Ultimate Power: Lithium-Ion Packs Need Some Extra Circuitry

April 8, 2024 by Arya Voronova 19 Comments

A LiIon pack might just be exactly what you need for powering a device of yours. Whether it’s a laptop, or a robot, or a custom e-scooter, a CPAP machine, there’s likely a LiIon cell configuration that would work perfectly for your needs. Last time, we talked quite a bit about the parameters you should know about when working with existing LiIon packs or building a new one – configurations, voltage notations, capacity and internal resistance, and things to watch out for if you’re just itching to put some cells together.

Now, you might be at the edge your seat, wondering what kind of configuration do you need? What target voltage would be best for your task? What’s the physical arrangement of the pack that you can afford? What are the safety considerations? And, given those, what kind of electronics do you need?

Picking The Pack Configuration

Pack configurations are well described by XsYp:X serial stages, each stage having Y cells in parallel. It’s important that every stage is the same as all the others in as many parameters as possible – unbalanced stages will bring you trouble.

To get the pack’s nominal voltage, you multiply X (number of stages) by 3.7 V, because this is where your pack will spend most of its time. For example, a 3s pack will have 11.1 V nominal voltage. Check your cell’s datasheet – it tends to have all sorts of nice graphs, so you can calculate the nominal voltage more exactly for the kind of current you’d expect to draw. For instance, the specific cells I use in a device of mine, will spend most of their time at 3.5 V, so I need to adjust my voltage expectations to 10.5 V accordingly if I’m to stack a few of them together.

Now, where do you want to fit your pack? This will determine the voltage. If you want to quickly power a device that expects 12 V, the 10.5 V to 11.1 V of a 3s config should work wonders. If your device detects undervoltage at 10.5V, however, you might want to consider adding one more stage.

How much current do you want to draw? For the cells you are using, open their spec sheet yet again, take the max current draw per cell, derate it by like 50%, and see how many cells you need to add to match your current draw. Then, add parallel cells as needed to get the capacity you desire and fit the physical footprint you’re aiming for. Continue reading “Ultimate Power: Lithium-Ion Packs Need Some Extra Circuitry” →

pierced puffed exposed leads lithium ion battery

Lessons In Li-Ion Safety

November 13, 2019 by Bob Baddeley 85 Comments

If you came here from an internet search because your battery just blew up and you don’t know how to put out the fire, then use a regular fire extinguisher if it’s plugged in to an outlet, or a fire extinguisher or water if it is not plugged in. Get out if there is a lot of smoke. For everyone else, keep reading.

I recently developed a product that used three 18650 cells. This battery pack had its own overvoltage, undervoltage, and overcurrent protection circuitry. On top of that my design incorporated a PTC fuse, and on top of that I had a current sensing circuit monitored by the microcontroller that controlled the board. When it comes to Li-Ion batteries, you don’t want to mess around. They pack a lot of energy, and if something goes wrong, they can experience thermal runaway, which is another word for blowing up and spreading fire and toxic gasses all over. So how do you take care of them, and what do you do when things go poorly?

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Better Battery Management Through Chemistry

October 7, 2019 by Bob Baddeley 33 Comments

The lead-acid rechargeable battery is a not-quite-modern marvel. Super reliable and easy to use, charging it is just a matter of applying a fixed voltage to it and waiting a while; eventually the battery is charged and stays topped off, and that’s it. Their ease is countered by their size, weight, energy density, and toxic materials.

The lithium battery is the new hotness, but their high energy density means a pretty small package that can get very angry and dangerous when mishandled. Academics have been searching for safer batteries, better charge management systems, and longer lasting battery formulations that can be recharged thousands of times, and a recent publication is generating a lot of excitement about it.

Consider the requirements for a battery cell in an electric car:

High energy density (Lots of power stored in a small size)
Quick charge ability
High discharge ability
MANY recharge cycles
Low self-discharge
Safe

Lithium ion batteries are the best option we have right now, but there are a variety of Li-ion chemistries, and depending on the expected use and balancing and charging, different chemistries can be optimized for different performance characteristics. There’s no perfect battery yet, and conflicting requirements mean that the battery market will likely always have some options.

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The Science Behind Lithium Cell Characteristics And Safety

September 18, 2017 by Sean Boyce 58 Comments

To describe the constraints on developing consumer battery technology as ‘challenging’ is an enormous understatement. The ideal rechargeable battery has conflicting properties – it has to store large amounts of energy, safely release or absorb large amounts of it on demand, and must be unable to release that energy upon failure. It also has to be cheap, nontoxic, lightweight, and scalable.

As a result, consumer battery technologies represent a compromise between competing goals. Modern rechargeable lithium batteries are no exception, although overall they are a marvel of engineering. Mobile technology would not be anywhere near as good as it is today without them. We’re not saying you cannot have cellphones based on lead-acid batteries (in fact the Motorola 2600 ‘Bag Phone’ was one), but you had better have large pockets. Also a stout belt or… some type of harness? It turns out lead is heavy.

The Motorola 2600 ‘bag phone’, with a lead-acid battery. Image CC-BY-SA 3.0 source: Trent021

Rechargeable lithium cells have evolved tremendously over the years since their commercial release in 1991. Early on in their development, small grains plated with lithium metal were used, which had several disadvantages including loss of cell capacity over time, internal short circuits, and fairly high levels of heat generation. To solve these problems, there were two main approaches: the use of polymer electrolytes, and the use of graphite electrodes to contain the lithium ions rather than use lithium metal. From these two approaches, lithium-ion (Li-ion) and lithium-polymer (Li-Po) cells were developed (Vincent, 2009, p. 163). Since then, many different chemistries have been developed.

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A New Battery For A Potted Clock Module

August 6, 2017 by Jenny List 31 Comments

If you did much dismantling of PCs back in the 1980s and 1990s, you might be familiar with the Dallas Semiconductor range of potted real-time clock modules. These were chunky dual-in-line devices containing clock and non-volatile RAM chips, a crystal, and a lithium battery. The battery was good for about a decade, which was fine for most PCs of the day because the majority of desktop computers are replaced long before that deadline.

[Glitch], however has an industrial single-board computer with a 486 processor that has had a life much more prolonged than its desktop siblings due to its application. The battery in the onboard Dallas DS1387 has long ago expired, and since these devices are so long out of production to be unavailable, he’s had to improvise.

Improving on some previous documented projects he found through an internet search, he carefully ground away the potting compound to reveal a couple of the battery conductors, cut them with a PCB drill, and mounted a lithium cell holder on the top of the device with some tidily soldered Kynar wires to bring in the power. A CR1225 cell was used rather than the ubiquitous CR2032, as space was at a premium in the width of the ISA card form factor.

The potted RTC module is something of a rare device these days, but if you have a retro computer containing one this seems to be a very useful piece of work to bring it back to life. We’ve covered another similar one with a slightly larger battery in the past.