Development of an intelligent charger with a battery diagnosis function using online impedance spectroscopy

Abstract

Battery diagnosis is vital to battery-based applications because it ensures system reliability by avoiding battery failure. This paper presents a novel intelligent battery charger with an online diagnosis function to circumvent interruptions in system operation. The charger operates in normal charging and diagnosing modes. The diagnosis function is performed with the impedance spectroscopy technique, which is achieved by injecting a sinusoidal voltage excitation signal to the battery terminals without the need for additional hardware. The impedance spectrum of the battery is calculated based on voltage excitation and current response with the aid of an embedded digital lock in amplifier in a digital signal processor. The measured impedance data are utilized in the application of the complex nonlinear least squares method to extract the battery parameters of the equivalent circuit. These parameters are then compared with the reference values to reach a diagnosis. A prototype of the proposed charger is applied to four valve-regulated lead-acid batteries to measure AC impedance. The results are discussed.