Comparative Analysis of Reconfiguration Assisted Management of Battery Storage Systems

Present battery storage systems are connected as fixed cell topology. Performance is limited due to the differences in ageing of different cells and failure situations. Static battery management systems and balancing methods with fixed cell topologies are developed to monitor and balance the cells, unfortunately, current designs are not able to mitigate the issues very well. Several reconfiguration designs have been proposed to not only monitor the cells but also control the connections between the cells which are not clearly worked out. In this paper, we have presented a generic reconfigurable battery topology which has the ability to monitor and configure the cells using appropriate switching to increase the lifetime of battery cells. An additional component is used in this topology which is named as switching network. The working principle and a techno-economic analysis of the switching circuit are developed to find the balance between the performance and the associated losses in the network. We also have compared the proposed topology with the existing static BMS architectures with passive and active balancing designs using a set of performance parameters-flexibility, reliability, management complexity, efficiency and cost.