Designing a high performance battery life cycle tester

This paper illustrates the Battery Life Cycle Tester with intelligent charging and discharging unit comprising of measurement, data logging, remote monitoring and communication sections for data acquisition and control. The life cycle tester switches between different charging and discharging modes making it compatible with all battery chemistries. The discharger comprises of an electronic load using MOSFETs operated in their linear region to dissipate power. The required charging/discharging profiles for various applications like electric vehicle motor load and urban drive cycle tests can be programmed via an RS485 link and the data collection is done through Ethernet with an onboard SD card for backup. The user can also set their own test profiles within given limits. The Battery Life Cycle tester is used to perform required charging and discharging profiles at the specified Depth of Discharge (DOD), temperature, State of charge (SOC), charge and discharge rates for the desired number of cycles and store the data for analysis.