cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Best way to detect disconnected battery

samu1214
Associate

Hi! I'm new in this forum, and my english is not the best, but I will try to explain myself. 

I'm charging Lead-Acid batteries with a transformer, and a bridge rectifier. If there was no battery, the signal will be a pulsating signal, but because the battery has a internal resistance, and ESR, it's quite flatted ( if it's looked in an oscilloscope, you see a DC voltage, with the upper part of the pulsating signal wich is greater than the battery voltage ). Currently, I have a voltage divider, with some 0.1% tolerance resistors. Is there a better way to do this? In the code, the ADC input is filtered with an equivalent of a RC low pass filter ( Input signal 50hz ), and then with an average code. Again, is there a better way to make this? Finally, I have to detect when the battery reaches a setpoint voltage, this is easy, but I also have to detect when the battery is disconnected, may seem simple, but when the battery is disconnected, the transformer has no load, and the measured voltage, goes up to the maximum of the bridge rectifier output. I was thinking that a zero-cross detector can be used, so when the battery is disconnected, the signal it will probably go less than 1V, because it has no DC component anymore. Will this work? Is there a more efficient way to do it? Thanks.

1 REPLY 1
Peter BENSCH
ST Employee

Welcome @samu1214, to the community!

Well, lead acid batteries are often charged with CC/CV, but the temperature of the cells must always be taken into account. When charging after only a bridge rectifier, the effective charging current is difficult to determine, so this is only done in very simple cases.

If you are already going to the effort of using an MCU for control, you can also realise the CC/CV charging mentioned above. The best way to do this is to read the relevant literature, which was published in abundance at a time when lead acid was widely used. You could use a CC/CV controller for it, like e.g. the TSM1014. or you could realise its functionality in software for the STM32.

Hope that helps?

Regards
/Peter

In order to give better visibility on the answered topics, please click on Accept as Solution on the reply which solved your issue or answered your question.