A Battery Management Unit

Abstract

Emissions from vehicles and decreasing oil resources are pressing matters in today’s society. Electric vehicles are considered, by some, to be the solution to those problems. For years the available batteries have been too heavy and inefficient to be used in commercial electric vehicles. This thesis considers a new cell technology, LiFePO4, which was investigated and implemented into a battery pack for a prototype electric go-cart. The LiFePO4 cells need to be supervised by an efficient Battery Management Unit to function. The Battery Management Unit implemented in this thesis was based on minimal hardware combined with a prototype board for active cell balancing. The results show that it is possible to build such a lightweight Battery Management Unit, but with the loss of accuracy in the system.