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The automotive industry is moving from fossil carburant to electric drive trains due to the stringent CO2 reduction policies. In this context, the electric energy storage becomes one of the key parameters of successful rolling out electrified vehicles. Typical battery management systems comprises of battery cells measurement and monitoring, balancing function, temperature monitoring, together with the State of Charge and State of Health estimations based on the given measurements. Together with the functions above, a robust internal IC communication protocol is one of the key parameters to guarantee battery performance as well as safety. This paper focuses on the automotive battery communication system. On one side, the importance of the communication system and its impact in the EDT (electric drive train) is discussed including safety aspects. Later on, the different communication methods up to date are analyzed to further understand their limitations.

Since several decades, passenger cars and light duty vehicles (LDV) with spark-ignited engines reach full pollutant conversion during warm up conditions; the major challenge has been represented by the cold start and warming up strategies. The focus on technology developments of exhaust after treatment systems have been done in the thermal management in order to reach the warm up conditions as soon as possible. A new challenge is now represented by the Real Driving Emission (RDE) Regulation as this bring more various, and not any longer cycle defined, cold start conditions. On the other hand, once the full conversion has been reached, it would be beneficial for many Exhaust After Treatment System (EATS) components, e.g. for overall durability if the exhaust gas temperature could be lowered. To take significant further emission steps, approaching e.g. zero emission concepts, we investigate the use of Electrical Heating Catalyst (EHC) also including pre-heating.