a 100 year old industry
While Blixt’s solid state circuit breaker technology enables software control of the current flow, the X-Verter® enables flexible voltage software control.
While the power conversion market has developed over the past decades, from central inverters to more modern string and micro inverters, there is still no conversion technology that is adaptable to all types of use cases and voltage levels (low, medium, and high voltage), while proving constant high efficiency and built-in storage.
Current state of the art
Hardwired systems that only support a pre-determined in- and output level. As they lack system modularity they cannot adapt to the surrounding environment and do not support integration of multiple energy storage technologies.
X-Verter®
A generic voltage control technology that enables an efficient and scalable volume production, extendable power conversion systems, with built-in storage and high efficiency levels across the entire load spectrum.
The X-Verter® is a switching power conversion technology that is developed by BLIXT. It shares similarities with modular multilevel power converters, reconfigurable battery systems and solid-state transformers.
Battery Energy Storage Systems
Batteries are widely applied for energy storage, power supply, transportation, power systems, communication networks, etc. With new emerging technologies, such as vehicle electrification and renewable energy integration, the demand for batteries has skyrocketed the past few years. To meet various voltage, power, and energy requirements in large-scale applications, multiple battery cells have to be connected in series and/or parallel.
While battery technology has advanced significantly in the past decade, existing battery management systems (BMS) mainly focus on state monitoring and control of battery systems packed in fixed configurations. In fixed configurations, though, the battery system performance is in principle limited by the weakest cells, which can leave large parts severely underutilized.
In addition, when deploying these systems, they all require inverters, rectifiers, cooling and additional monitoring systems. If the required input or output voltages change or the system needs to switch from AC to DC, the supporting hardware cannot be upgraded but needs to be completely replaced.
Reconfigurable battery systems
A reconfigurable battery system has several benefits, as every cell can be addressed individually.
- Enhanced Fault Tolerance:Defect or malfunctioning cells can be isolated immediately without impacting the battery as a whole.
- Charge and Temperature Balancing: Charging and discharging can be optimized on a cell level, improving life time of a cell and also minimizing the required thermal management solutions.
- Extended Energy Delivery: Charging and discharging can be optimized on a per cell level, and taking the temperature into account, each cell can give it maximum power output or charged at a maximum level.
- Coordinating Batteries of Different Age or Chemistry: Battery cells of different chemistry or age can be combined into the same system, and their usage optimized based on their individual parameters.
- Customized Terminal Ranges: A RBS system can feed a different voltage to each terminal, depending on the requirement of the load, and only implemented by the software configuration of the system
Modular multilevel converters
Modular multilevel converters (MMC) describe an architecture, that consists of basic building blocks and are stack able and therefore scalable and can be used to build systems for any voltage level. The MMC technology is already used in high voltage DC (HVDC) applications, but its use in low voltage and other application areas, for example in EV batteries, is still an unexplored area.
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