Design of the Smart Charger for Miners Cap

Lamp with Safety Monitor System

AI Xue-zhong

ZHAI Yu-wen, YANG Xiao

College of Information & Control Engineering

Jilin Institute of Chemical Technology
Jilin City132022, China
Email: aixuezhong2006@163.com

College of Information & Control Engineering

Jilin Institute of Chemical Technology
Jilin City132022, China
Email: yuwenzhai@126.com

AbstractThe smart charger for miners cap lamp with

safety monitor system is developed in this paper, which can
recharge various kinds of Li-ion rechargeable batteries
matching with it. The multiplexing technology is applied to
the data exchange between the charger and the miners cap
lamp during charging process. The lamps charge cycles,
production date and operation logs can be read out and
transmitted to the charging management computer via
RS485 bus for the convenience of safety supervision from
National Safety Production Supervision Department or
miners cap lamp manufacturer.

The interface circuit RS 485 performs data

exchange between charging controller and management
computer. The information, including battery type,
charging voltage and current, charging limit cycles and
revising miners lamp code, can be obtained from the
management computer. And some charging information
can be transferred to the management computer via
RS485.

Keywordsminers cap lamp; PWM; charge; safety monitor

I.

INTRODUCTION

Miners cap lamp is the essential device in deep

mining operation, and its safety performance holds the
miners life together tightly. With the emergence of the
large capacity Li-ion battery and high power LED
lighting technology, the Li-ion battery-powered miners
cap lamp with novel cold light source has been widely
used. Both lifetime and safety performance of the
miners lamp based on the technology above are
improved greatly. Nevertheless, some mining enterprises
often ignore the safety problems and make the lamp
running overdue in order to save the production cost.
Thats the potential safety hazard.
Although the No. 2007.3 Document released by the
National Coal Mine Safety Supervision Bureau clearly
defines the operational requirements of Li-ion
battery-powered miners lamp as in [1], it is hard to carry
out various safety standards due to the difficulty of
supervision. So this paper developed the smart charger
for miners cap lamp with safety monitor system, which
can control and monitor the operation overdue of the
miners lamp.
II.

Figure 1. Block diagram of the smart charger for miners cap lamp

III. CHARGING CIRCUIT DESIGN

A.

PWM control circuit

PWM control circuit (shown as Fig. 2) dedicates to

generating the square signal with the duty ratio of 0 to
50%.

PRINCIPLE OF THE SMART CHARGER

FOR MINERS CAP LAMP

The block diagram of the principle of the smart

charger for miners cap lamp is shown in Fig. 1,
including basic peripheral circuit C8051F310, output
control and driver circuit, converting circuit for analog
signal from serial interface, detection circuit for charging
voltage and current, interface circuit RS485, and data
transfer multiplexing control circuit [2].

Figure 2. PWM control circuit

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978-1-4244-9690-7/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE


U o + U o = 5.1 V

CEX4 and CEX0 are the PCA programmable output

signal with frequency of 47.85 KHz and synchronization
of falling edge [3]. After frequency division of CEX4, JK
flip-flop74HC112D outputs the 23.925 KHz square
signal CLK with the duty ratio of 50%. Then the
23.925KHZ PWM output signal, whose duty ratio is
controlled by CEX0, is obtained after the logic and
operation of both CLK and CEX0 by 74HC08. The
relation of all signals is shown in Fig 3.

U o = 0.9 0.1 = 0.09 V

U o1 = U o + + V D 4 = 5.938 V (the voltage drop of
SS23 diode D4 is 0.748V when the current is
900mA).
When VIN input voltage is 12V and charging
output current is 900mA, the voltage drop of D3 is
about 0.53V. So Vi =11.47V. If the turn-on voltage
drop of Q2 is ignored, the charging voltage of the
inductor L1 can be deduced: UL=5.532V
z

If the transformation efficiency of PWM driver

circuit from the input Vi to the output Uo1 is
considered as 0.95, then 0.95 U i I i = U o1 I o
so Ii = 0.494A , and the maximum charging current
I M = 4 I i = 1.976 A.

Figure 3. Signal waves

B.

Calculating the average charging current Ii of the

inductor:

PWM output driver circuit

z

Fig. 4 illustrates the PWM output driver circuit [4],

actually which is a buck DC-DC transformer converting

the 3.3V to 12V DC voltage in Triode Q8.
In order to promote the switching speed and DC-DC
converting efficiency, Triode Q6 and Diode D5 are used
to construct the driver circuit of the PMOS Q2. Both R37
and C20 are used to adsorb the switching noise from Q2.
The PWM pulse signal is converted to the DC signal
through rectifying and filtering by D5, L1 and C21. The
Diode D4 can prevent the high level of communicating
signal voltage from pulling down when PWM is turned
off.

Calculating the inductor L1: Fig. 5 illustrates the

charging current wave of the inductor L1.

Figure 5. Charging current wave of the inductor L1

The maximum duty ratio designed is 50%. The

charging process can be described as (1):
I
U L = L1 L
(1)
T
UL is the charging voltage of the inductor.
UL=5.532V;
T is the charging time of the inductor. When the
duty ratio is considered as 50%, PWM signal
frequency is 23.925KHz;
T = T / 2 = 2.089 10 5 s
IL is the charging current of the conductor. It
shows the current value after T charging when
the inductors initial current is 0. According to Fig
5:
I L = I M = 4 I i = 1.976 A.
Put all the parameters above into (1), then

As the supposed load, R47 can accelerate the

discharging speed of C21 when PWM is closed, keep
the output voltage round 5.5V when no miners cap lamp
is connected, and when the charging state is switched to
the data transmission state, R47 can rapidly discharge the
C21 for being ready for the data transmission.

