At present, energy storage is the pivotal technology that will reshape the energy sector by enabling widespread adoption and grid-integration of solar and wind renewables. It will play also a major role on influencing our behaviour on how we will use energy in general.

An energy-storage market is growing exponentially and with reducing of its cost, it is now entering in the commercial, consumer and residential market, where applications are smaller but it requires simplicity, safety and scalability. In order to achieve such potential of the energy-storage systems, number of disruptive changes needs to be adapted in underlying basic cell-chemistry, requiring hardware, which needs to be integrated as well as software components as per their applications. A key component in this eco-system is a Battery-Management-Systems (BMS), which should inherently run the intelligent algorithms, which are adaptable to various underlying cells but also should allow scalability for integrating different hardware components using standard communication with not only to multiple battery-packs but also to other power-electronics devices.

This proposal will outline the development of a modular and scalable high capacity energy-storage system that will use EtherCAT as its main communication bus between the different modules. This will be the first EtherCAT based energy-storage in the market. In existing systems battery-packs are connected via SPI, CAN or similar real-time bus systems with limitation of number of nodes connected to it. EtherCAT is an Ethernet based real-time field bus which provides high speed communication with flexible network topologies, relative to other available bus systems. EtherCAT provides a significant increase in the number of nodes (eg. up to 65535 battery packs) that can be connected to the bus. In addition it allows a widely spread network of battery pack.

In this proposed experiment we explain the development of a complex EtherCAT slave controller as a targeted CPS product which expands the EtherCAT technology in energy storage and battery management systems. It also contains the description of the target product, necessary development efforts of hardware and software using euroCPS platforms, required work-packages and resources.

Overall concept