Development of Smart Charging and Energy Management Controls for Batteries and Ultracapacitors

This paper presents the design and testing of battery and ultracapacitor current and voltage control systems suitable for smart charging and energy management of hybrid energy storages. These include the concept of a constant-current/constant-voltage charger which can be easily configured for different batteries, and a power flow control strategy suitable for DC microgrid voltage bus control. The effectiveness of presented control systems has been verified experimentally on the battery/ultracapacitor test setup comprising DC/DC power converters, wherein the battery/ultracapacitor current and voltage controllers and the DC link voltage controller are implemented in a programmable logic controller (PLC). The high-level control, supervision, signal processing, and data logging are implemented on the National Instruments (NI) CompactRIO standalone acquisition & control platform, while on-line process monitoring has been implemented within the National Instruments (NI) LabView software environment running on the master PC. The main advantages of utilization of NI hardware and software are manifested in the flexibility of implementation of high-level control and supervision through a highly-configurable GUI interface, and the ability of the NI CompactRIO system to store large amount of data during long-duration experiments.