IMPORTANCE OF BATTERY MONITORING SYSTEMS
What is a Battery Monitoring System?
There are 2 types of battery monitoring systems. The first is for mobile applications such as electrical vehicles (EV), and the second is for stationary applications such as UPS. In this article, a battery monitoring system (BMS) for stationary applications will be discussed.
Let us start with the definition of a BMS. In a nutshell, a BMS is an unmanned fixed surveillance system for stationary battery application. More detailed, a BMS is any electronic system that monitors or manages a rechargeable battery that undertakes tasks such as protecting the battery from operating outside the “safe working area”, monitoring its status, calculating secondary data, reporting this data, checking its environment, and verifying its identity.
A BMS differentiates from portable measuring devices by its capability to keep the historical data of all measurements. For the right conclusion for the battery pack, a healthy analysis of the measurements can be done with the comparison of the previous data.
What is it used for?
All wonders can be eased with its definition since it is clear. A BMS is used for protecting the full system health by measuring, monitoring, and logging the secondary data of the batteries.
On stationary battery applications, such as UPSes, the full system is used for constant uptime for the relevant business operation.
The higher the operational sensitivity level, the more important it is that no operation interruption occurs. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure the quality of the system components and the stability of the system.
In this direction, UPS, batteries, capacitors, and such devices, which are the main components of the system, should be selected in such a way as to capture the sensitivity level of the operation. Then, each of these devices must be constantly monitored to ensure full performance and remain highly efficient.
Furthermore, a BMS is used for monitoring the batteries first. With that and ambient data, which comes from BMS again, the user can be notified whether system components are well healthy.
Why is it necessary?
Previous parts can declare the necessity of a BMS. All battery applications occur in critical power areas. From an overall perspective, the importance of a BMS can be clarified as “safety”. First, safety for the batteries. After that, the perspective can be expanded to safety for human life, safety for the environment, safety for the business uptime, and safety for the budget.
A “Safe working area” has to be provided for battery applications. By safe working area, it means for either a large or small battery pack, protection for such as:
• Over-charging
• Over-discharging
• Over-voltage during float charge
• Over-voltage during charging
• Under-voltage during discharging
• Over-temperature
• To ensure a “safe working area” for the battery pack, a BMS measures the secondary data such as voltage, current, and temperature, and detects the charge/discharge positions.
What could happen in its absence?
Lack of knowledge on battery pack health, the user cannot be notified before anything bad occurs. What does it mean by bad thing? Let us give some examples.
First, one bad battery can affect all of the batteries and directly can affect the connected UPS.
Second, in some cases, thermal runaways may occur. Thermal runaway is the most undesirable thing for the whole system. Since it can lead the dangerous circumstances like fire or even explosion.
To express the situation’s importance, in the absence of a BMS, the system can stop completely, which means “downtime” of the business operation.
The results of these can be evaluated by the user.
Alpais Battery Monitoring System Introduction
Alpais BMS is developed for stationary battery applications. It detects secondary data of batteries, which are listed below;
• Battery Internal Resistance
• Battery Voltage
• Overall Battery Bank Voltage (String Voltage)
• Battery Temperature
• String Current
• Charge/Discharge cycles
Alpais BMS also monitors and notifies the user about ambient status. It monitors Ambient Temperature and Humidity.
Alpais BMS provides system protection by ensuring a “safe working area” for batteries.
Over and Under-voltage alarms are generated by the Alpais BMS on charging, discharging, float charge, and idle positions for the battery pack.
Alpais BMS solutions have a wide variety for different applications and requirements such as Data Centers, Telecom, Medical, Oil&Gas, etc.
Alpais BMS offers monitoring solutions for lead-acid and NiCd batteries. In the Alpais Battery Monitoring System, the user can monitor the batteries by Cloud or Local Network - also an Embedded Server is an option.
Data storage can be adjustable for more than 10 years.
Alpais BMS reports can be downloaded in PDF & CSV format with a desired period like daily, monthly, and yearly.