Very simple but odd battery charger. Need assistance.

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Michael Craft

Joined: 13 Jan 2008
Posts: 2

27 Jun 2008 1:22 Very simple but odd battery charger. Need assistance.

Here is a schematic to an old battery charger:

Very simple but odd battery charger. Need assistance.

http://a575.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/100/l_09969b14997fab47f301b5effb9280ae.jpg

The charger is designed to charge a bank of large, lead-acid batteries. The batteries are in parallel and have a float voltage of around 36 V.

I understand the purpose of T2, L2, D1, and D2 - it's a simple full-wave rectifier. But what is the purpose of T1, C1, and L1?? Why are they doing that? Any ideas? Question

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TekUT

Joined: 17 Jun 2008
Posts: 413
Helped: 23

27 Jun 2008 13:06 Re: Very simple but odd battery charger. Need assistance.

Interesting circuit, may be the input network was used to filter current pulse, as a sort of passive power factor corrector?

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davidgrm

Joined: 08 Apr 2006
Posts: 232
Helped: 21

27 Jun 2008 14:38 Re: Very simple but odd battery charger. Need assistance.

I used to work on computer printers years ago and they had a similar arrangement. I was told it was to get rid of mains interference. The transformer was designed that the primary core would be over saturated. This caused the peaks of the sine wave to be chopped off. On an oscilloscope the output looked almost like a square wave. The transformer had the plates welded together on the corners to stop them making a noise. A common problem was the capacitor across the winding packed up and the you would get weird output voltages and very little current.