Thursday, March 8, 2007

The desulfation experiment continues

On a more process-oriented note, the 8-volt battery sitting on the desulfator is up to 9.1 volts (from 7.95 volts), so I have warm fuzzies that the desulfation system is working somewhat. I'll wait until the battery gets up to 9.6 volts (float voltage) and see what the specific gravity is. If this experiment works, I might splurge and purchase a $500 super-desulfator and offer to desulfate batteries for the OEVA club. The super-desulfator is 25 times as powerful as the one I have now and should desulfate a 70 pound battery in three days (whoosh!).

On the battery equalization front, I got some feedback regarding the flying capacitor circuit that I presented in a prior blog entry. While the flying capacitor approach is elegant and simple, it just isn't effective in a practical system because very little charge is transferred as the voltage on the batteries approach each other. A more effective system was designed by Lee Hart. The schematics and other info is located at the following link:

http://www.geocities.com/sorefeets/balancerland/index.htm

The major drawback of Lee's system is that it's expensive. The OEVA club is looking into this and I hope to cost reduce the system to be only $20 per battery. Perhaps using a PIC microcontroller and slightly lower currents will help. My engineering buddies are looking into this now.

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