Electricity: battery or capacitor charging or discharging – Diverse charging or discharging rates for plural batteries
Patent
1997-03-28
1998-10-06
Tso, Edward
Electricity: battery or capacitor charging or discharging
Diverse charging or discharging rates for plural batteries
320133, 320160, H01M 1046
Patent
active
058182020
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
FIELD OF UTILIZATION IN INDUSTRY
The present invention relates to a charging system for a secondary cell and to a secondary cell charging apparatus, and more specifically to a charging system and secondary cell charging apparatus which, in charging a secondary cell, are capable of causing a secondary cell to achieve a charged state that is close to a full charge, and also of causing the secondary cell to operate with good efficiency at all times, so that a long life is maintained for the secondary cell.
DESCRIPTION OF THE BACKGROUND ART
In general, secondary cells such as lead batteries, nickel-cadmium batteries, nickel-hydrogen batteries, nickel-zinc batteries, and lithium ion batteries are recharged many times over their useful lifetime.
When recharging a secondary cell for the first time, the recharging process requires as much as several hours. That is, in the prior art process of recharging the above-noted secondary cells, 6 hours, or in extreme cases even 16 hours, were required to perform the charging operation, and even with what was called a quick charge a, 1 to 2 hour time period was required.
In the past, when recharging a rechargeable battery of this type known as a secondary cell for the intended purpose, although the desire to shorten the charging time as much as possible was known, because of internal temperature and pressure increases within the secondary cell, caused by the principles of chemical reaction occurring within the cell, a limit was reached, and because the drive of a large current through the battery over a short period of time led not only to damage to the battery but to a deterioration of the characteristics, that is, the output characteristics, of the battery, this approach was not taken.
However, in recent years, the demand for such secondary cells has increased in a large number of industrial fields, and there is an increasing demand for a secondary cell that can be charged quickly, and preferably even instantaneously, particularly in the case of such applications in which a loss of battery power is highly undesirable, such as in machine tool applications, medical equipment for hospitals and the like, and mobile telephone applications.
Therefore, with an increase in consumer equipment which is powered by secondary cells, there has arisen a desire for a secondary battery that can be recharged in units of minutes rather then units of hours.
In the process of charging a secondary cell, to prevent irreversible damage to the battery, it is necessary to provide more careful monitoring and control, and while a variety of secondary cell recharging systems which quickly recharge a secondary cell have been developed to date, none of them provides satisfactory results.
For example, in Japanese Examined Patent Publication (KOKOKU) No. 62-23528 and Japanese Examined Patent Publication (KOKOKU )No. 62-23529, a method of recharging secondary batteries such as nickel-cadmium batteries is disclosed, wherein the variation in the voltage waveform is observed during the recharging operation where a plurality of inflection points which appear in this voltage waveform have been stored beforehand, and when these stored plurality of inflection points appear in a prescribed sequence, the recharging operation is interrupted.
In this method, however, it is necessary to store beforehand for each type of battery the changing in the voltage waveform occurring during a charging operation, and to overwrite the stored contents before performing the charging operation a correspondence, with the above-noted stored information corresponding to the type of battery to be recharge.
In addition to this making operating complex, depending upon the environment in which the charging is performed and the history, for example, of the battery, the voltage output waveform will not necessarily match in sequence and magnitude of the stored information, so that it is not possible to perform a precise charging and recharging operation, thus making it difficult to perform a high-speed charging operation without causing
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Miyamoto Isamu
Simmonds Neil
Tso Edward
Zip Charge Corporation
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