Battery Power Management for Portable Devices

I was delighted to see this book come out. I have been a proponent of the Z-Track Battery Management system, and it seemed good to read a leading book on Batteries from the guy who invented that system (Yevgen Baruskov). The Impedance-Based modelling approach is the state of the art, and will serve the industry for years to come. For insights into battery management in general, this book from Yury and his associate (Jinrong Qian) is a gem. Yevgen's down-to-earth demeanor, and his evident command of the science, makes him a favorite at battery conferences. Now, he brings forth a strong statement on overall battery system design, and it is a most welcome contribution.Lingering questions have long nagged me, even while taking full battery designs to production. This fine volume fills in those cracks nicely. I was especially pleased with the sections on battery chemistry; internal impedance modeling, and battery charging. Most recently, I am reviewing Chapter 3, Battery Safety and Protection.Battery pros will tell you that we are always learning. This volume gets better with follow-up reads, the sure sign of a good book. And its reasonable size makes it handier than that jumbo, ubiquitous "Battery Handbook".Buy this book and get informed.

Pros at Texas Instruments wrote this book, and I've talked to Yevgen on the phone about charging algorithms, as part of my job. This book is great for designing long-life battery systems, not necessarily high-power.

This is an excellent text to get to know the overall landscape of batteries and power management. I would not recommend paying full price though. The state of the art (almost) is described in reasonable detail. The text falls short in several areas - battery chemistry and how batteries work is treated almost as if the reader were already familiar with the topic. For example the figures on cathodes and anodes and the nomenclature is not clear at all. The use of black and white images of poor resolution makes it hard to use it as a fundamental text. Surely there are excellent images and animations available in color to describe the charging and discharging process in li-ion batteries. Fortunately several university lectures are available to fill in this gap. Another grouse of mine is that while the text claims to discuss fuel gauging algorithms, the finer details which are in some sense public domain by way of patents is treated cautiously. Given the authors are employees of a company, this is understandable from a trade secret point of view but as a text to enthuse the reader the text disappoints. In this regard, some of the app notes from TI or other companies are a better read and free of cost. References to literature are minimal and reader may have to dig into patent documents to really understand how battery gauging works in practice. A final point is the lack of exercises that would make for using this text in a classroom setting. At 50% of full price it was a great buy. I wish the authors take note of the shortcomings and come out with a color print 2nd edition.

very good choice!