Talkative battery: super-safe batteries with power-modulation based internal and external sensor data collection

Individual cell surveillance in lithium-ion battery systems has not yet been widely adopted in the industry due to the increased cost of the final product. Thereby, the limited number of temperature sensors in a battery pack endangers system safety. This paper proposes talkative power conversion for collecting the temperature data from the sensors of a large-format battery cell, utilizing the high-frequency signal induced by the power converter modulation. Such a battery is called talkative battery in this paper. The principle of load shift keying (LSK) is utilized to establish a communication link between the sensor and the power converter (e.g., a battery charger) via the wire line. The concept of talkative battery is theoretically analyzed and experimentally validated with two different lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells. The findings indicate that low-cost individual cell thermal sensing is viable with minimal hardware requirements.