Analysis and Modeling of an Energy Management System in Automotive Environment

In the pursue of less CO2 emissions and pollution, the last decade saw an exponential growth of batteries driven applications. This growth evolved in many directions: it involved classic vehicles for public roads (cars, buses, vans, etc.), competition vehicles in tracks, but also industrial equipment and infrastructures (e.g. backup power for elevators), and gave birth to new micro-mobility concepts and new vision for public transportation. Thus the need for a system that manages all battery pack operations and its safety became evident. The requirement for this system may vary depending on the target application and use case. In this document I put the focus on what is the modern automotive energy storage use case, that may be also valid for the next years to come, until new technologies, currently developing at early stages, incompatible with the current ones in terms of system management, will be available. The objective of the thesis is to analyse the requirement of a system capable of handling a typical automotive battery pack and model it, both in hardware and in software, in a prototypal version, on a microcontroller platform with existing hardware. The prototype has been tested on a test bench with evaluation modules and a small battery string. This involved analysing a broad spectrum of aspects related to batteries itself but also to their use inside battery packs. An introduction of some concepts and topics will also be given in order to better understand the document.