Negative current summation

A couple of threads are dealing with measured negative currents. The answer is often: that is due to caps and pulse currents and the negative current is real. Fine. But what about a primary battery powered device? Maybe a current is flowing into the battery. But the battery isn’t rechargeable at all. So currents into the battery are not re-usable as capacity. Those in my opinion all negative currents have to be discarded instead of averaged with positive currents. What do you guys think?

Hi,

The negative currents are artifacts of Otii Arcs voltage regulation so they would not appear in a primary or secondary battery use case. In the Otii case, when the load increase in a step, there is a overshoot and this is followed by an undershoot. If the step down is to a really low value (sleep) then this undershoot will result in a negative current measurement.
So, to make the current and energy average correct, the negative current need to be taken into consideration.

Best regards,
Björn

Hi Björn, thanks for the reply. Does that mean that

  • a) a real battery as source wont show that undershots
  • b) summing up the special behavior (over- and undershot) of OTII would result in the same numbers.

Hi,

Correct.

Best regards,
Björn