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.