Batteries play a key role as energy storage elements in the fields of solar energy plants, electro mobility and all kind of network- independent technical equipment. Due to their product specific properties, batteries have to be tested for each specific application, taking into account all possible electrical and environmental situations. Up to now, such evaluations and tests were performed mostly with real batteries or battery stacks.

Over the past years, engineers began to substitute real bulky and expensive batteries by electronic power supplies in order to simulate at the least the discharge behaviour of the real battery. By this, one of the most important drawbacks of real batteries could be avoided: In the case of a circuit failure or a short circuit, real batteries are driving nearly unlimited current endangering personnel in the vicinity by fire or splatters of melted metal. Modern power supplies dispose of a fast acting current limit preventing too high a current from flowing.

Advanced Battery simulation however means not only to reproduce the discharge curve more or less accurate, but rather to cover the full characteristics of electro-chemical storage element during any charge or discharge activity. Due to the bidirectional current flow of each rechargeable battery, simulation also has to cover the full range of charging and discharging currents.

REGATRON Battery Simulators are made up of a bidirectional and programmable REGATRON DC power supply equipped with the powerful Application Software BatSim. This software is resident on-board the DC power supply respective on-board the master unit of a bigger system and is handled by a PC shell software. The BatSim computing process is running in real-time perfectly matched to the internal timing of the DC power supply. By this, an optimum computing rate can be reached leading to nearly one-to-one time behaviour even in the case of steep changes in charge/discharge current.

Each battery type reacts in a typical manner to charge and discharge currents in terms of ‘state of charge’, cell voltage, ohmic and parametrical losses, polarisation voltages and so on. REGATRON BatSim software/firmware is based on specific mathematical models considering these interdependences in an optimum method. Nevertheless, the operator may fine-tune the model by a number of well-defined parameters in order to match the models answer to an existing real value table.

The features at a glance

Full integration within TopCon power supply series: TC.GSS, TC.DSS, ResAct series and TC.P (discharging only)

Select from the following base models:

• Li-Ion
• Lead-Acid
• NiMH, NiCd
• Further technologies on request, e.g.
  BatSim+‘:
  Detailed Cell Chemistry model developed by Fraunhofer FHG

Define and enter all important process parameters related to your application as:

• Cell capacity
• Number of cells in series, parallel or mixed
• Simulation cut-off values
• State of charge

Use the following features:

• Multi-channel data-logger with EventMarkers as time stamps, file export in .csv file type
• Record-to-file capabilities freely configurable by scripting language
• Multi-trace Data analysis (e.g. comparison) of different measurements over the same time axis by a DataAnalyser

See the “Related Documents and Files” TAB above for more details.