Design and implementation of a lead-acid battery emulator

Abstract

The lead-acid batteries are a widely spread energy storage technology due to their low cost and good reliability. For most of the applications using battery-based energy storage systems, it is important to assess the battery performance and dynamic behavior. However, the laboratory research on actual batteries is time consuming, costly and may lead to wrong results due to battery capacity attenuation, aging and environmental conditions. These reasons make battery emulation an attractive alternative to reduce the mentioned difficulties. Therefore, in this paper the design and implementation of a leadacid battery emulator are presented. The proposed battery emulator is based on a Flyback converter, the control schemes and battery model were implemented using a Texas Instruments TMS320F28335 DSP. Design considerations of the proposed emulator are discussed and key experimental results about the battery emulator confirm the system feasibility. Finally, main conclusions are presented.