17ELBC bronze sponsor Digatron Power Electronics GmbH is an international group of companies with headquarters in the historic city of Aachen, Germany, with global manufacturing facilities in USA, China, India and Italy.
Exhaust legislation forces car manufacturers to save every gram of CO2 emissions. For small and mid-range cars, the fleet-wide introduction of micro-hybrid concept helps save CO2 without significant investments into expensive technology. The car will save energy through the start-stop function of the combustion engine and brake energy recovery. During recuperation phases, the battery of the vehicle should accept load pulses on concise terms. A measure to evaluate the quality of a battery to allow micro-hybrid load pulses is called ‘Dynamic Charge Acceptance’ or DCA. It is standardised in the European standard EN 50342-6.
Although this procedure has been standardized, it is still very complicated and not easily manageable due to different preconditions such as – IF/THEN/ELSE branching and total testing time of 2 weeks. Digatron supports OEMs and battery manufacturers in managing the testing effort and complexity by offering a DCA testing package.
DCA testing is done best with the Digatron UBT-RE tester. It supports a high package density by offering 6 channels per module. Nevertheless, Digatron supports DCA testing also for all former Digatron equipment as well as an add-on to the existing range of equipment.
The DCA package consists of:
- DCA program for Battery Manager 4 (BM4) supporting DCA testing according to EN 50342-6 as well as the Ford run-in test
- A key-off resistor assembly to efficiently simulate the load of the board-net during standstill phases
- A calculation sheet to calculate the correct resistor value according to the EN standard
- Recommended testing hardware – UBT-RE equipment