On March 9th-11th, the 38th International Battery Seminar and Exhibit (IBS) was held virtually. TWS Technology was invited to attend the event. Mr. Charlie Liu, the Global Vice President of Technology for TWS, delivered a presentation focusing on the topic of "Platformizing a BMS with Intelligence", and Mr. Guoliang Zhang, Senior Software Manager of TWS, moderated a roundtable with the theme of "Wireless BMS and its Challenges".

BMS: A Caretaker for Batteries

The applications of lithium-ion battery technology have been continuously growing since its first commercialization in early 1990s. Nowadays, Lithium-ion batteries are ubiquitous and can be found in more and more applications, which are improving quality of life for people everywhere. However, the increased size and complexity of the batteries brings increased safety concerns. A Battery Management System (BMS) addresses these issues by acting as the brain of the system: it monitors, protects, controls and takes care of the entire battery system.

TWS BMS Platform with Intelligence

Monitoring and managing the battery system with data-driven advanced features for prediction and prevention in advance, is what an Intelligent BMS Platform does.

The platform developed by TWS has a core of proven software, with hardware design verified for the BMS. Not only does this enable efficient use of engineering resources, but it ensures stability and reliability. Ultimately, we can deliver a high-quality product, while shortening the development cycle and expediting the time to market. TWS can allocate more engineering resources to focus on optimizing and enriching the BMS platform with increased intelligence, developing more advanced algorithms and data-driven diagnosis capabilities to better track battery state of health, predicting cell aging, and preventing failures in advance.

With the nature of applications and cost concerns, it is hard to have one BMS platform to fit the needs of all applications. For example, a BMS system for a vacuum cleaner is much less complicated than a BMS system for industrial vehicles or an ESS system. At TWS, we have developed one set of unified software running on a few hardware systems to form tiered platforms covering all applications. With the platform as a core and as a foundation, we can build solutions to address many customers' specific projects, under various application categories, quickly and efficiently.

Platform upgrades for the future

As time goes on, in order to ensure the competitiveness of the BMS, our engineers will be continuously improving the algorithm, and adding new features to upgrade our platforms. These additional features and upgrades will be based on either the latest industrial trends, customer needs globally, or even from TWS internal research results. These upgrades can be applied to all future projects: once we upgrade the platform, any future projects using the upgraded platform can take advantage of the upgrades and advanced features. At the same time, it also may be possible for some of the released products to take advantage of these advanced upgrades.

At TWS, we have developed and unified our platform. Going forward we will be focusing on continuous enhancement of our platforms, adding more intelligence and advanced features to make them more competitive. Towards the end of his speech, Charlie said, “TWS collaborates with our customers, the manufacturers in various industries, to enable their products to be more environmental-friendly, and to create a better life for people everywhere. TWS has transformed its business: designing a platform based BMS that is easily customizable for our diverse clients. We make use of our platform-based design approaches, to turn customers' needs into high-quality product solutions in a timely manner. We continue to attract more customers globally with our platform-based design, engaging more customers and building trust with them via our technology-oriented solutions.”