Electronics > Beginners

Active balancer.... anyone want to speculate how this work?

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paulca:

mikerj:
Looks like a buck/boost balancer.  AFAIK these simple non-coupled inductor designs can only transfer charge between adjacent cells, so on anything with more than two cells you can't transfer charge between the end two cells.

SparkyFX:
Underside of the PCB would be interesting, should there be anything.

I suspect it just makes use of an inverting boost converter, which could enable charging the lower cell and might be able to switch to non-inverting for reverse operation.

paulca:

--- Quote from: mikerj on August 19, 2019, 04:12:17 pm ---Looks like a buck/boost balancer.  AFAIK these simple non-coupled inductor designs can only transfer charge between adjacent cells, so on anything with more than two cells you can't transfer charge between the end two cells.

--- End quote ---

That's the thing.  It "seems" to be working on a 3 series and... bidirectionally too.

mikerj:

--- Quote from: paulca on August 19, 2019, 06:28:43 pm ---
--- Quote from: mikerj on August 19, 2019, 04:12:17 pm ---Looks like a buck/boost balancer.  AFAIK these simple non-coupled inductor designs can only transfer charge between adjacent cells, so on anything with more than two cells you can't transfer charge between the end two cells.

--- End quote ---

That's the thing.  It "seems" to be working on a 3 series and... bidirectionally too.

--- End quote ---

Yes it still works on a 3S, but the limitation on transferring energy between adjacent cells means it may have to transfer the energy multiple times across cells which drops efficiency but still a lot better than the simple resistor load style balancers.

Lots of info on this and other topologies if you google "buck boost cell balancer"

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