Development of SOH monitoring system for industrial VRLA battery string

With the recent remarkable growth of information technology (IT), it has become increasingly important to secure reliable backup power supplies in installations such as distributed communication terminals and data centers. While valve regulated lead acid (VRLA) batteries are predominantly used nowadays due to their maintenance-freeness, their diagnosis techniques have not been fully developed. Currently used are discharge and ohmic techniques. The former can give reliable and accurate life information of VRLA batteries, however their constraints in practical applications involve not only temporarily shutting down the system but also testing individual cells at expense of man-hour. Battery condition watcher (BCW) was developed and commercialized, which is an automatic monitoring system with remote communication capability. It measures the internal impedance, voltage and temperature of each cell or battery with high accuracy, which are data-processed by IT to enable the diagnosis of battery condition and life.