Is your battery safe or not? For a battery pack, its safety system is at prime focus. These safety measures can extend the battery life and protect you from minor accidents like exploding batteries. A battery or product designer was confused between using a Battery management system (BMS) and a protection circuit module (PCM). These both are good from their point of view, but designers must select one. You can Learn Battery Management System Course in Mumbai.
In this article, we will know which is a better option for a designer.
What is PCM?
PCM stands for Protection Circuit Module, which is entirely related to the protection of circuits. You will find no software for security. This protection relies on predefined switch-off limits to protect batteries from getting damaged. It becomes dangerous if you overcharge a battery, especially a lithium battery. Here comes the role of PCM; it will protect the battery against very high charging voltages, very low discharging voltages and high current during discharging, which means a short circuit.
The limited capability of a Protection Circuit Module (PCM) makes it an affordable safety system when compared to Battery Management System (BMS).
Drawback of PCM
- It does not provide the battery pack’s special status, making it inefficient. It won’t inform us about the charging level of the battery.
- PCM does not always balance a battery’s state of charge properly.
- It rarely measures the temperature of battery cells that may cause overheating. If you don’t identify it, there might be chances of a small explosion or malfunction of the battery.
- It is almost impossible to communicate with battery packs using PCM, which limits the possibilities of devices.
- You can’t optimise the battery consumption because you have no information about overcharging or undercharging.
What is BMS?
BMS stands for Battery Management System. It is similar to PCM, but it has the upper hand over PCM because it monitors the health of any battery. It has a microcontroller integrated with intelligent software, which allows it to interpret and calculate the different battery measurements like State of Health (SOH) and State of Charge (SOC).
BMS has a communication bus to transfer information to the main application or other BMS. It can manage chargers or consuming units to utilise the batteries entirely with the help of a communication bus. This ability also helps BMS protect high-capacity batteries since it can intelligently adapt to their different needs.
BMS offer better protection than PCM because it can detect all abnormal events and give an alert to the users about them. You are free to perform a complete battery diagnosis to know the health of your battery pack anytime. You can also keep a battery life record by taking advantage of BMS. A Battery Course Certification in Pune will provide certification after completing their courses.
Conclusion
According to the above points, it is clear that the battery management system course is better than the protection circuit module. There are several reasons why BMS provide more security than PMS. First, BMS allows you to monitor the status of the battery’s health, whereas PCM cannot perform this task. Second, you can resolve any problem with the battery with the help of BMS, which is missing in PCM. Third, the cost of BMS is high, but quality over price is excellent.