HCH1 A123 60ah Pack Install

[IamIan]

Originally Posted by samwichse

Looking good.

I wonder if the new Chinese owners of A123 will start selling to the general market now?

Sam

I have my doubts.

The larger 'general market' ... is for comparatively small capacity cells ... laptops, cell phones, flashlights, RC cars ... etc ... and if anything shrinking ... as devices be it cell phone or computer become more efficient the capacity needs shrink.

The larger Vehicle and grid like capacity cells is a market that for the vast majority is something people expect some large OEM to take care of for them... and thus not a end small scale individual general consumer market.

This observation about the market is a major reason that Tesla choose to use so many small capacity cells ... even though that method has so many other complications compared to a fewer number of large capacity cells.

Maybe they will ... but I have my doubts.

[retepsnikrep]

HCH1 Honda Civic A123 60ah Pack Install Video 8 - YouTube

Pack now sat in the car with holes drilled to bolt it to the floor.

Strapped to the tray with 4 x 250kg straps.

Will try and wire and fire it up tomorrow.

[Aqua]

Great progress Pete, it's not really that large of a pack, that minor weight,does looks good,
just chirp this in, if you and sam or others are interested, you can get cool fresh air ventilation into the ima battery, look under the car in the spare tire well it's hiding under neat the foam, they is a 3 " round removeable plug, a screw driver from the bottom will punch through and you can pop it out a clean 3" hole.
for stock you turn the tire upside for air room And put a block of wood under the tire as the trunk cover rest on the tire, and the well taper off the back right under the back seat and below the ima battery.perfect there is no need for a fan as hot air rises and will suck cool air into the battery and out to the top vent. I believe I pop a few of the back carpets holder at the bottom. On the other side I have got rid of the two bolts that hold the rear back top seat, so it's allow air through the pack to exit the top too. This was my way of monitoring my ima battery acceptable regen heat by hand touch,( this was done 3 years ago)
If you wanted you could make box the battery into the well and
Add a fan on the top, and temperature the box reading. But that only if your going to be giving that pack a workout.

[retepsnikrep]

Been up the road in it no IMA errors or unexpected behaviour.

Few findings.

1) It won't regen at all at the moment because the battery is sat at 180V.
2) It recaled to 75% (20 bars) after 30 seconds when ign first turned on which is expected due to the high voltage.
3) It went straight into burning off the soc mode by operating the dc-dc again due to the high voltage.

If I had used only 50 cells then the above would not have occured and behaviour would be like the G1 A123 car I have already

I need to gather some live data now from the car to get my IPU interceptor designed and built to fake the system voltage properly.

Some interference on my BMS line so need to scope that and add some supression. Also need some code changes in my mini BMS master software.

Need to install the mains charger and solid state relay etc

Lots of tidying up and sorting to do!

Some shaky videos showing what is going on.

Batteries now bolted down in back and moved forward another couple of inches and hard up against the bulkhead. Quite a lot of boot space left. Suspension doesn't seem to be stressed or low as a result of the weight in the back. The weight penalty is about 65kg after you deduct the 22kg weight of the old nimh pack.

Pack capacity is about 10kwh. 3.2V x 56 = 180V x 60ah = 10800wh

HCH1 Honda Civic A123 60ah Pack Install Video 9 - YouTube
HCH1 Honda Civic A123 60ah Pack Install Video 10 - YouTube
HCH1 Honda Civic A123 60ah Pack Install Video 11 - YouTube

[samwichse]

I like!

Dial in 3 clicks of assist and cruise around town using almost no gas .

Sam

[retepsnikrep]

1) Been for a longer trip. No errors or unexpected behaviour.
Used lots of assist see photo below. No heating or complaints from any of the components.

2) Fixed BMS intereference issue

Cells seemed pretty well in balance. Lowest under 50A load was 3.12V but pretty cold overnight so they are probably only around 5C

3) Gathered some live data from the IPU IGBT serial stream in the car.

