The lack of a standardized approach on how State of Health (SoH) should be calculated and the fact that on-board battery management systems (BMS) alone are not sufficient in assessing battery safety are highlighting the need for battery analytics.
BMS vs Analytics
Why on-board battery management is not enough for ensuring the health and safety of electric vehicle batteries
Introduction
Knowing the State of Health (SoH) and safety status of lithium-ion batteries is fundamental for managing electric vehicle safety, maintenance, and battery warranty. Yet, keeping a battery system safe and reliable is not as easy as just operating the battery within specified thresholds. It needs far more advanced solutions to ensure seamless, safe, and profitable operation.
For battery health and safety, key performance indicators such as SoH or State of Charge (SoC), are important values to keep track of. However, determining accurate battery SoH remains a considerable challenge. There is a lack of consensus in the industry about how SoH should be calculated, meaning there is no standardized approach. Different manufacturers also calculate SoH differently. This creates complexity, particularly for fleet operators as various parties might refer to their very own SoH calculation.
On-board battery management systems (BMS) sometimes, but not always, provide an estimation of SoH. However, the accuracy of the estimations decreases over the lifetime of a battery, meaning that on-board BMS alone are not sufficient in assessing a battery’s health over its entire lifetime. These barriers to predicting battery health can be overcome by deploying battery analytics.
Interested in the details? The article covers the following topics:
- Why is it important to assess battery health?
- Why should you care about battery safety?
- How can battery health be assessed?
- How to increase battery health through data
- Why relying on BMS is not enough
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