Grant: Idea to Innovation

Safety concerns arising from the frequent incidents of fire and catastrophic failure of electric vehicle (EVs) batteries are primarily bottlenecking the wide adoption of EVs. This is primarily because all existing practical battery management system (BMS) controls the battery thermal management system based on the measured temperatures at a few different points of the battery pack instead of cell core temperature. However, experimental studies revealed that the core temperate of the battery cell differs 50-60°F compared to the measured temperature at certain points of the battery pack. The difference is even more alarming in the case of EVs due to very high discharging and regenerative charging current during rapid acceleration and deceleration. Installing a physical sensor at the core of each cell is impractical due to system cost and manufacturing challenges. Now estimating thermal states needs a large volume of current as well as historical battery operational data as thermal parameters are subject to charge with battery aging, driving pattern, and other external parameters. Further real-time thermal state estimation by processing the current and historical data is also not feasible due to low processing power and the low data storage capacity of the onboard BMS.