Design and Implementation of an Automated Instrument for Battery Charging Experiments

Accurate and long-term measurements are essential in battery charging research and development, to evaluate and compare different techniques and their effectiveness. In such approaches, a very good control of certain charging parameters is also necessary, during several hours or even days. Thus, it became necessary to obtain an automatic instrument that could ensure the precision and repeatability of the experiments, but also the flexibility regarding the type and size of the b attery. This article presents the design, implementation and preliminary experimentation of an instrument for automation and monitoring of battery charge-discharge cycles. The tool adds exponential current pulses to the battery charging process, especially in the constant current phase. Such pulses are rarely addressed in the literature, although some studies suggest that they have the potential to improve batteries performance.