Electronic – Using a voltage supervisor IC to protect a Li-Ion battery from undervoltage >2.8V

batteriesdischargelithium ionover-discharge

Sorry if this has already been asked, I tried searching but might not have the right vocabulary.

I'm starting to use lithium-ion batteries to power projects, and I've wound up with some 18650 cells. Not wanting to use unprotected cells, I hooked them up to some common and cheap TP4056 charge/protection boards. This lets the batteries charge up to 4.2V easily, but I've read that the undervoltage protection on these boards is really more of a failsafe than a way to keep the battery healthy; it doesn't cut off until 2.5V, which I'm worried might damage the cells pretty quickly.

It looks like there are affordable over/undervoltage protection ICs for li-ion batteries, but the highest undervoltage cutoff I can find is still only 2.8V on something like TI's BQ29700.

So here's my question – if I want to err on the side of caution when draining the batteries, can I use a 'low voltage supervisor' IC hooked up to an N-ch MOSFET as a cheap/simple extra layer of protection to cutoff at something like 3-3.5V? Would I be better off just using an opamp? Is the voltage supervisor's 3uA enough to continue draining the battery appreciably?

Here's what I'm thinking of specifically – it's just a high-side N-ch switch with its gate attached to the voltage supervisor's "reset" pin, which is pulled low during undervoltage in the MIC2776L model:

MIC2776 circuit

And here are the non-discrete parts; I tried to pick a MOSFET with low on-resistance:

Adjustable low-voltage supervisor – MIC2776L: http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/mic2776.pdf

N-Ch MOSFET – PMV20EN: https://assets.nexperia.com/documents/data-sheet/PMV20EN.pdf

Thanks! And sorry if I'm missing something, I'm pretty new to this.

Best Answer

This is the basic idea. If you push and hold the button, the regulator will be forcibly enabled. Then the output of the regulator will come up and pull up the enable pin so that the regulator stays on when the user releases the button.

The GPIO pin must not go high. When the time comes to shut down the regulator, you can assert the GPIO pin high, and it should disable the regulator. You may need to add a diode and capacitor to the base of the regulator to make sure it is driven low long enough to fully turn off the regulator. I didn't show those. I can add them if you want.

schematic

simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab

This is just one way to do it. Not shown is the sense circuit used by the processor to monitor battery voltage. That may need to be controlled by a switch also, so that it doesn't drain the battery when the regulator is disabled.