The global supplier Marelli has expanded its battery management technologies with the introduction of a wireless distributed battery management system (wBMS). The new system eliminates the need of daisy-chain communication and wiring by using wireless technology to enable the communication between batteries and control unit.
Compared to previous wired distributed solutions, the Marelli wBMS reduces the wiring harness by 90% and simplifies battery cell construction and installation. In particular, the wBMS reduces complexity in the assembly and grants more flexibility for battery module placement.
“Marelli designed both the wBMS and the Wired BMS with identical base architectures, supported by two different ways of communication and interfaces,” noted Dr Razvan Panati, head of power electronics technology for Marelli’s vehicle electrification division.
“In that way our technology can be applied across multiple vehicle platforms with minimal change,” he added. “This flexibility guarantees significant reduction in engineering costs and allows Marelli to make this high-end technology affordable for the mass market.”
The Marelli wBMS can be delivered with a software application layer that uses advanced algorithms based on a proprietary technique called Sensor Fusion. These algorithms estimate several parameters of each battery cell – including state of charge, state of health, state of power – to ensure a more accurate calculation of overall status, and inform the other powertrain components accordingly.
The Marelli solution is expected to be available from the second quarter of 2022, to support customer launches in 2024.