When you think of battery life, what first comes to mind? Your thoughts may wander to your smartphone or maybe your laptop. But if you really think about it, you quickly realize batteries power the world around us, from the power tools in our garage to the forklift in a warehouse to the millions of electric bicycles and scooters driven all over the world.
As TIers set out to develop the new bq76940 multi-cell battery monitoring family they kept this worldview in mind. Instead of developing a battery management system for one type of device or one customer, they created a trio of products that can be used universally across potentially thousands of different types of devices.
What makes this set of battery management products different from the rest is its flexibility. For example, a power tool company wants to use a battery management system in an 18-volt battery pack for a leaf blower. The power tool company would have to invest time and money in a group of engineers to design the 18 volt battery pack to properly function with the leaf blower. If the same company then wanted to build a lawnmower with a 36 volt battery pack, they would have to start from the beginning, designing and coding a whole new interface for the battery pack system with the same amount of time and effort as the leaf blower. With the bq76940 monitors, the interface design is exactly the same. So, the engineers can use the same code to have the battery management system talk to the microprocessor or microcontroller whether it is 18 volts, 36 volts, or any other voltage, saving significant time, effort and cost while also bringing customer products to market faster.
“Our competitors have something that is either too simplified or too complex, and we want to give customers one, true management platform that captures all of the battery information they need,” said Allen Chen, TI business development manager in battery management systems. “We are enabling our customers to innovate faster.”
So what does a multi-cell battery management system do? It handles battery measurements – taking all of the data available inside a battery pack such as cell voltages, current and temperature and turning the data into meaningful information that can be further processed by a microcontroller. The end result is the ability for a device to know how much battery life is left (called fuel gauging) while also offering another layer of protection to the device by making sure the battery doesn’t over charge or over discharge. The end goal of TI’s battery management system is to provide safe, reliable and consistent operation from their batteries.
“With full integration of voltage, current and temperature, customers can do an infinite combination of functions within the overall system. Once you have that information, what you do with it is very flexible,” said Allen.
The bq76920, bq76930 and bq76940 battery monitors can be used well beyond the more than 65 million power tools sold worldwide to homeowner and construction companies. These uses include, but are not limited to:
- Electric bicycles, scooters and golf carts. Electric bicycles, which are very popular in China, electric scooters that can be seen as the vehicle of choice in many parts of Europe and golf carts all over the world can also use this battery management system.
- Energy storage systems for renewable energy sources. Wind and solar energy has become more of a viable option as a reliable energy source. But often times, the energy must be stored before it’s used. Much like power tools and light electric vehicles, this market continues to grow for battery management systems.
- Data center battery backup. This blog post you are reading right now was stored in a data center somewhere in the world. The entire Internet runs off of hundreds of thousands of data centers storing all of the information that is generated and accessed on the Internet. And what keeps data centers running when they lost power from the grid? Battery backup systems.
- General industrial. Everything from medical applications to seismic monitoring to forklifts and everything in between – if it runs off of a battery, it most likely can use this battery management system for more accurate fuel gauging, added protection and most importantly, flexibility.