New Industry Products

Nuvation Engineering Delivers Advanced 3rd Generation Battery Management System

March 27, 2012 by Jeff Shepard

Nuvation Engineering has developed the 3rd generation version of its Battery Management System (BMS) that monitors, balances and protects large-scale lithium battery stacks. Other battery chemistries including nickel are also supported. The Nuvation BMS addresses the needs associated with today’s complex battery systems, including safety, accuracy, noise immunity, compliance with industry standards, and competitive cost. Battery stacks are found in electric vehicles, internal combustion engine replacements, grid storage, uninterruptible power supply systems, solar and wind power conversion systems, residential time-of-use billing load redistribution systems, and many military/defense applications.

The Nuvation Battery Management System has already been used to significantly improve battery life, safety, scalability and fuel gauging of electric vehicles, all while decreasing charge times. Nuvation’s BMS provides a shortcut through many technical challenges to minimize the R&D required for new battery system technology, thus improving ROI and time-to-market.

"The technology to manage next-generation battery systems for peak performance is complex, requiring state-of-the-art design and testing to guarantee results. The Battery Management System includes highly functional design hooks to many popular interface technologies," said Michael Hermann, VP of Engineering at Nuvation. "Currently, our BMS platform can be quickly customized for solutions that address hybrid-electric and all-electric automobiles and secondary vehicles, grid-attached power solutions, remote communications platforms, unmanned aerial vehicles, and of course, battery manufacturers themselves."

Nuvation’s Battery Management System provides original equipment manufacturers a platform that can address their entire large-scale battery-powered product roadmap with a single platform. The platform, truly designed with engineering needs in mind, combines impressive design option flexibility with a broad range of possible target applications. Nuvation decided early in the architecture-planning phase to create a platform that was highly flexible and extensible, Hermann explained, rather than attempting to predict all of the potential variations that OEM customers could envision.

"Unlike other platforms offered by competitors, Nuvation’s Battery Management System has gone through extensive road testing, and is currently in use in the over 100-mph capable E.Rex, a street-legal electric car designed by our team," said Michael Worry, CEO of Nuvation Research Corporation. "We have leveraged the experience gained in developing the one-of-a-kind all-electric E.Rex vehicle to enhance our BMS for next-generation power systems that are anticipated to be adopted across many EV platforms."

The Nuvation Battery Management system is available under a number of licensing and evaluation options.

More news and information regarding the latest developments in Smart Grid electronics can be found at Darnell’s SmartGridElectronics.Net.