Abstract

With the increase in energy demand globally, the need to improve on the efficacy, reliability and sustainability of renewable energy has been the center of focus for most researchers in recent years, especially given that non-renewable energy sources keep depleting with increase in use. Making use of these renewable sources of energy effectively requires proper battery management systems, since they are predominantly temporary and unreliable.

The autonomy of batteries (Lead-Acid batteries) depletes with use, this causes its capacity to drop with time and hence, the whole system efficacy. This capacity drop in the batteries leads to a complete change of the old batteries with new ones in order to maintain the system autonomy. This change in batteries leads to a waste of the left active capacity of the old ones.

Disposing old batteries also leads to environmental challenges. Also, the simultaneous charging and using of batteries is generally not good for the battery health as it reduces its lifespan considerably, with time. The system proposed makes use of both old and new batteries in a system and also avoids the batteries being charged while being in use at the same time, which is not good for the batteries’ state of health.

The old batteries gives  the user or system, the possibility of longer use given that it is globally an addition of battery capacity of the two monitored storage banks. This is achieved by grouping the batteries into two banks, with them being switched alternately such that while a bank is charging, the other bank is connected to supply the load and vice.

The switching is being done using IRF9640 MOSFETs, with a PIC18F4550 Microcontroller for monitoring and control. The switching states were observed and the switching time derived from it for both DC and AC loads. It offers a time response of 0.96ns and 5.76ms for DC loads and AC resistive loads respectively.

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