I am new to battery management and I have been reading a great deal of information causing information overload and confusion. I am working with a 4S3P lithium Battery pack with an external charger and looking to add a Fuel Gauge. We intend on using batteries from different manufacturers, and do not "think" we need battery balancing functionality.
I tried the TI Fuel Gauge selection page at:
http://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/power-management/battery-fuel-gauge-products.page
But I am not sure if I am doing something wrong, and there are some terms in the selection processes that i need some clarification in what they are asking. This is what I have:
- STATUS: ACTIVE - Active is the only choice but not sure what they are looking for here...
- NUMBER SERIES CELLS: This the number of cells in series or the total number of cells. My application has 4S3P or 4 cells in series so I selected: 2-4 CELLS
- CELL CHEMISTRY: Li-ion
- COMMUNICATIONS INTERFACE: I2C or SMBus
- BATTERY CAPACITY (min/max): is this the pack or individual cell capacity? Each cell has a capacity of 2500 to 2600 mAh, the pack has a total of 7500 to 7800mAh.
- IMPLEMENTATION (PACK/SYSTEM): is this where the fuel gauge circuity resides? Fuel Gauge circuitry is in the battery pack or mounted externally on the system. We would like to have ours mounted outside of the pack itself. However when I enter the number of cells in series there are SYSTEM implementations shown. It appears that I can only us a fuel gauge that is on the pack itself when there are greater than one cells used. Is that correct?
- EXTERNAL CAPACITY INDICATION: None, since we can read it through the I2C/SMBus
- GAS GAUGE ALGORITHM: I believe we need to use impedance tracking since we want it to adjust to different batteries from different manufacturers?
i would greatly appreciate any feedback from the experts out there...
Thanks in advance - mike
