Thread: Victor Burnouts
View Single Post
  #62   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 27-02-2007, 15:34
dcbrown dcbrown is offline
Registered User
AKA: Bud
no team
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Rookie Year: 2005
Location: Hollis,NH
Posts: 236
dcbrown has much to be proud ofdcbrown has much to be proud ofdcbrown has much to be proud ofdcbrown has much to be proud ofdcbrown has much to be proud ofdcbrown has much to be proud ofdcbrown has much to be proud ofdcbrown has much to be proud ofdcbrown has much to be proud ofdcbrown has much to be proud of
Re: Victor Burnouts

The state of charge is very close to linear, but SoC (state of charge) and battery health/capacity are two different things. Also SoC tables for flooded cell (e.g. car batteries) and starved glass mat cells (e.g. the FIRST MK batteries) are slightly different.

For battery health/capacity we bought a pretty cheap static 50A battery tester from www.harborfreight.com ($10, item 93784). We added a set of anderson connectors so we can simply plug in the battery and read the voltage which provides an indication of SoC. A flick of a switch provides a short 15 second test to determine health/capacity.

For example, we had a battery from two years ago that showed good SoC after charging overnight. However it failed the load test. Its voltage dropped to 2-3v with a 50A load. This could result from a high internal resistance which may occur due to large sulfate crystals forming. Large crystal size is associated with storing the battery with little or no charge for a period of time. Who knows, all we do know is it passed the SoC test but really failed the load test.

Often after charging there is a surface charge which results in an elevated voltage and an incorrect SoC evaluation - a quick 15 second load test removes most of that and gives us a rough indication of battery health at the same time.

Team 1073 Battery Pamphlet (chiefdelphi white paper section)

Last edited by dcbrown : 27-02-2007 at 15:37.