Design and Investigation of a Modular Battery Simulator System

The topic of vehicular hybrid drive systems gains more and more in importance because of the increasing scarcity of fossil energy sources. A major focus of development in this area is improving the integration of electrical energy storage systems in the existing powertrain. The necessary developments require complex test benches to evaluate the results. To decrease the costs for testing large battery systems, the electric behavior of the storage is emulated by a power electronic circuit. Thus, the influence of different energy storage systems on the real testbench can be verified. This work presents and analyses an approach on simulating an electrochemical energy storage, which avoids the disadvantages of available systems on the market, such as high costs, large space consumption and low flexibility in power range. In addition to the modeling of the storage, it includes a draft of a multi-phase dc/dc-converter which acts as a link between the simulation model and the real test environment. The multiphase configuration of the dc/dc-converter requires a special control concept which was developed and successfully verified on an experimental setup consisting of three parallel phases. Furthermore, the multiphase approach offers the possibility of a modular system design to provide the most flexible simulation platform.