Power Line Communications in Automotive Traction Batteries: A Proof of Concept

Power line communication (PLC) in automotive traction batteries is considered an attractive alternative to the serial-bus communication used in state-of-the-art battery management systems (BMS). PLC uses the battery power line as communication medium and saves additional wires, connectors and isolation effort. In this work, we present a proof of concept for a battery PLC in a small-scale battery pack. From a hardware approach, we develop a PLC modem, which modulates UART data using on-off-keying (OOK) and couples it onto the battery power line. To test the PLC, we design a demonstrator consisting of two PLC modems connected to a small-scale battery pack. The PLC is verified by a master-to-slave communication with an exemplary data transmission of multiples of 12 byte data packets.