One of our clients wanted to build a battery-powered energy storage system for use in RVs, motor homes and trailers. Most recreational vehicles have a mix of 12 V DC and 120 V AC appliances to provide heating, cooling, entertainment, refrigeration, and other home comforts. The 120 V AC is typically supplied by a 12 V DC inverter when not plugged into shore power.
Connecting a stack that is not at the same SOC will cause a massive amount of current to flow into that stack from the other stacks in the pack. This damages the contactor which leads to premature failures and early warranty returns of the battery pack.
The client’s existing battery management system did not properly allow for organizing and managing multiple stacks in parallel, so they chose to replace it with Nuvation Energy's battery management system. When paired with our Multi-Stack Controller, Nuvation Energy's BMS intelligently manages multi-stack systems to prevent damaging amounts of equalization currents.
We developed 12 V battery stacks for our client, which were designed to be connected together, 8 in parallel, to provide the desired run time for the consumer appliances.
Project Details:
- LFP battery cells were chosen because of their inherent safety
- Four 160 amp hour battery cells were installed in a compact metal enclosure along with the Nuvation Energy BMS, contactors and current shunt to create a 12 V battery module
- A Nuvation Energy Multi-Stack Controller was used to control and monitor the combined outputs of up to 8 of these modules parallel at the DC bus level
- Each module had heating pads installed to allow for low temperature operation