Hardware Implementation of Battery Monitoring System Controller for Underwater Vehicles

Abstract

Recent times design, development and testing of unmanned underwater vehicles for various civil and military missions have been enhanced. In underwater vehicle batteries are the main source of power supply to other subsystems. Monitoring of these batteries is an important activity to be performed by Battery Management System (BMS). It reduces the damage incurred in the various subsystems due to abnormal operating conditions and reflected voltage changes of the battery cells. Hence, the main objective of this paper is an implementation of the BMS controller in FPGA. The FPGA is the better choice to interface various sensors and ADC to PC to acquire the data for further processing. The total voltage is the cumulative voltage of the cells and is fed to the ADC through a signal conditioning circuit. The BMS controller is implemented in Verilog HDL using the Xilinx ISE design suite and validated using on Chip-Scope pro debugging tool. The presence of the controller increases the lifetime and safety of the battery cell pack. By continuously monitoring the battery voltages and currents, systems are protected from malfunctioning or damage due to voltage/ current changes.