http://www.evcomponents.com/SearchResults.asp

My EV/Hybrid reading list is on LibraryThing at
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/John_Hardy

If you drill into the books, you will see some reviews including mine. Leitman and Brand is so-so. “Electric Motors and Drives” by Hughes is brilliant although it does demand some basic physics

If you know of a good book on batteries, I would be very glad to hear of it.

Warning - at the moment I’m an EV Newbie. The last car I built has a small block Ford V8!

I bought the first book but it was a bit disappointing, lot’s written but not much said that actually helped with my conversion. Wouldn’t hurt to get them all though if the price is right.

As for websites, there are many and I haven’t checked them for a while but my favourite has always been Jerry Halstead’s; http://www.evconvert.com/

You haven’t updated in sooo long… …Hope everything is still going well with the E-E and yourself…

I’ve been thinking of converting my Nissan Skyline over… …Or getting another one that’s had the motor thrashed and doing it…

Are there any books you’d recommend or “Go To” web sites to get info???…

There were three books I was looking at on Amazon… …”Build Your Own Electric Vehicle” by Seth Leitman and Bob Brant… …”Convert It!” by Michael Brown… …and “Electric Motors and Control Techniques” by Irving M. Gottlieb…

Amazon seem to sell all three in a package and I was wondering if you’ve read them or at least had a look at them…

Again… …Hope all is well and I look forward to your next post…

I actually went a long way towards building a test rig for 12 x A123 cells in series but got a bit frustrated by the complexity required to monitor / log each cell voltage + total current in both directions, have a realistic charge / discharge profile and keep all the cells balanced. Believe me it takes a lot of work to build something like that with proper fail-safes etc for stand-alone cycling. By the time I’d done all that I might as well have built a whole battery pack!

Hi Matt,

I’m just in the throws of testing a BMI 144V 10A LiFePO4 battery pack (14410-HPS). Will be doing a detailed blog of the results but see http://www.lifebatt.co.uk/hps_specification.html to get a taste of what I’m playing with.

I put one (that’s ONE) of these 24kg batteries by itself in my car on the weekend and drove up our very steep street trying not to go over max constant current of 120A (that’s 12C). It continuously pumped out about 15kW (that’s 20HP) no problems up all of the 200 metre climb. Imagine 8 of these in parallel!

Cheers,

Shaun.

another update, just past 8500km (400 or so cycles to 60%dod, plus a couple of 100%dod), today still going strong.
turns out the cell i thought id killed had survived.
turns out i have a corrosion issue at the terminals, causing significant voltage drop.
scary what a little water can do.
tip for young players: tin your copper interconnects with solder to prevent oxidation of the copper.
also make sure no water gets in

also turns out that the cells are more tolerant of overdischarge than i first thought. last week i ran the scooter until every cell in the pack was below 2.5v (not completely intentionally of course, home was only 2-3km away when the volt gauge started heading further south than id ever seen).
charged up fine, i havent seen any immediate effect, though this pack is certain for an early death.
definately wont be doing that for my car pack.

for those who have a dislike for TS, there have been rumours of another cheap large format manufacturer called sieden. similar construction by the looks of it.
K2 cells also look interesting. I might build myself a pack out of those project after next.

shaun - out of curiosity, what batteries are you using now?

Matt

I wonder how easy it would be to design a test rig that could simulate an EV scenario, with say a 6 volt source and a proportional resistance load. Could you scale it down to test with a single battery or small battery pack (to keep test cost reasonable), and get realistic scalable results? Run it with a computer to control charge and discharge loads, with results gathered by a data logger?

Run the same test cycle for lead acid batteries (wet/gel/AGM), then LiPo and A123. Could you get comparable results, that wouldn’t be skewed by BMS or charger design?