Ok, I think I am getting myself turned around here.
I have a circuit that uses 8 18650 lipos in parallel.
I was previously going to use a schottky diode for reverse polarity protection, and reverse current protection on each the battery cells.
However the power losses are pretty substantial for the application.
I was then going to use a p-channel mosfet as high-side reverse polarity protection.
Then I came to believe that if I do this, if one of the cell voltages is higher than the other, the lower cell might have some current flowing into it...
After poking around and asking chat gpt, I now want to use an n-channel mosfet on the high side with the source and drain shorted. I believe this should functionally behave as diode with minimal forward voltage drop, but this seems too good to be true...
This seems very simplistic, and I cant quite pin down the behaviour of the body diode. Im under the impression the body diode goes from
SOURCE -> DRAIN and therefore will not be backflowing current into the battery cell if a cell is under charged.
I know this should be basic but Ive got my wires crossed before - just hoping a real human being could point me in the right direction on this one