High Voltage NiMH battery charger

[Ioannis]

Thanks for the interesting ideas.

It gets more complicated than I thought.

Well, my approach initially was more direct (and maybe dangerous). Make a high voltage power supply with current limiting and some more extras from a PIC to control and check the time and voltage of the battery cells.

The client needs also to discharge the battery under control to make a couple of conditioning cycles and check at the same time the capacity of the battery pack.

The discharge I guess is going to be a very large array of transistors on big heatsink, to act like a electronic load, controled by the PIC and also keep a record of the discharge rate.

Too much power to convert into heat, about 1KWh. And then to charge back the pack.

Charlie, I did not quite understood how your idea would be implemented. Could you give more details?

This is what I want to accomplish: http://www.hybrids.co.nz/testing-com...tery-analyser/

Ioannis

P.S. These batteries are "small" cells of 7.2/6.5Ah and can be disconneted from each other. So one other idea would be to charge and discharge independently. Of course this means 28 seperate circuits...