Lead acid batt analyser

[Tony Stewart]

and discharge to 50% SoC like LiPo's doubles the battery life. in total CUM Ah

Sounds like your blowtorch rejuvenator is working well

Cheers from Toronto

But aging is the accumulated time well below 0% SoC , isn't it ( in weeks... months

 

[Mosaic]

In normal use a pasted plate lead acid battery (Starter or dual use) sheds active paste. This accumulates at the bottom and reduces the Ah capacity until the battery can no longer hold enough chemical energy to keep your application (vehicle?) viable after a few days of self discharge or parastic discharge from assorted ECUs etc.
So, over discharging a starter batt is like accelerated aging.

Stationary batteries meant for deep cycle can be made with solid lead plates...and last for 20 years.They'll outlast your car. Li Ion tech isn't so long lived though, but is much more portable.

 

[Mosaic]

Hi y'all:
Here's a sneak peak of the 'commercial' grade prototype battery regenerator incorporating a great deal (5 years) of R&D :=> blowing up batteries, logging regenerations, battery plate photography, Spec. grav. data logging, acid holes in my clothes, burning out semi conductors and even melting a couple heavy duty relays. I am now conversant will all shades and types of magic smoke and the creation thereof.

Please give a thumbs up...I'll do a real product video when the time is right, for now this is just a teaser. The system is fully automated and made simple to use for the average Joe.

The bright glow inside the plexiglas case is from the kick back pulses generated by hammering the battery with several hundred amps of current @ several hundred Hz. I am 'burning' off that power with a 21 Watt automotive lamp to save the NFets from avalanche.
Pulse charging, reflex charging, dendritic whisker removal and of course desulfation are all part of the recipe.

I used a lowly PIC 16F886 maxed out with 7K of pure ASM and most peripherals employed excepting the opamps, no free pins, some double & triple duty. There is a coprocessor IoT chip to handle the data comms and data mining and remote internet control with monitoring & diagnostics of the system. An I2C EEPROM acts as the datastore with the PIC signalling the IoT chip to conduct data and control command Wi-Fi transactions bidirectionally. Kelvin voltages are calibrated to 0.02V and currents to 0.1A. There are 400+ components spread across 3 double sided circuit boards amounting to 100 sq in of PCB.

The system allows for dual battery processing on a queued basis with hot swapping of the completed battery for another regeneration candidate = 24/7 ops. Internal diagnostics identify any internal faults and displays them on a runtime and boot time basis. There are multiple thermal protections layered in the system for the power circuitry as well as an overall thermal monitor for enclosure temperature should forced air cooling fail. A few fail safes as well, such as foldback, rev. polarity detection, PTC fusing, fast blo fusing, over current and power loss.

There are two built-in float chargers for maintaining two finished batteries which can draw power from those batteries to handle power dips or loss. The system hibernates until the mains come back online.

Rejuvenation yields (back into OEM service) are 20% to 30% from old (years) scrap batteries and > 80% for stale dated Ex stock batteries (warehoused or 'parked up' etc.) The system reports on the battery failure mode encountered and fully rates the CCA and Ahr of completed batteries for appropriate service application. It maintains a cumulative track of batteries processed, and the success rate for online management reporting. Each rejuvenated battery is qualified by its new CCA & Ahr as well as a 'BASIC' or 'GOOD' moniker to assist the user.

I am in the process of finalising a custom enclosure manufacturer and parts & assembly sourcing. I'd guess around $100K has been sunk into the project over the period. Several hundred batteries have been processed and a tracer study of regenerated batteries placed back 'on the road' is done.

I am doing more marine batteries now and the results have been even better than automotive, perhaps marine battery build quality eliminates some of the failure modes auto batteries have.

Thanks for the support, encouragement and guidance along the way from the forum. I couldn't have done it without the Gestalt therein.

 

[Tony Stewart]

WTG Mosaic!! Now that you learned about how to explode batteries,.... hopefully you have a figured out how to prevent this from occurring from weak warped plates shorting out. How long does it take to determine if a battery is unrecoverable and how does success rate change from period of sulphation from duration of undercharged state?

The big profits are with motive power batteries at airports and warehouses and fleet truck operations.

Also I wonder if you do data logging on Coulomb counting efficiency and have serialized logging in Windows or android wifi target host.

good job, the display may need too much tech skill for some users who prefer idiot lights.

 

[Mosaic]

Battery rejection will take place in the first few hours, sometimes in just 8 minutes. for critically failed batteries (broken or corroded buss bars or posts). Recovery is related to duration of sulfation, under 6 months of sulfation gives good results. upwards of 18 months not so good. AAlthough, I have recovered a 10 year old, 100Ah Caterpillar deep cycle that was in a tropical warehouse self degrading to 3V or so for a looong time. After 10 years I recovered 50% of the Ah!!

Tony ..did u thumbs up my little youtube video?
I posted a dropbox pic which has more detail than the video...https://www.dropbox.com/s/0zhzec00lk2kg2g/Regen.jpg?dl=0

 

[Mosaic]

The smaller batt. in the video recovered after 16 hours total processing to 100% CCA and 73% Ahr. It was down for 6 months in a vehicle and had drained down to 2.0V . The system auto switches to the next queued batt. upon completion.

Each battery has a serial data log of its process for uplink and host data logging in csv format. The website to accept the data and track the customer usage is under construction.

This data includes currents, temps, voltages and DC-R progress as well as AHr inputted and pulse amplitudes. Samples occur every few minutes. A data header informs on the OEM battery spec. and a data footer informs on the battery failure mode OR (for a regen'd batt) the rerated spec.

Energy efficiency varies a bit per batt based on its condition. It can be as high as 70%.

The display isn't really required unless you are reading off the progress and battery ratings...if u look at the two blinking LEDS, one for battery A and one for Battery B, you'll see battery A blinking fast (red/green) and a slow blink for batt B. This means Batt A is processing and Batt B is the queued batt. A failed batt makes the matched LED solid RED and a beep sequence alerts. A passed batt makes the LED solid green and a milder beep sequence alerts.

A system diagnostic error blinks both LEDs red and does a different beep alert.

Details are on the large LCD screen but the 2 LEDs give you all the critical guidance.

 

[Tony Stewart]

I had not watched the video on You tube until now as I watched embedded here. So you have 2 thumbs up now.

 

[cowboybob]

Very nice, Mosaic!

Just an observation: I'd extend the display time of each "window" of the particular battery's status - neither stays "up" long enough for me to fully absorb the info provided in a single display time.

 

[Mosaic]

It's fast, but sometimes I want to see a particular value, eg. current or voltage as opposed to the whole readout so....I found that overall it would take longer to double the display latency from 2 to 4 sec. and still get the readings.
The datalog of the changing parameters is available at the end of each regeneration for proper review.

I can slow it down for the production version..