Abstract
The US Army has been pursuing the development of a Smart Battery development as part of its on-going efforts for reducing operation and maintenance costs of the Army's ground vehicles. As a consequence of this effort, it became evident that the smart battery has a much broader significance well beyond that of an operations and maintenance cost reduction exercise. In effect, the traditional concept of a battery as a simple energy storage unit yielded to that of a critical component in a power management subsystem. A smart battery is a standard battery having an embedded microcontroller that monitors key sensor inputs, processes and stores the derived information and reports the results on a shared data bus. In that arrangement, the smart battery serves the function of a status-reporting load-leveling component of the over-all subsystem. As such, the smart battery becomes an essential contributor to a digital nervous system in vehicle systems. The smart battery is creating a new way of defining what a battery is. It is evident that the use of smart batteries has a direct bearing on vehicle readiness and enables system-wide planning, organization and control of the power and energy resources.