for which they want to track, and the precise geolocation of that battery can be captured on the screen in the maps.
With this, if a battery is behaving abnormally or gets shut down due to any reason we will be able to track and repair the affected battery for that client or customer by tracking it through this “Traceroute Matrix” section on the web portal.
This web portal is designed in Angular and has a Java backend with a Timescale database.

How does it affect the autonomous future?

On the contrary, if we talk about the mobile app; this mobile app gives the EV user the ability to be in sync with its automobile battery and keep track of the battery health of its e-vehicle. A user can see the critical flags of the battery if the battery becomes inactive or faulty through this app and can contact support to have a replacement or repairman of the battery.

How can the batteries last longer with time?

The mobile app also gives the user the ability to install the FOTA updates on a battery. FOTA (Firmware Over The Air) are the updates related to a battery’s firmware which are essential for the batteries as they age to keep them up-to-date with all the new advancements. A battery, apart from being a hardware device, is connected to the Battery Management System through this Firmware component which will help the battery to know and install any new firmware updates available on the cloud server.
Once a new firmware update is pushed to the cloud server, it carries particular info about that firmware topic of a battery through which a targeted battery knows and decides whether this update is ready to install for it or not.
These FOTA updates become necessary for the batteries to cope with all the new changes or variations coming in the future. If battery health is getting critical or affected we can improve the battery performance by sending them a bunch of firmware updates to install. This works exactly in the way our Mobile apps work with their new version or software updates.

Conclusion

A battery management system is a system created to analyse and keep a continuous focus on an everyday growing EV market.
BMS becomes a necessity for our near future when it comes to EV vehicles and standards as without a battery management system, it will become almost impossible to have a sustainable development model when it comes to batteries and their longevity.