OCD Circuit - "O"tomatic Conditioning Device

[Sephiroth]

Circuit inspired by a post Aaron made on another thread

Resting time between cycles does absolutely effect COP. You wait too long to charge and drain again and efficiency goes down. You need to do the charging/drain cycles like you have OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) and you'll see that the efficiency goes up...do it non-stop and you'll see high gains...skip even 1-2 days and you'll see efficiency go down.

Unfortunatly, and unlike the Great Nikola Tesla, I do not have OCD It's a curse, I know.... runs in the family...

So I built a circuit that has OCD instead







Obviously based on Bedini's Solid State Oscillator so relevant patants apply.

The rest of the circuit is a 4 PDT relay controlled by a 4060 timer circuit and transistor. By tuning the pot on the circuit you can vary the 50/50 flip flop to anywhere between 5 minutes to God-Knows-When... hours, days, etc lol

During one stage it is operating as a normal Solid state circuit, then after teh set time has ellapsed the relay will switch and turn off the solid state circuit and connect the charging battery to a load. Then after the set time has ellapased again it will disconnect the load and turn on the solid state circuit.

Designed to run from a power supply. Because of the extra current draw for the timer and relay circuit it has larger losses to compensate for so it won't be as efficient as a standard circuit. This is just for conditioning batteries.

Choose a load resistor that will discharge the battery just less than it charges, otherwise your charging battery will run dead after every cycle which can't be a good thing.

I have included extra terminals to allow me to take current meansurements from the charging circuit (bypassing the current used for the timer circuit) and to swap the load resistor easily.

The blue part of the circuit is an LED that will flash at 1024 times of the frequency the relay switches. So for example if the LED flashes at 1hz then it will take 1024 seconds for the circuit to go through one cycle (charge/discharge). This saves you sitting around for an hour to see how long it takes for the relay to switch

Could also work as a battery swapper I guess. It appears simpler to build then a battery swapper that monitors the voltage though I haven't built that circuit so I don't know.

Have fun


SCHEMATIC


I have mine hooked up to a USB multimeter so I can record how the COP improves over time...

EDIT : ... and for God's sake people don't forget the Neon Bulb on the transistor... nearly every email I get from people who can't get their circuit to work haven't used a neon and have fried their transistor... USE A NEON!!!! Sorry... had to get that out of my system...

[Aaron]

battery efficiency

LOL, very cool!

At John's shop during a lot of testing several years back, John and Peter were doing probably the most extensive charging/draining tests in the history of batteries. lol

All the charts of what the batteries were doing were maintained with extreme precision. It was seen that over the weekend when the test wasn't conducted...following up on Monday, they weren't running as efficient. The efficiency dropped by simply letting two days go by.

Peter posted about this somewhere here but I remember seeing all this at the shop.

John was never secret about the importance of conditioning the batteries and doing these tests to see that the extra energy winds up in the batteries.

[Sephiroth]

Made a quick video for the benefit of youtube viewers who don't frequent the forum... yet.

YouTube - OCD Circuit - "O"tomatic Conditioning Device

[Sephiroth]

bliss

This is bliss! Runs like clockwork!

Just leave it running and you end up with this


(for anyone interested in the data, the amp draw is 160ma from a 13.8v supply and the load is a 100ohm resistor, and each cycle is approx 2 hours)

[Aaron]

incredible automation

You're a genius Seph!

I would have gotten much more sleep if I had this! lol

[Sephiroth]

Thanks Aaron

I have been testing the circuit with short cycles, but now I have set it to switch every 10 hours. Now the real fun starts

COP appears to be around 0.75 at the moment

[Aaron]

comments

With the 100ohm resistor was is the discharge rate? c?

Also, can you make it so the battery comes down to exactly 12.00 v before charging again?

On longer charging times, you will be able to see the voltage climb, but then you will probably see the voltage dip down...when you see that dip, that is when that battery is done charging for its particular conditioning at that point...the dip might appear at a higher and higher voltage over more cycles.

[Sephiroth]

I'll have to look out for that dip you mentioned and tuen the circuit accordingly

the load is well within the C20... the batteries I am charging for this test are two 7.2ah 12 volt batteries so the C20 would be 750ma... but with batteries this size the real C20 is more like 500ma.

with a 100ohm resistor the load is around 125ma.

I have chosen the load based on the predicted COP compared to the input current which is 160ma. I chose 160ma for no other reason than it was below 200ma (I find the circuit tends to get warm when over 200ma is used per transistor)

do you think it is worth tuning the oscillator for a higher amp draw?

[theremart]

Tip I got from Erwins page...

General Parts

I have been converting his html pages to audio, and I noticed this tip of charge / discharge that was faster than the c20 rate.... thought I would share.




Summer 2007, Rescuing an old sulphated 1000 CCA battery by cycling it my way:
A friend looked for a spark by striking a wire between the two terminals of a 12V battery in a scrap yard and brought it to me. It is called a freedom battery and had removable pry caps under the plastic sticker, thus I was able to top up the electrolyte, the ones which have no removable caps are garbage (rip off).
The idea is to place a load of 5.2A onto the battery for a short duration while making sure the battery recuperates over 12 volts, preferable 12.25V.
The Hydrometer showed a 0.1125 density of the electrolyte reading and the voltmeter indicated 11.25 Volts and the conventional charger accomplished zero charging.
I hooked it up to my SSG4a with a Volt reading of 11.28 and climbing, which is a promising sign. (Usually the initial charging with old sulphated no good batts is between 18 and 24Volts with the voltage slowly dropping to the proper level where it then starts climbing). When the battery was to the point where the volt needle no longer climbed any further I discharged it with two car tail light bulbs at 5.2 A within a few seconds, watching the voltmeter needle dropping to 11.5V then letting it recuperate. If it recuperated more then to 12.25V, I discharged it a little more. You want to make sure it always recuperates over the 12.00V mark. Next charge it would stop charging a little higher as before and would take a little longer to discharge and it also would recuperate a little more say, to 12.35V. In repeating the charging and discharging cycle, it became evident that the battery after 48 hrs cycle time would charge up to 14.75V and would discharge and hold a 5.2A load down to 12.10V for 15 min. by removing the load the battery would recuperate to 12.58V within 5min. I left it sit for a week or so, the volt indicator needle showed 12.50V and applied the same load to it. It held the load of 5.2A at 11.90V without dropping any further for 15 min. where I unhooked it and watched it recuperating to 12.30V within one minute. Of course I charged it up to max. voltage right away again. The more I repeat this cycle the more capacity the plates will store. I tried this with several batteries now and it seams to work according to the quality of the battery; very well for some and not so good for others. This system is a lot less time consuming than the procedure of the C20 rate.

[Aaron]

experiment

do you think it is worth tuning the oscillator for a higher amp draw?

No, you're extremely intuitive and should go with what you have now and do comps later.

[sucahyo]

I have been converting his html pages to audio, and I noticed this tip of charge / discharge that was faster than the c20 rate.... thought I would share.

So it is better to use variable voltage comparator instead of fixed timing?

@Sephiroth, is it possible to make a timer which has increasing time?

[theremart]

RE: Better than c20

So it is better to use variable voltage comparator instead of fixed timing?

@Sephiroth, is it possible to make a timer which has increasing time?

This method worked well for Erwin, I notices that he would let off the the charge that it would return to 12V as a resting point. I guess whatever method works for you.

The C20, is tried and true, I was just suggesting another method that might work better since it worked for Erwin.

FYI.