Charger transformer controlled by triac

[Riku]

I want to design and build an intelligent battery charger for wet lead acid batteries.

As the bank of batteries is quite hefty (12V at 400-600 Ah) the charger needs to be able to supply up to 40 A.

I discharged SMPS's, because of their complexity and sticked to traditional transformer design.
Because of high current I would discharge also secondary series control design.

Primary series control should do the job, as I have already seen a similar design (old german Minitron battery chargers).

I plan to use a triac on the primary winding of the trafo, controlled by the battery sensing regulation circuit through an optoisolator.
My concern is the triac control, as it should switch the inductive load of the transformer.

Can you suggest any schematic to do this job? Is there, may be, an I.C. designed for this job? Should I consider phase control within each cycle or switch on and off complete cycles?

Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated. Thank you all. Riccardo from Italy.

 

[bassnut]

You should use a zerocrossing triac circuit, or youll get huge inductive spikes and overheat the transformer. An off the shelf isolated input zero crossing SSR would be the cheapest and easiest, 40A modules are common..