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 Battery Charger for an Orthopedic Surgical Product

A division of a large company specialized in products for the orthopedic surgery market, and they needed an electrical engineer to help them with a few aspects of a product development project. They were developing a very high-power silver-zinc battery system to power a surgical tool that could be configured for various tasks, such as drilling, sawing, and chipping. The group wanted a tester that would discharge the batteries with a constant, adjustable current. The maximum discharge rate was 25 Amps. They also needed a timer to keep track of the discharge time, a voltmeter, and an automatic shutoff so they would not need to monitor the battery while it was discharging. I designed and built one unit that met all of their requirements, and they used it in their laboratory to characterize battery behavior. Later, the lab needed four or five more units and I supplied them.

This project is a good example of a job well done leading to another. As my customer progressed on the battery development and the mechanical development of the tool, they hired me to develop a constant-current battery charger for their final product suite. This charger included some LED indicators to indicate the state of the charger, and a safety device that guaranteed the battery was installed in the cradle properly before it would charge it. I designed the electronics, developed the printed circuit board, and worked with the mechanical designers on the product's packaging. This product passed UL certification on the first pass.

When the product entered the manufacturing phase, I worked with my customer's manufacturing plant to integrate the product into their system, and I manufactured the battery charger electronics. I also developed a functional test system for the charger, wrote a detailed test specification for the charger, and built another discharge tester for the manufacturing plant.

 

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