Abstract
Battery swapping is a popular alternative to the conventional battery charging, which involves removing a drained EV battery and replacing it with a fully charged one. EV users can swap batteries on the go at any battery charging station. A robust data management system facilitates this exchange by providing an interface and platform to locate new batteries. Using data analytics to quantify the voltage and temperature of the battery, the health of the battery is estimated and is displayed to the user. In comparison to the conventional charging procedure at a battery station, which can take hours, this service is less time consuming and easy to adopt in urban environments. This paper describes an IoT based real time monitoring system for these swappable batteries that enables customers to search for nearby battery swapping stations, while also transmitting each station's battery SOC and health. The system also communicates the station's operational status as well the health of the batteries to the manager of the station, easing the arduous task of monitoring them manually.
TopBackground
Energy and transportation are the forefront of the transition to a low carbon economy and reducing consumption of fossil fuels in this regard is a drastic step that has a significant impact on a country’s economy. Hence, the shift to renewable energy sources and electric transportation has been gradual. As the need for electric vehicles grows every day, research in battery technologies have equally peaked. Currently, the batteries used in electric vehicles have a lifespan of a few hundred charge cycles after which they must be replaced, which can be very expensive. With a single battery charging system, it takes considerable time to charge one battery to 100% percent rather than to charge few small batteries. To solve these issues, an efficient battery system is required which makes sure the battery remains at optimum level prolonging its life and extending the range.
An alternative battery recharging method that resolves this problem and is receiving global attention is battery swapping, wherein a depleted EV battery is removed from the vehicle and replaced with a fully charged one (Subriana, Puig, & Sarma, 2017). The technique of battery swapping is also known as mechanical fuelling or mechanical recharging because it requires mechanical replacement and battery refilling. These battery swapping stations combine the benefits of both slow and fast charging, i.e., gently recharging EV batteries during off- peak hours while swiftly refuelling EVs in a short amount of time (Barreras et al., 2015; Tahara, Ishikawa, & Ishigaki, 2020).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Light Nodes: Sensor clusters that combine together to transmit different types of data parallelly at the same time to the main server.
Serial Communication: It’s a communication methodology that involves one or more transmission lines to send and receive data one bit at a time.
Protocol: A set of established rules that dictate how data is formatted, transmitted and received in a network of devices.
API: It is a contract service that binds two applications and defines how they communicate with each other using requests and responses.
Internet of Technology (IoT): An interconnected network of electronic devices that communicate with one another and external environment for autonomous operation, data collection, data analysis and storage.
Battery Management System (BMS): A system designed to monitor, charge, and maintain batteries in vehicles, charging stations, and swappable battery stations.
Dashboard: It is a graphical user interface that displays processed data in the form of widgets and sometimes with the ability to take in user commands.
Node-RED: Software platform designed to establish flows and code that play a pivotal role in establishing a connection between the servers and light nodes.
Arduino: A low-cost open-source microcontroller board based on C programming that is designed as a prototyping platform.