Creating your own battery simulator

Batteries are rated in mAHrs. A 2-A battery charger requires approximately one hour to charge a 2000- mAHr battery, longer when including the effects of the connector resistance and the internal resistance of the battery. It is inefficient to evaluate charger performance by waiting one hour to charge and additional time to discharge the battery for additional testing. This application note explains how to make a circuit that can provide an observably slow output dv/dt, while sinking the entire 2-A charge current that the charger supplies.

Use a power amplifier circuit with Texas Instruments single-cell Li-ion battery chargers to quickly characterise their charge profile. With an RIN x CIN time constant at its input, the output of the power amplifier simulates a battery charging. The power amplifier both sources and sinks current. One can characterise the entire charging profile of the charger by tying the output of the battery charger to the power amplifier output.

View the PDF document for more information.

Originally published by Texas Instruments at www.ti.com as "Building Your Own Battery Simulator".