New Secondary Battery Charger/Discharger Available for Zero Voltage Discharge

This paper proposes a new secondary battery charger/discharger available for zero voltage discharge which is used for test equipments and formation process. The proposed system is a switching type converter, and thus the system is high efficiency and more compact as compared with linear type charger/discharger. Conventional switching type charger/discharger can not discharge secondary batteries to zero voltage because of voltage drops in the switching elements and long distributing line(typically 10m). However, the proposed system is able to discharge the battery to zero voltage in constant current mode regardless of the voltage drops. In this paper, we analyze the proposed charger/discharger and the validity of the system is verified by simulation and experiment.