Hello everyone,
I join the discussion with 3 defective chargers.
One has serious water damage/corrosion and no attempt to repair will be made. The others will be named charger 1 and 2.
Charger one was doing nothing. At close inspection, I could find IC2 shorted between drain and ground, R30 R33 (1Ohm resistor) burned. Q3 and Q4 were fine.
I switched the ic2 circuit from the water damaged one to this, and replaced the burned components.
The charger switched from no working case, to green light, insert battery, start fan and relay for 5 seconds then stops with green light on.
I checked the gates of the MOSFET's and was apparently shorted between the gate and source. The short was coming from the IC1. I can not explain why. But the chip seems to start working when measured by the DMM and close the contact between mosfet gate output and drain pin (measured before R23 or R32). Tested on a new IC and found the same behavior. It was enough to touch with my fingers the chip and the short was gone. Be careful when measuring these chips. They can give false short circuit readings between HVG-OUT and LVG-GND.
Anyway, I replaced the chip and nothing changed.
Later I found that J3 was burned. Was the last component to think that can be burned and checked it only after reading this topic. Replaced, same results.
At this moment, I have no idea what can be the problem. I can only list my measurements and what I tried,
I checked and de-soldered where was the case all the components around IC1.
Line and Dis are ok.
The uC is commanding the IC1 to start.
When starting, the gate of Q3 gets a short trail of impulses and then everything stops. RFMIN goes to zero, VCC remains at 13V.
I supplied IC1 directly with 13V external, wired a 1.5V battery between the GND and LINE pin to enable the conditions of LINE>1.2V and DIS <1.8V.
When doing this, the chip comes alive and I have the right signals on the mosfet's gates (25Khz, 50% dtc pwm).
Then I tried to supply the main capacitor C3 with an increasing voltage up to 16 volts. IC1 works till I reach the voltage of apx 10 volts (sometimes 3 volts).
I can put a load on the secondary (3w light bulb) and it will work.
The chip suddenly stops if I increase the primary voltage (and by stop I mean no gates pwm, RFmin voltage collapses, need to recycle vcc to restart)
De-soldering the transformer pin and hooking up a light bulb of 25W between the Q4 drain and, the chip remains on even if supplied with 16 volts.
Moving the light bulb wire to GND (so that the Q3 will switch the light) and the chip stops again when approaching 10 volts.
I tried with Dis grounded, Isen disconnected. Measuring all the diodes with the dmm, all capacitors de-soldered and checked. When at 10 volts, the voltage across C19 and C20 oscillates at 300 volts if no load is applied to secondary. With load, at 40 volts.
I changed the mosfet with the donor one.
De-soldered the optocoupler.
Looks like the chip is latched in a protection state. Only two are latched. OCP and DIS. I tied both to ground and still latches so... ???
I have no ideas.
Charger 2. ..green light, insert battery, start fan and relay for 5 seconds then stops with green light on.
Changed the IC1, worked fine for a day, charging with 8 amps. Next day, was not.
Apparently, IC1 is burned again. (400 ohms between vcc and gnd and is getting hot). Forgot to check the Vin voltage...
Any ideas regarding the first charger?