Battery Management
Battery Management, Lithium Battery Chargers and Battery Monitors
All lithium batteries require some form of battery management to ensure a long reliable working life. It is 100% certain that a battery with battery management will have a longer working life before cell failure compared with a bare cells only battery.
The lower the manufacturing quality of a cell, the higher the degree of battery management required to prevent cell failure. The cell quality is determined by many factors including in quality of the raw “ingredients” used to manufacture the cell as well as cell manufacturing practices and quality control. The later includes such factors including ageing period, grading, capacity and impedance matching of cells.
Battery management can be an internal BMS electronic module to suit the battery chemistry / type required as well as the battery voltage and charge / discharge current required. BMS can be either internal or external to the battery block. For specific applications such as high power aircraft, truck or racing application starting batteries no BMS may be the recommended option. This is to provide simplicity, the lightest weight battery and greatest reliability in use since no electronics (BMS) is used with the battery. In these cases battery management is taken care of during charging using a microprocessor balance charger or multi-charger during routine service / periodic battery maintenance. Of course these batteries without any BMS use extremely high quality A-grade cells and needless to say the mass produced cheap cells made in China do not satisfy this requirement and must always be used with a BMS.
Our most common BMS provides over charge (over voltage) protection, over discharge (under voltage) protection, over temperature protection, short circuit protection and provides cell balancing function. It is automatic resetting so as soon as a fault condition has been removed the battery will instantly reset itself and normal battery operation will resume. We manufacture these BMS’s in many different battery voltage ratings from 3.2V to 144V and discharge current ratings from 20A to more than 220A for general application use and to more than 1000A for engine start for car and truck cranking batteries.
