I built a switched capacitor balancer. It takes some time to balance a wildly out-of-balance pack but does a great job of maintaining balance during charging and discharge. I run the balancer during pack charging and discharging. I tried it charging an 8S LiFePO4 pack with 7 fully charged cells and one fully discharged cell and it worked fine... no cells were over-volted during charging.
It does not waste energy/generate heat like a resistive balancer. An inductive balancer can handle higher balance currents for very high capacity packs, but is also quite a bit more complicated to do correctly. Also built a processor-per-cell BMS using ATTINY-85's. I've used both on 4S32P / 8S16P A123 packs and ICR 18650 packs. Those A123 cells can dump 200A (each!) into a short circuit... you REALLY don't want to short a 32P A123 pack... They are also rather tolerant of abuse. A friend made a video of charging one at a 100C rate and it survived without exploding/melting. I once bought some that had been sitting fully charged for over 4 years and when tested still retained over 80% of the charge. A couple of charge/discharge cycles and they performed like new. I keep 4S1P packs in my cars for jump starting. There is a video of a guy in Canada staring his car over 10 times in sub-zero weather using one. The cells are 26650 size... are about the size of a D cell. ---------------- > The BMS doesn't balance the charge after charging (which consumes time & > energy _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
