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New charging approach could extend battery life by at least 20%
- bityard 4y agoI don't believe this is exactly ground-breaking research... even hobbyists know that in a battery with identical cells, the individual cells exhibit different capacities over enough charge/discharge cycles due to unavoidable differences in manufacturing. The "right" way to charge a battery of cells is with balance charging... but there are at least two ways to do it. It turns out that the most common way to do balance charging is to charge the whole battery up to full capacity and monitor the individual cell voltage. The "weaker" cells that can't hold as much energy get charged faster, and so the balance charger applies a load to them to bleed off their "extra" charge while the stronger cells continue to take a charge. This is a very brute-force method of balance charging a battery, but it works well enough and is cheap to implement and therefore is how almost all consumer electronics do it. The better way to do balance charging would be a separate charging and monitoring circuit for each individual cell, which is all this article is advocating. Problem is, it requires more components and is more expensive to implement.