Design of a Simpler Ampere-Hourmeter

In any application in which working with batteries is a must, the knowledge of the batteries’ state-of-charge (SOC) is a fundamental parameter for anyone, so it determines the remaining capacity in the battery. There exist several methods for the estimation of this SOC in Lead-acid batteries; however, when the requisites of the measuring method must offer, besides precision and reliability, the possibility to integrate the results into an automatized system, the Coulomb’s counter is the method that prevails. This paper presents, then, the design of a simpler Ampere-hourmeter based lead-acid battery SOC estimating system. Supported by previous studies in the field of SOC estimation in Hybrid Electric Vehicles and by experimental tests carried out by the researchers, the modelling of the simpler measuring system has been parameterized by following Peukert’s Equation, and afterwards it has been integrated into a data acquisition and processing system designed through a CSNX25 current sensor and a low-cost and low-consume 16F877 microcontroller. The fundamental conclusion of this paper is that obtaining an accurate result while estimating the SOC of a lead-acid battery with an simpler Ampere-hourmeter developed through a microcontroller based system is achievable but only if the used microcontroller holds enough memory to include the whole data treatment algorithms.