Testing 24 volt aircraft batteries using Midtronics conductance technology

Midtronics in cooperation with both US and UK battery users have performed both conductance and discharge capacity tests on literally thousands of batteries and cells in two, six and twelve volt configurations. The results of these extensive studies have been published in several technical papers presented to various technical and industry groups in North America, Europe and Asia. These papers clearly demonstrate the utility of conductance technology for determining battery state-of-health and show analytical procedures for identification of premature capacity failures. This paper shows the results from VRLA (valve regulated lead-acid) 24 volt synthesized equivalent monobloc batteries using an averaging procedure for single cell conductance capacity data measured from 1000 ampere-hour telecommunications batteries. These synthesized data are used to demonstrate the correlation, diagnostic sensitivity and utility of the conductance measurements as applied to the 24 volt battery configuration generally used in aircraft applications. This paper also presents test data on a limited number of 24 volt aircraft battery systems, which indicate that conductance measurements are capable of detecting batteries with seriously deteriorated capacity.<>