Implementation of a Control-Oriented Electro-Thermal Battery Pack Model Using Modelica Available to Purchase

Control oriented battery pack models can be very useful in the context of electrified vehicle development because such models can be used to develop the battery management system, which is a broad term that encompasses everything from thermal management and charge balancing to state of charge estimation. In this paper, a control oriented battery pack model is developed using the Modelica modeling environment. This model combines a Randle equivalent circuit representation with an lumped parameter thermal model for each cell to provide simultaneously the electrical and thermal variations among the cells. Modelica differs from modeling environment such as Simulink because it offers non-causal modeling, which handles both differential and algebraic equations. The resulting implementation is both scalable and flexible to accomodate any pack size, geometry, and connection. As part of the future work, supporting architectures such as the charge balancing system and thermal management system can be added to the pack model to simulate the complete pack operation.