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Monday 11 September 2017

Lead acid batteries - Measurement of internal resistance - x4 resolution mod

The initial project used a voltage divider to reduce the measured voltage down to less than 5V. This means the voltage resolution is about 20mV which means the internal resistance measurement for 1 amp of current is 0.020 ohms.

Instead of dividing by 4 with a resistor string, what if we subtracted 10V from the voltage to be measured? This would give us a voltage resolution of about 5mV with an internal resistance measurement for 1 amp of current is 0.005 ohms. This seems like a worthwhile improvement and can be easily achieved.

I had never played with a voltage subtracter before but it proved to work first time. Reaching into the junk box I pulled out a NE5532 dual op amp. I had no reason to chose this device over any other except I had hundreds I had recovered from a couple of boards. A few resistors and it was done.

While I used a NE5532 and 2.4k resistors I don't think there is anything critical about this. Just about any op amp will probably work and the resistors could be anything between perhaps 1k and 100k. As long as they are all the same value.



As before I'll post the updated code over on Hackaday. While this is not yet the complete measurement tool I wanted it will allow me to make some measurements on the impact, if any, pulse conditioning has on internal resistance.

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