Redundant series cell voltage measurement circuit design of battery management system for functional safety

Abstract In most battery management system (BMS) circuit designs, the analog front end (AFE) chip is used to get the series cell voltage of the battery pack. However, it can lead to incorrect calculations by the BMS, causing errors in battery information, failures in protection control, and triggering a battery system fire accident if the AFE chip is abnormal. Unfortunately, the BMS will never know the correct of measured results if it is measured by a single AFE chip. This paper proposes a redundant series voltage measurement system (RSVMS) for the series cell voltage of the battery pack. The original AFE is referred to as the main AFE (m-AFE). The RSVMS can be regarded as redundant AFE (r-AFE). In this paper, the r-AFE consists of a series cell selector and an analog-to-digital (ADC) converter with an isolated communication function to transmit measurement results to the microcontroller unit (MCU) of the BMS. Due to the hardware requirements of functional safety, it does not allow using two identically designed hardware as redundant systems. To satisfy the hardware level of functional safety and to minimize the hardware cost and size, the series cell selector of r-AFE shares the same hardware circuit as the Active Hybrid Equalizer Circuit (A-HEC). The cell selector of A-HEC is composed of the back-to-back MOSFET switch array with a simple ON/OFF function. The MCU of BMS will identify the abnormal of voltage measurement results when the difference of m-AFE and r-AFE is over the threshold. In summary, r-AFE can ensure the accuracy of cell voltage measurement for m-AFE to avoid significant errors when estimating battery information and avoid disaster caused by failure or malfunction of protection functions. In addition, the m-AFE and r-AFE are two independent designs to avoid similar errors caused by identical circuit configurations.