Battery management system for industrial-scale vanadium redox flow batteries: Features and operation

This paper describes the battery management system (BMS) developed for a 9 kW/27 kWh industrial scale vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB), both in terms of hardware and software. Such BMS is quite different from those of solid-state batteries, e.g. Li-ion ecc…, due to the different battery structure and operating principle. The BMS is built around a desktop computer equipped with LabVIEW software and NI (National Instruments, US) Compact DAQ (Data AcQuisition) device, which results in a flexible and expandable system, with advanced programming features. The BMS in-house software is designed to provide the test-facility with SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) functions, that is, it receives processes and logs all acquired data generated by the thermo-fluid and electric dynamic probes which are needed to perform the subsequent analyses. The BMS also generates the feedback signals for controlling the experiments evolution according to advances strategies such as efficiency maximization. Signal management between the stack and Compact DAQ includes cell voltage galvanic insulation that consists of opto-isolators and stack voltage galvanic insulation ensured by a DC/DC transformer. Up to now, very few papers present such developments for industrial scale VRFBs.