Comparator – Single-Cell Lithium Battery Powered Comparator Circuit with Hysteresis

batteriescomparatorhysteresislow-battery

I recently was reviewing a circuit I made and began to question its feasibility. The circuit cuts off a battery's connection to a load after the voltage has fallen below a certain threshold.

To eliminate ON/OFF cycling around the cut-off point I added hysteresis. I followed this design guide, scroll to figure 5.

There is one key difference between my circuit and figure 5: Vcc is a battery supply. It is not constant, meaning Voh (Voltage output high) is also varying.

So I decided to graph the Vth and Vtl (threshold high and low respectively) and varying Vbat. I found that if the battery voltage decreases, so do Vtl and Vth.

Does this mean that the comparator will never make a transition?

Also, why does Vin in the diagram never appear in the equations? Is my circuit independent of the non-inverting input's voltage? This seems unlikely.

My overall question is: at what battery voltages will the circuit transition from high to low happen? I have provided some preliminary resistor values below.

My target is to cut the battery supply at 3 V and reconnect it once above 3.2 V.

circuit

reference circuit

Here is a diagram showing how the battery voltage affects the hysteresis threshold voltages.
excel plot

Best Answer

There is one key difference between my circuit and figure 5: Vcc is a battery supply. It is not constant, meaning Voh (Voltage output high) is also varying.

That is ok in most cases, but both + and - input terminals of the opamp need to be much lower than Vcc (which is Vbat). Also the output of the opamp will never get higher than Vcc (Vbat) so keep that in mind. I'd probably run the Vref and the Vin of the hysteresis circuit lower than the mid range of the lowest battery voltage (so if your Vbat minimum is 3.0V run the Vref around 1.5V)

It will, because the resistor divider is dividing Vcc/Vbat. If you want it to be fixed, you'll need a reference. You could use something as simple as this circuit (with U2 and R3 and R4 to provide a better stable voltage)

enter image description here
Source: https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/battery-protection-circuit.html

Also, why does Vin in the diagram never appear in the equations? Is my circuit independent of the non-inverting input's voltage? This seems unlikely.

It's because you are comparing Vin to Vtl and Vth. so Vtl and Vth change the state of the comparatator. In essence Vin is being split into Vtl and Vth