Impulse based battery management system

[VooteleAer]

Hello
My friend is developing a microgrid proof of concept based on high voltage impulse transmission along with powerline communications and this got me thinking:

Would it be possible to do similar thing within a battery pack.
Right now the batteries are charged & discharged in series and then balanced by external circuit. Active balancers are effectively transmitting power from one cell to another. But what if every battery cell would have a special converter that can emit or receive, say, 120V DC pulses. All those modules are connected parallel to shared bus. The charger would be then just a DC power supply with 120V pulse output and the output would be just mosfet and a bank of ultracapacitors where the "right" pulses would end into.

Of course all this would be orchestrated and synchronised somehow.

This is somehow similar how DC-DC converters work, they all have part of the circuit that generates pulses and another part where the pulses are stored to the capacitor. My idea was to separate those parts, or more precisely, have multiple enitites of those networked.

 

[rafalg]

To understand you better - the idea is to have cells charged separately 'in parallel' so that every section has its own charger?
But with serial connection the charging is already done in parallel - i mean all cells charge at once, with same current. Balancer is there just to correct some capacity differences.

 

[VooteleAer]

Yes, sort of. This would enable using different batteries together, have indefinitely expandable system, or even have different energy storage mechanisms in one system (battery, supercapacitors, flywheels).
A sort of energy exchange system.

 

[BlueSwordM]

That is doable, but it would be somewhat costly, more failure prone than a regular battery and reduce system level energy density.