Our goal for this project is to build a custom Battery Management System PCB that must be compliant with the Society of Automotive Engineers Regulations listed in the student notes section tab.
Commercial Battery Management Systems are generally lacking for open-wheel electric vehicles as well as being bulky and expensive. Furthermore, purchasing a battery pack and battery management system from a third party will add constraints to our FSAE team’s overall design. Our objective for our project is to design and build a feasible battery management system and battery pack for our FSAE vehicle. Designing our own battery pack and battery management system reduces overall costs since it allows our team to have greater flexibility when implementing the subsystem onto our chassis.
A Battery Management System (BMS) is essentially an electronic system that will monitor rechargeable batteries found on vehicles such as Tesla's Model S and Model X. In order to prevent our battery packs from operating outside of the Safe Operating Area, the Battery Management System PCB on our vehicle will monitor our battery cells' state, calculating and reporting data, and balance the cells accordingly to prevent over-voltage and over-current.
Our battery management circuit must contain following requirements:
Furthermore, our team will need to design and assemble a battery pack that stores enough energy to power a 6.1 kilowatt motor for at least 7 minutes before recharging. Designing our own battery pack is more cost effective as it will allow us to increase flexibility when implementing the packs onto our chassis. Furthermore, designing our own battery packs will also give our team the capability of increasing the battery capacity over time. In addition, we need to design an accumulator container that will protect the battery packs from the environment and we will need implement a fire resistant material with a rating tolerance of UL94V-0. The fire resistant material will protect the driver if one of the battery packs were to malfunction during a race.