Estimating the estate of charge of lead-acid batteries.

Abstract

A new system approach for battery discharge to estimate the state of charge of lead-acid batteries has been developed and tested. This new system is based on an industrial network that runs the Modbus Protocol with RTU format. Each unit includes an ID for communication in this network, its own power supply, a stable current supply for battery discharge and its own calibration curve for each channel at the analogical-digital converter. All parameters can be configured by the software supervisor. This system is able to discharge up to 16 batteries simultaneously and save voltage and current values for each unit. All information can be saved into a file that can be read simultaneously to the data acquisition. Thus, it is easier to have it integrated to a database and distributed on to a computing network system. This system will bring more information to the battery ageing estimator, based on the observed voltage distributions over one month. The Pierre Auger Observatory works with different set-ups for the 1600 PV-stand-alone systems. Therefore, a larger scale system capacity to test each battery unit a time has become necessary.