L1 = U L

Figure 4. PWM output driver circuit

(2)

Allowing for the influence of inductor value on the

output power of the charging circuit, that is, the output
power decreases with the increasing of inductor value, so
the inductor value only can be less than 59.815H. And
the value 56uH is the nearest serial value of inductor. So
the inductor value is designed as 56H.

Depending on the design limit (maximum current is

900mA, and maximum charging output voltage is 5.1V),
the inductor L1 is calculated as follow:
z

T
2.089 105
= 5.532
= 59.815
I L
1.932

Calculating the charging voltage of the inductor L1:



C.

I AD = I R53 ( R 4 + R18 ) / R18

Detection circuit for charging voltage and current

Fig.6 illustrates the charging voltage detection circuit,

which is a typical differential amplifier circuit [5].

D.

(4)

Design of the multiplexing control interface

between charging and data transfer

The multiplexing data transmitter circuit is shown in

Fig. 8. The key of the charging and data transfer
multiplexing technology is time-division multiplexing. In
Fig. 4, the charging circuit can not provide power output
while data transfer. In Fig. 8, when the voltage drop of
C21 is below 0.3V due to the discharging of R47,
because of D4 action, the voltage level of Uo+ is only
controlled by the state of the TXD (serial interface
transmitting) signal from C8051F310, and has no
relation with the charging power output.
Figure 6. Charging voltage detection circuit

The charging voltage detection circuit performs the

differential amplifying operation on the voltages Uo+ and
Uo-, which are from the power output ports in Fig 4, then
introduces the operation result UAD to the A/D pin of
C8051F310. UAD can be described as (3).
R29=62KR11=100K. When the charging output
voltage is the upper limit value 5.1V, UAD is about
3.162V that can meet the demand of input signal with
upper limit of 3.3V in A/D converter circuit.
The low-pass filter circuit consists of capacitor C13
and resistors R13R31 to decrease the influence of the
PWM operation process on the precision of A/D
converter.

Figure 8. multiplexing data transmitter circuit

Accordingly, the multiplexing data receiver circuit

is shown in Fig. 9.

U AD = (U o + U o ) R 29 / R11 (3)
Fig7 illustrates the charging current detection
circuit, which is a typical in-phase proportional
operational amplifier whose operational relations can be
described as (4).

Figure 9. Multiplexing data receiver circuit

Under the charging state, power signal (charging

current) can charge to the Li-ion battery via D5. And
under the communication state, D5 can prevent the
influence of Li-ion battery on data transfer.
In transmitter circuit, TXD high level is converted
by Q4 and Q7, pulled up by R45 and then transmitted to
Uo+ of receiver circuit; TXD low level is converted by
Q4 and Q7, pulled down by R48 and then transmitted to
Uo+ of receiver circuit.

Figure 7. Charging current detection circuit

R53=0.1, R4=100K, R18=4.7K. When the

charging output current is the upper limit value 900mA,
then IAD is about 2.00V that can meet the demand of
input signal with upper limit of 3.3V in A/D converter
circuit. The current upper limit that can be detected in
this circuit is 1.48A. The low-pass filter circuit consists
of capacitor C3 and resistor R2 to decrease the influence
of the PWM operation process on the precision of A/D
converter.

In receiver circuit, Uo+ keeps high level after Q3

and Q5 and transmits to RXD of C8051F410 in miners
cap lamp, and Uo- keeps low level after Q3 and Q5 and
transmits to RXD of C8051F410 in miners cap lamp. In
case of destroying the electric components, here R48 can
prevent Q7 from being turned-on when the charging
power output signal does not cancel.



multiplexing channel in order to read the information of

miners cap lamp, determine whether the lamp is legal or
overdue operation; If the miners cap lamp is legal, the
information will be reported to the management
computer, PWM output is turned on to control charging
output until charging finish. Then system will detect
whether the miners cap lamp is removed after charging
finish so as to being ready for next round.

IV. SOFTEWARE FLOW

The software flow [6][7] is shown in Fig. 10.

V.

CONCLUSIONS

The smart charger for miners cap lamp with safety

monitor system can charge Li-ion battery by three types:
trickle charge, constant current and constant voltage. The
relative error of trickle and constant charge current is less
than 5% (related to resistor precision), and the absolute
error of constant charge voltage is less than 0.02V.
During charge process, the information exchange and
authentication mechanism are introduced through the
multiplexing technology. So the overdue operation of
miners cap lamp can be prevented effectively, the
disjoint problem of production, usage and safety
supervision can be solved in order to clarify the monitor,
production, maintenance and usage and attain the goal of
safety mine production.
REFERENCES
[1]
[2]

[3]
[4]

[5]
Figure 10. Software flow

[6]

Initial program makes system in weak PWM output

state and detects whether miners cap lamp is connected
in. If the miners cap lamp is connected in, the controller
will turn off the weak PWM output state to release the

[7]



GB79572003. Universal Requirements for the Safety

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