Hello, my name is Gregory Plett, and it's my pleasure to welcome you once again to a course in the specialization on algorithms for battery management systems. This specific course has to do with battery pack balancing and power estimation. This is the fifth course in the specialization that looks into how do we manage battery packs properly and efficiently and effectively. Up until this point in the specialization, we've been looking at computer methods that are focused on estimating certain quantities that describe what is happening inside of the battery pack. These quantities usually cannot be measured directly such as state of charge, and state of health, and so forth. In this course, you're going to learn instead about techniques that are more involved with controlling the operation of the battery pack instead of estimating something that is happening inside of the battery pack. A battery management system must control battery pack operation in a number of ways. Here, we're going to look at balancing cells and computing operational limits on how much power may be withdrawn from the pack or sunk into the pack at any point in time. I have already shared this illustration with you before, but I bring it back to remind you of the progress that we've made and what we're going to do in this particular course. In the first course, you learned about battery pack requirements including how to measure a voltage and how to measure current and temperature. In the second course, you learned how to model battery cell operation by learning about equations that describe how a battery cell voltage responds to a change in the battery cells electrical current that's flowing through it. In the third course, you learned how to develop algorithms to estimate state of charge. In the fourth course, you learned about algorithms to estimate battery cell state of health. In this final course, you are going to learn about balancing cells in a battery pack and about computing power limits for cells and battery packs. So, with this understanding, you will complete the set of skills that are required to develop algorithms for battery management systems on your own. In this course, you will learn about causes for cells becoming out of balance. You will learn circuit concepts and methods to bring battery cells and the battery pack over all back into balance. You will learn about different considerations for how to design an overall balancing solution. You will learn how to simulate balancing operations in Octave code and how to evaluate designs in that way. Then, we will move from the topic of balancing battery systems to the other topic which is computing power limits. You will learn about limitations to some of the simple methods that are often used to compute power limits. Remember that these power limits inform the battery packs load how much power should be withdrawn or sunk into the battery pack, basically, how the battery pack should be operated. So, after looking at these limited methods, you will learn a straightforward method for improving some of those simple methods and even a method beyond that that is even more powerful. You will learn how to implement the power limits computations in Octave code. If you choose to pursue the honors track of this course, you will also learn about future trends in battery management system algorithms beyond what I've been able to share with you in this particular course. Notice in this case, I have developed two specific different icons to illustrate your progress through the course. Earlier courses focused really on one topic per course, and so they had a single icon. But this course really covers two quite distinct topics. So, for the first two weeks, you will study battery pack balancing as depicted by the first icon, and for the remaining two weeks and the honors week if you choose to pursue that, you will study about power limits computations as depicted by the second icon instead. After completing this course, you will be able to evaluate different design choices for cell balancing, and you'll be able to articulate their relative merits. You will be able to design component values for simple balancing circuits, and indeed, this was going to be one of the topics of the capstone design project for this course. You will be able to compute available power using a simple cell model, and you'll be able to use provided Octave code to compute available power using a more comprehensive equivalent circuit cell model that provides better power limit estimates. You will also be able to use the provided Octave code and simulation scripts to evaluate how quickly a battery pack must be balanced. This course does have several prerequisites. It depends on certain things that you have learned already throughout the specialization. So, looking at the first course in this specialization, you will need to remember some basic background in battery management system requirements, especially having to do with sensing and also the simple methods that you learned there on how to compute power limits and energy limits in that course. You will need to remember some things from the second course in the specialization also on equivalent circuit cell model simulation. You will need to recall specific background pertaining to the enhanced self-correcting cell model equations and how they operate, and that's really critical because that is the basis of a lot of what we're going to do in this course. Also, you're going to need to remember the Octave codes that I shared with you in that second course because we won't have time to review those but we will be using those extensively. As an optional resource, you may choose to purchase the book on Battery Management Systems, Volume Two on Equivalent Circuit Methods from Artech House. Once again, this book is not a requirement for succeeding in this course or in this specialization, but I believe it can be a really helpful permanent reference for you and a permanent resource for the topic areas that are covered here. In this course, we are going to study chapters five through seven of this book. So, for further study, you can confer this optional resource. That brings us to the end of this lesson. Without delay, let's proceed on to the next lesson where we're going to jump right into the content of the course and you will start to learn about cell balancing.