SOC was fixed at 75% as battery voltage even under 50A load never fell below 175V so BCM was probably constantly in recal mode.

No regen was available as expected due to high soc/voltage.

I think my Zivan NG3 charger will have to be sent off to Zivan to be upgraded for the higher voltage as I could not make it reach a high enough voltage to charge the pack, or I will have to buy a new one, or build my own using power supplies. Hmm might build my own as I can make sure that fits in the old battery space. Have to study the Zivan schematic.

Edit

Quick look at the live IGBT IPU data and I believe the first date byte in each packet is the voltage.
The pack was at ~189V IIRC and when you look at the data the first byte is $BD which equates to 189

I'll check that tomorrow but should make the interceptor easy enough, just subtract a value from that byte which corresponds to the same voltage as selected by my pot on the fooler resistor matrix. So basically turn the system sensed voltage down by X volts, I'll probably start with just enough to get regen working. But you could turn the voltage down to around 125V which will force the system to increase current to the max to compensate for the percieved lower voltage.

[samwichse]

Quick look at the live IGBT IPU data and I believe the first date byte in each packet is the voltage.
The pack was at ~189V IIRC and when you look at the data the first byte is $BD which equates to 189

Well, that was easy .

Your gauge pic there is making me jealous for sure. At that rate, you should get 1400 miles from that tank! Wow. Also: interesting that the HCH in England has the same MPG scale as the I1, 0-150 with 75mpg at the middle. The US version has 0-120 with 60 mpg being the middle.

Sam

EDIT: Do you have any live data from while the voltage was sagging under 50A draw?

[Cobb]

This is really interesting, wish I understood more about it. Can we get a more detailed explanation by video? Maybe go from layman's to techie speak?

I just discovered my enginer 4 kilowatt kit is made up of 64 20 amp lifepo4 pouches.


Sent from my iPhone using AutoGuide.com App

[retepsnikrep]

I had assumed my logic analyser had worked out the correct format for the serial data before I imported it into excel. Duh !!! I was a bit surprised it had no parity as most of the other Honda stuff i had studied does, so when I changed the analyser settings and forced it to have even parity the data changed significantly and there is now a clear corelation between igbt input voltage and the first data byte in each packet. Oh well at least I have found the issue. See attached.

The MPI Voltage is the first byte in each packet x 2, that makes sense and coreleates with the fact the mpi voltage jumps by two volts at a time when being monitored by the honda scan tool.

Now I can work on the interceptor.

I shall delete my prev posted spreadsheets!

[retepsnikrep]

Got my Zivan 3kw charger in and controlled by the BMS.

Managed to fit it into the old battery space as I had hoped, it fits quite well and vents out of the standard battery exhaust above rear seats. Might need some foam to channel the air but that's simple enough. Tweaked it upto 198V and that's just right for the pack.
It gives an extra level of protection as well.

The charger is controlled by three systems.

1) Pwm by the BMS reducing or holding the charger voltage when a cell goes over the balancing voltage set at 3.60v (Not wired up yet)

2) Solid state 25A mains power relay controlled by BMS for when any cell goes over an absolute maximum value of 3.65v or the pack goes over 200v (Wired up and tested)

3) By it's own internal system to limit maximum voltage to 198V.

The BMS is powered by the car when operating normally, and by 250ma switch mode 5v psu when mains charging. There is a diode in the car feed + line to prevent the 5v supply trying to power all the MCM 5V side.

HCH1 Honda Civic A123 60ah Pack Install Video 12 - YouTube

Time for a decent ride out tomorrow and work on the IPU Interceptor device.

I would like to get some skeleton code developed for that tomorrow. I'll probably use a 12F1822 which is a more upto date 8 pin pic with hardware USART as the serial data will have to be processed quite quickly and there aren't any big gaps in the data stream.

I will probably delay the transmission by one byte or packet. I don't think the data is hyper critical, it's likely to be voltage, temperature, and fault flags so I doubt the MCM will care about it lagging behind, it won't know anyway.