EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff => Topic started by: camdenmil on February 23, 2015, 05:49:05 pm
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Hi everyone,
I am working on a power systems for a new robot. The chosen power system consists of 2 battery packs with a 26V nominal voltage. Each battery can supply a maximum of 10A and the robot draws around 16A under full load. The batteries are not going to be charged in-system but we would like to implement hot-swapping of the battery packs (the robot will not be drawing near 10A while the batteries are being hot swapped). The batteries are at 29.4V fully charged and at 17V when over-discharged.
The previous robot (designed and built years ago before any of the current team members were involved) had 6 smaller battery packs and used an LTC4412HV coupled with a power MOSFET for each battery to create an 'ideal diode' to implement diode OR-ing of all the batteries onto a single bus. Is this technique a good practice for power applications and does it effectively share the load of the batteries? If not, how can I approach balancing the batteries onto a single bus without significant losses in power conversion? Also, how can I make the system safe for hotswapping?
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hot swap controllers would only work out if the load was less than what a single battery was rated for, (it only connects the battery with the highest voltage)
for you... i'm guessing that 26V you dont use directly? if so you could likely parellel 2 buck/boost/sepic regulators to give you the output you seek independent of the voltage of the batteries, (look at multiphase regulators)