Thermal Fault-Detection method and analysis of peripheral systems for large battery packs

Complex electrical systems such as battery packs are pushed further to comply with the continuously rising demands for power, energy and safety. This triangle of requirements needs to be optimized in all three directions, but has to be well balanced using as much information about the battery's parameters, such as temperature. Today's battery packs lack of gapless temperature acquisition due to a limited sensor count. To increase the temperature information count and herewith the safety, additional sensors would need to be installed, which is rather expensive. A different approach is provided in this paper: Already existent wire harnesses are put into a secondary use to acquire thermal hotspots. Additionally, the proposed method allows to localize the thermal event which leads to a more detailed knowledge of battery pack's thermal situation. By accomplishing a gapless temperature supervision, the mentioned requirement triangle can be further optimized to match future application demands.