Along the recent substantial growth in the sales of electric vehicles, a number of spontaneous fire and explosion incidents have also been reported around the world. Automakers spend plenty of manpower to verify the battery packs, but this obviously is limited to the charge/discharge life and communication tests of common regulations and fails to cover the complex actual operation of a complete vehicle. Therefore, key players throughout the automotive industry have started to vigorously promote the ISO 26262 standard. A large share of car manufacturers and suppliers has since implemented this regulation on functional safety in road vehicles.

In ISO 26262, the product development at the system level is expanded to the hardware and software levels (as shown in the figure below). The standard stipulates the following flow for safety requirements of the parts: Functional Safety Requirement → Technical Safety Requirement → Hardware Safety Requirement → Software Safety Requirement. Regardless of the ASIL level on functional safety integrity, each verification process requires hardware-in-the-loop and fault injection tests to ensure accurate safety mechanisms at the vehicle level and effective failure coverage.

▲ISO 26262 Overview

Chroma ATE proudly presents the 8610 Battery Pack Power HIL (Hardware-In-the-Loop) Testbed. The test system not only realizes the required basic functions and signal control tests but also includes verification of the actual power behavior. Compared with traditional signal-level HIL solutions, Chroma 8610 offers more complete coverage of the EV high-power components testing range. The equipment helps users to perform more thorough verification and validation on the right side of the vehicle's standard V-shaped development process for components such as battery packs and modules, battery management systems, and cooling and heating systems. This includes a variety of compound working condition tests on the system-level functions of the battery pack. Users can then discover and correct problems early to reduce development costs and improve test efficiency.

Chroma 8610 integrates a Fault Injection Unit to perform open and short circuit fault tests on various control and communication signals of the test object. Combined with vehicle behavior simulations such as dynamic discharge, insulation resistance change, and static charging, the testbed can even simulate and verify the battery pack under the most complex and high-risk complete vehicle operations without needing the actual vehicle. Chroma 8610 serves to improve the fault injection test requirements in the ISO 26262 process, and as such is conducive to obtaining the ASIL safety level certification.

▲Fault Injection User Interface

Together with a Chroma 170X0 series battery charger and discharger, Chroma 8610 can simulate the power system's dynamic loading and recharging on the battery pack and supports the import of Altair Activate vehicle models and various real-time mathematical models with Simulink model-based design. Integration of international standard driving cycles like NEDC and WLTP serves to verify the dynamic discharge and regeneration performance of car batteries.

▲Chroma 8610 & 170X0 Series Integration

▲Dynamic Discharge & Regeneration User Interface

For more details on these and other products, please visit Chroma's website and leave your inquiry. We are happy to be of service.