German engineers have developed new sensor technology that can reduce the weight and cost of electric vehicles and other types of lithium-ion batteries.

Philip Dost is a member of the power system technology and power mechatronics research team at Ruhr University. The team has developed a new concept for monitoring the current and voltage of the battery, which can reduce the technical burden of the battery and add New features.

Normally, an electric vehicle battery consists of a single battery that can contain up to 12 batteries, each of which is monitored by its own voltage sensor. Sensors are very important for monitoring batteries. If they are overheated or overworked, they may burn and catch fire.

In a typical electric vehicle battery, there is a current sensor and multiple voltage sensors to do this work, the sensor is a considerable weight and cost driver.

In order to reduce weight, Dost and his colleagues proposed a method to reduce the number of sensors that previously used electric vehicle batteries to monitor current and voltage to one, regardless of the number of cells in the battery.

The researchers said that the sensor system they developed can be extended to batteries with different numbers of cells. It can also be applied to other battery types, such as tablet or notebook computers, wireless power tools, uninterruptible power supply systems, and solar energy storage systems to reduce its weight and cost, and increase battery life.

Next, engineers at Ruhr University will continue to work hard to improve the technology, evaluate their prototypes more closely and replace individual parts to meet the requirements of the automotive industry.