RP30 Advanced Battery charger
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The RP30 is a six channel battery charger / conditioner suitable for use with a wide variety of mobile radio batteries. The charger uses a patented charging technique known as reflex Charging, for background information a short description of this method is given below.

Reflex Charging Technique

Traditional battery chargers work by applying a constant current to a NiCd Battery, the charge termination point is detected by a voltage peak which occurs as the cell changes from charging to over charging, some chargers cut off at this point, others look for a negative change in cell voltage and terminate at that point and others simply cut off at a preset cell voltage
Problems occur if the battery pack contains unmatched cells, each cell having its own characteristics, in this case the voltage monitoring methods are unsuitable for detecting end of charge as each cell will have its own voltage characteristics. The RP30 employs the Reflex charging method, first devised and patented in the 1970's, which works by repeatedly applying a constant current charge pulse then a short high current discharge to the battery this is repeated until the battery is charged.

This charging method effectively conditions the cells crystal structure and thus improving charge take up and retention. Charge termination is voltage based but uses the first derivative of the voltage slope to sense the termination point, additionally a linear regression algorithm is used to filter out any small voltage fluctuations which can occur and provide a best fit curve for the available voltage data.

High impedance Cells

Some batteries can exhibit a high impedance when first connected to a charger, this can cause early termination due to the high voltage peak that is seen. The RP30 overcomes this by using a soft start charge method; initially the battery is pulsed with a 200mS charge pulse instead of the usual 1048ms, with no discharge pulse, this is increased over the first 2 minutes until the full charge rate is applied. This has the effect of easing the battery in to fast charge.

Some batteries after prolonged use, abuse or incorrect charging can develop faulty cells, if a cell should become open circuit the RP30 will detect this and reject the battery, additionally, the RP30 can perform a cell voltage test whenever a discharge pulse is applied, if the cell voltage drops below the internal preset level the battery is rejected. Any battery packs that fail should be further investigated as reconditioning using a specialist battery analyser may cure the problem.
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Last updated 16 August 2001, Copyright Karter Electronics 2000