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“Batteries are impacting almost every facet of the world around us. Together we unlock possibilities for a smarter, safer, greener, healthier and more enjoyable world”, said Jeff Bessa, General Manager, Battery Management Solution, in his welcome address to a gathering of battery engineers. Engineers from all around the world attended the annual Texas Instruments Battery Management Deep Dive last week.

“The Deep Dive” (as regular attendees refer to it) happens once a year. It all began in 2004,, a group of six battery engineers from one customer were trained on various aspects of designing safe, high-efficiency, and high-accuracy battery circuits that enabled faster and cooler charging. Since then, the annual event has grown bigger each year including a number of customers and TIers. This year, around 300 engineers attended the event. The keynote session was delivered by guest speaker Steven Clark, Senior Manager of the Energy Storage & HV Systems Department at FCA in Auburn Hills, MI. “Battery management systems are an important part of any advanced battery pack design and XEV system function.” said Mr. Clark in his keynote address.

This year’s event was divided into three separate tracks: Advanced Fuel Gauging, Charging & Wireless Power, and Monitoring & Protection. The Advanced Fuel Gauging track featured training sessions on the Impedance Track ™ fuel gauging algorithm. Other topics in this track included battery gauge design considerations for high charge/discharge applications, and the battery management unit architecture (BMU), to name a few.

The charging & wireless power track consisted of sessions such as designing with TI’s 5W and  10W wireless power systems. Also included in this track were topics such as Battery Charger design considerations, and Battery Fast Charging trends, to name a few.

The monitoring & protection track consisted of topics such as Precision monitoring and safety for large battery pack applications, Creating modular and stackable battery platforms for large-scale energy storage applications, and also session on a 36-V power tool Battery Management Solution reference design.

The event included hands on training on some of the tools from Texas Instruments that make battery management design less complicated. One particular tool, the Gauge Parameter Calculator (GPC) was introduced at this year’s event. The GPC automates the process of obtaining matching parameters/coefficients for the specific battery profile - thus making it a whole lot quicker, and easier to design a battery fuel gauge; and at the same time allowing a more accurate fuel gauge over temperature. Without this tool, obtaining matching parameters would take 2 weeks, or more in some cases. The GPC can do it in 1-2 days. The lab sessions also featured the bqStudio gauge design tool, as well as hands on training on the Gauge Development Kit

TI’s Battery management engineers, together with their customers are driving cutting-edge technology that changes the world. Their primary focus is to solve real world problems found in high power charging, battery state (SOC) and health monitoring (SOH), wireless power, energy harvesting, and battery protection and authentication. The annual Battery Management Deep Dive allows customers to extensively interact with TI’s engineers, thus creating a collaborative platform to solve some of the toughest problems in battery management. If you would like to learn more on these topics, check out Battery Management University.

Jeff Bessa said it rightly - “Together, let’s drive technology and change the world”. The 300 or so engineers who gathered at the event are doing just that!

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