Battery charger monitoring to HMI

hi guys, I want to display state of the battery charger into the HMI through a PLC. I want the status of "charge,off,fail" of the battery charger. I used 24 vdc lead acid battery as the power backup. I have search in the market, I cant find a battery charger that can give an output to controller such as PLC to retrieve its state. Does anyone know a battery charger that has output to PLC I/O? if not then how to detect battery charger status? can I just use a voltmeter or any special device?

Thanks,
muzie

Most battery chargers will have a port for monitoring, either serial or Ethernet where you can get this information. Most PLC's have optional ports available either serial or Ethernet. One may need to write some logic or add a protocol converter between them.

With a lead acid battery you do not need to monitor charger at all.

You can look at DC battery or DC line voltage and get all teh knowledge you need with one exception.

For 24 volt you should be floating battery around 27.6 VDC
27 maybe OK
26 think we got a problem
25 We GOT a problem
24 We GOT a BIG problem but we have some time to fix it.
23 We still got the BIG problem but we better shutdown cause the battery is gonna be discharged pretty soon (or parallel a fully charged battery)

The only other thing I would want to see is an ammeter to see what the charger output is mostly ot avoid overloading charger from adding just one more gizmo to the load.

Dan Bentler

If the charger doesn't have a comm card installed in it, I'll typically install an Arga Panel Meter to pick up the voltage. It has a programmable output, and programmable contacts. In most cases, if the Battery voltage drops below a certain point, i'll close the contact and pick it up in the PLC notifying the operator the condition.

muzie said:

I used 24 vdc lead acid battery as the power backup. I have search in the market, I cant find a battery charger that can give an output to controller such as PLC to retrieve its state. Does anyone know a battery charger that has output to PLC I/O?

Click to expand...

The description of your exact needs is a little vague, but perhaps this is what you are looking for.

http://www.automationdirect.com/adc...ules_(RHINO_PSM_-a-_PSP_Series)/PSM24-BCM360S

http://www.automationdirect.com/static/manuals/psxinstall/psm_bcm_operating.pdf

If you look at the SITOP DC-UPS-Module 6EP11931-2dc21/31/41 from Siemens, it has 5 Outputs with alarms which you can use as inputs to the PLC. I always use 3 of them.

Hi all thanks for your quick response,
actually the battery charger will control the charging of battery without instruction from PLC, so I just want to get the operation status of the battery charger which are "charge or off or fail"

RussB said:

Most battery chargers will have a port for monitoring, either serial or Ethernet where you can get this information. Most PLC's have optional ports available either serial or Ethernet. One may need to write some logic or add a protocol converter between them.

Click to expand...

yes the battery charger has an optional port (ethernet) but with unknown protocol that's the problem . If it has protocol like modbus or ethernet/ip it would be nice.
Anyway thanks for your suggestion.

Please look at the Siemens UPS information.

http://www.impol-1.pl/siemens/KT10_07_09.pdf