Page 1 of 1

LiPo battery solar charging - Fire Risk?

Posted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 10:26 am
by rsatchel
Hi,
I am working on a project in which I am using a Sparkfun Lithium Ion 850mAh battery https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13854
and wish to charge the battery from some solar cells.

I got some 5V 30mA (each) solar cells https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XT ... UTF8&psc=1 and confirmed that they did indeed produce 30mA at 5V in full sun.

I had in my parts drawer a solar lipo charger from DFRobot which uses the CN3063 constant current/constant voltage linear charger IC https://www.dfrobot.com/product-1139.html The schematic is here http://image.dfrobot.com/image/data/DFR ... %20SCH.pdf.
The datasheet is here http://www.consonance-elec.com/pdf/data ... CN3063.pdf

However my question is about the Sparkfun battery.
The application is solar powered (charging) bicycle lights. So the battery is shielded from direct sun, but I expect there to be a reasonable amount of conductive heat from the bicycle frame and from the 3D printed case to the battery. I looked over the datasheet https://cdn.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Pro ... 1.0ver.pdf
for the battery and saw that it has a charging temperature range of 0-45C.

What happens to the battery if it exceeds the 45C maximum temperature while charging? Will it explode/burn?

Re: LiPo battery solar charging - Fire Risk?

Posted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 1:43 pm
by jremington
At 500 mA charging current, the maximum allowed by that charger, the battery won't heat up significantly.