EV battery cycler meets future high voltage requirements

The 150kW battery cycler is NI’s highest voltage cycler designed to support existing EV architectures while leaving room for future higher-voltage variants as technology continues to evolve.

Featuring unprecedented synchronisation capabilities and a modular design, the HPS-17000 helps battery labs upgrade performance with scalability, increased layout flexibility, and lower cost of maintenance.

Built to serve the modern battery test lab, the HPS-17000 complements NI’s portfolio of battery cyclers, offering a solution that is ideal for testing in a fast-paced environment that needs to be scaled and easily serviced. With this addition, NI continues to bring flexibility to customers locked into big, stand-alone racks that force them into rigid layouts that limit the scalability of their labs.

“The HPS-17000 pushes the performance boundaries of NI’s cycler portfolio even further, providing our customers with all the tools they need to test their EV batteries at the scale they require,” said Piet Vanassche, Chief Engineer of NI’s EV test systems. “By using NI’s software capabilities, hardware design expertise and modular approach, customers can scale their labs, maximise uptime and improve their test performance with a sub-ms dynamic response, and future-proof their battery validation labs.”

To serve applications beyond battery cycling such as inverter testing or dynamometer applications, this high-power system has standardized power- and application-specific breakout sections in the cabinet, which also lowers the cost of service across applications, making it possible for local service technicians to act quickly should a malfunction occur.

Time-Sensitive Networking technology allows multiple HPS-17000 to synchronize down to the microsecond, so cyclers positioned tens of meters apart can reliably operate in parallel, giving engineers more freedom to reconfigure their test setups and move equipment around the lab to maximize asset usage and optimise their test.

This synchronisation also extends to high-accuracy current and voltage sensor units so battery design and test engineers can readily correlate cycler actions with external measurements, at microsecond-level resolution, helping them set up, execute, and report on the test faster and with less effort.

NI’s power electronics portfolio for battery test includes grid simulators, plus cell-, module-, and pack-level cyclers. With the addition of the HPS-17000, NI further enables test performance to meet the fast-growing demand for EV batteries.

Additional features include:

High Frequency Test Signal Production

• Ideal for EIS, ACIR applications
• Modes ranging from 400V to 1500V

Parallel Operation via time synchronization over Ethernet and time-stamped setpoint streaming for large, distributed deployments

High Serviceability and Modularity

• Enhanced serviceability directly by customer
• Swappable power bricks reduce downtime
• System can run safely even if one power brick needs repair