Agilent Technologies E4371A, E4370A Hardware Description, Basic Functions, Additional Features

1 - General Information

Basic Functions

♦Charger – The Agilent MCCD can deliver accurately controlled current and voltage into a cell for proper forming. Each cell is independently paced through the cell forming sequence. This means that some cells can be charging and others discharging if they are at different points in the sequence.

♦Discharger – The Agilent MCCD can draw accurately controlled current from a cell for both forming and capacity measurement.

♦Measurement – The Agilent MCCD can monitor several parameters of the cell while charging, discharging, and resting. Measurements include voltage, current, time, internal resistance, ampere- hours, and watt-hours. These measurements are used to adjust the cell forming sequence for safety, reliability, and or proper cell forming.

♦Digital I/O control – The Agilent MCCD can monitor and stimulate digital I/O connected to it. This simplifies wiring, allows ease of expansion, and is more reliable than a centralized control system. Its high-speed capability is ideal for fast fault detection and system shutdown.

♦RS-232 control – The Agilent MCCD can support peripherals connected to its serial ports for adding printers, bar code readers, local terminals, robots and other types of local additional hardware via pass-through control from the host computer.

♦Equipment Protection – The Agilent MCCD has extensive safety features to protect both the cells under formation and the hardware from equipment failure, programming errors, cell failures and other types of external faults.

Additional Features

♦LAN 10 base-T control using a web-server graphical user interface and an application programming interface (API).

♦Comprehensive data storage capability and remote data collection.

♦Easily removable charger/discharger cards for minimum downtime if repair is required.

♦Charge/discharge sequences that can be modified in software, allowing for simple, rapid changes to the manufacturing process without changes to system hardware.

♦Define and configure groups of contiguous blocks of cells or channels. This lets you simultaneously run different sequences on groups of cells.

♦Continuous calibration is performed on the programming circuits during the entire charge/discharge sequence to eliminate errors due to temperature drift.

♦Bi-directional power transfer and reuse of energy by using energy from discharging cells to provide energy to charging cells.

Hardware Description

Agilent E4370A/E4374A MCCD

The Agilent E4370A MCCD mainframe is a full-width rack box that has 4 slots to hold the E4374A 64- Channel Charger/Discharger cards. The Agilent E4374A 64-Channel Charger/Discharger cards contain the circuitry that independently charges and discharges each cell at up to 5V and 2A.

NOTE: Each output channel has a maximum available compliance voltage of 5.5V. Compliance voltage is defined as the voltage required at the cell plus any fixture/wiring voltage drops. Having this higher compliance voltage allows the full 5 V to be applied directly to the cell with a maximum of 0.5 volt loss in the wiring.

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