Tinkering with HV module reconditioning but not seeing improvement

Kiwi,

Thanks for taking the time to do the comparison between the RC charger and your more sophisticated equipment. My favored solution for providing a 12v source is a big flooded cell battery (e.g. marine battery) and a high current battery charger. That way you can bridge a short power outage without loosing the data in the RC rebalancer.

JeffD

 

Didn't mean to imply you needed a manual for the chargers, only to see what settings were available to change in the ones we were using. Good tip on the power supply too, 50-60A @12V is around 150-180W per channel on the quad charger so certainly more than enough for what we've been using it for. I got a pair of the Hitec X4 AC plus (built in power supply) but you could save some money if you could get one or two of these power supplies cheap enough.

 

It might be a bit much to expect better performance from a battery of that age. If I keep my Prius that long, I expect I'll be replacing or bypassing bad cells, as long as the remaining ones still operate within a range that allows the hybrid system to work, albeit at a reduced capacity, and consequently shorter EV range.

For me fuel economy is the priority, so as long as the system is able to recycle energy from regeneration and maintain good fuel economy, I doubt I'd be able to justify a total battery replacement.

 

System does not allow to bypass....
What we are trying to fix today is to match performance of 28 modules only - it's not that hard. Skills gained today with Prius will come handy in a few years time with more battery operated cars on the road - just try to imagine what discussions could look like when some got 5 year old Tesla-S where battery pack contains 7,104 failing cells - try to match that . When you think about it - having Prius and mastering battery maintenance skills does not seem that hard anymore ...

 

Here are some test results of RC Balance Chargers:

Voltage measurements at Battery terminals were also controlled by Digitech Multimeter (accuracy in 4-40VDC range 1.2% according to manual)
Voltage measurements observed on Digitech multimeter were in-line with 14-Ch Analyser voltage readings but different from all RC charger’s readings.
Room Temperature was 21 Celcius (69.8F).

RC Balance Chargers - here is the summary of CHRG/DSCH test on 4 devices (see photo):

Voltage readings
- Charge Mode - higher then alternatively measured by 5.8% – 6.5%
- Discharge Mode - lower then alternatively measured by 5.5% – 7.3% (one of the tests on ImaxB6 stopped when RC Charger showed 0.93V when it ws 1.10V measured by Digitech and Analyser)

Current readings
- Charge Mode - lower then alternatively measured by 5% – 13%
- Discharge Mode - higher then alternatively measured by 7.5%– 8.7%

Capacity readings
- Charge Mode - lower then alternatively measured by 7.3%– 10%
- Discharge Mode - higher then alternatively measured by 9.6% – 10%

Nothing better could be expected from those.