What is a Battery Management System (BMS)?
Battery Monitoring Systems (BMS) use specialized sensors to monitor the battery characteristics of each LiFePO4 cell during actual battery pack operation. BMS manufacturers can configure their systems to sense cell voltage, current, temperature, and other characteristics within the anode, cathode and electrolyte materials of each battery cell. The overall goal of a BMS design engineer is to optimize individual cell usage in parallel with many other cells to compose a much larger battery pack that discharges and recharges the total battery pack current as one unified system. If just one LiFePO4 cell exceeds its maximum or minimum threshold and becomes disabled, it can lower the performance of the entire battery pack.
There are currently 2 different types of battery management systems. The first type is a battery metering system that displays the voltage of several batteries at a time and may give you a warning when one or more batteries have a high or low voltage with respect to the required voltage. The second type does all of the same functions as the first type and also equalises the voltage across each battery in the series string. Effectively this makes the battery more reliable and extends its life.
