Antiscab's NWH10 Prius plugin Lithium conversion

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antiscab
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Antiscab's NWH10 Prius plugin Lithium conversion

Post by antiscab »

No Pictures yet, but I'm putting 100 x GBS 20Ah prismatic cells into a NHW10 prius in place of the original 240 x D-cells

I have the batteries and charger, and am working on the BMS

More updates as I progress

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Post by acmotor »

Are you planning on CMS at the cell level or across batteries of 4 cells. i.e. 12.8V BMS ?
Once a startup balance is done, the 12.8V BMS can to do the job ?
Particularly if the BMS is voltage reporting.
e.g. 2.5 + 3.2 + 3.2 + 3.2 (worst case discharge) = 12.1V
     0 + 3.2 + 3.2 + 3.2 = 9.6V (shorted cell) reports fault at rest
if charge voltage is limited to say 3.5VPC so 14VPB then
     0 + 4.2 + 3.3 + 3.3 = 10.8V but low charge current that BMS can read as fault.
etc.
May need some simple shunt per cell (3.6V zener + R) to allow a trickle charge to top balance ?

All this coz CMS can cost half the price of cell at the 20Ah level !
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Antiscab's NWH10 Prius plugin Lithium conversion

Post by Simon »

After visiting the EV Works website and seeing 10AH Headway cells for $16 it's tempting to put a single string of these in my NHW10 Prius. A new lithium battery pack for only $1600!
Looking forward to your progress on the plugin Prius conversion antiscab!
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Post by coulomb »

Matt,

it seems that the lithium solution is more important than ever. Hybrid-battery.com has ceased trading; if memory serves they were the source for the replacement new cells for NHW10s.

http://www.insightcentral.net/forums/pr ... y-com.html

I hope your BMS solution works out, so others can follow in your footsteps.
Last edited by coulomb on Sun, 13 May 2012, 05:22, edited 1 time in total.
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Antiscab's NWH10 Prius plugin Lithium conversion

Post by antiscab »

I did consider the headways, and they might be ok for staying as a hybrid

I was a bit concerned they wouldn't be able to take the 60A regen current the prius can throw out, but the 60A discharge is fine.

I'm not sure yet whether the GBS 20AH cells can take 60A either, but I will soon find out

with the bigger cells, its not much more effort to add a charger ($220) and make it plugin

I'm going for balancing at cell level, with monitoring at every 4 cells

The car itself monitors at every 5 cells

the tricky thing with the balancing, is if the voltage goes high under high regen current, whats to stop the higher impedance cells being pulled out of balance by the balancers...hmm tedious

pack voltage limit on regen is 360V, so should be ok for 100 cells.

The car stops discharge if one of the 5 cell groups falls ~1.2v behind the rest (reversed nimh cell, or depleted LiFePO4 cell), so overdischarge shouldn't be a problem.

theres no such sublimit on regen (that I know of) so it will be interesting to find out

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Antiscab's NWH10 Prius plugin Lithium conversion

Post by coulomb »

antiscab wrote: the tricky thing with the balancing, is if the voltage goes high under high regen current, whats to stop the higher impedance cells being pulled out of balance by the balancers...hmm tedious

Ah. As in those with the lowest SOC, especially if towards the bottom knee in the voltage/SOC curve, have the highest impedance, and would end up with the highest voltage under extreme charge conditions like regen, when they are really the ones that are least in need of bleeding off charge.

There is the argument that it's important to keep the terminal voltage under a certain level, say 3.6 V or 4.1 V, but the Rickards of this world say it doesn't matter what the terminal voltage does under load, and presumably also under high charge.

60 A of regen is 3.0C, which I suspect LiFePO4 can take intermittently without too much trouble, so I suspect you'll be fine. But it will be interesting to see what happens.

[ Edit: added "have the highest impedance, and" ]
Last edited by coulomb on Sun, 13 May 2012, 15:17, edited 1 time in total.
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Antiscab's NWH10 Prius plugin Lithium conversion

Post by coulomb »

antiscab wrote: add a charger ($220)

I guess I'll find out soon enough, but I have to ask: where do you get a ~ 360 V charger for $220?
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Post by antiscab »

coulomb wrote:
antiscab wrote: add a charger ($220)

I guess I'll find out soon enough, but I have to ask: where do you get a ~ 360 V charger for $220?


$220 360V 2.5A charger

not PFC, may not be isolated

cheap as they come

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Post by Johny »

Given that it is available in so many voltages it must be a switch mode in which case I would expect it's isolated. Amazing price.
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Post by PlanB »

Excuse my ignorance but what exactly are the details of a hybrid like the Prius in long term EV only mode with a better battery pack? I assume you are carting around the ICE as ballast only & regen still works?
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Post by Simon »

The NHW10 & NHW11 do not have an EV button like the newer Prius so you can't run EV only. With a larger battery pack (assuming the car thinks it's got high SOC) it should drive like a normal Prius does when the SOC is high with lots of EV mode even at higher speeds and running the ICE very little. The ICE will still be spinning without fuel above 65kph though.
I think you may not see any regen or very little.

As far as I know nobody has done anything like this with the original Prius. A few people have Enginer kits in NHW11's but thats about it.

Here is a video of an NHW11 accelerating in EV only.
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nwiQQhG844
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Post by antiscab »

regen should still work, its just voltage limited to 360v

in theory the 100 cell pack should hold the voltage to ~345v unless it is towards the full end

I won't really know how it behanves until I put it together, but the engine still very much needs to be there

The 20Ah 320v pack still only has a usable capacity of 4.5kwh

re the charger, I still haven't got it yet, so I don't really know how well made it is.
I will report on that aswell

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Post by antiscab »

coulomb wrote:
antiscab wrote: add a charger ($220)

I guess I'll find out soon enough, but I have to ask: where do you get a ~ 360 V charger for $220?


I just got an email stating my charger has been shipped.

It seems to get the low price, you have to wait for others to order enough to do a production run :)
My wait was 3 months, but it hasn't actually held up the conversion at all

Still sorting out a BMS

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Post by coulomb »

antiscab wrote: It seems to get the low price, you have to wait for others to order enough to do a production run :)
My wait was 3 months...

Wow. Do they hit your credit card (or expect telegraphic transfer or direct deposit) at the start or end of the +- 3 month wait?

Edit: So much for the "958 items in stock" it states on the web page now. Or maybe that's after they did a production run of 1000 or something; I should have noted the stock when I first looked at the site. Maybe there will be no long delay now till stock runs out again. Presumably, the 958 items includes all voltages, and I imagine that the higher voltage models are less popular. It may be that if the less popular models run out, they have to wait till stock of all models drops below a certain level.
Last edited by coulomb on Sat, 02 Jun 2012, 14:24, edited 1 time in total.
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Antiscab's NWH10 Prius plugin Lithium conversion

Post by Mr Camouflage »

FYI theres an NHW10 at pickles this wednesday if anyone needs any parts:
http://www.pickles.com.au/damaged/item/ ... /552138466
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Post by antiscab »

coulomb wrote:
antiscab wrote: It seems to get the low price, you have to wait for others to order enough to do a production run :)
My wait was 3 months...

Wow. Do they hit your credit card (or expect telegraphic transfer or direct deposit) at the start or end of the +- 3 month wait?


I paid at the start by credit card

I'm not actually sure that was the reason for the delay, it was just an educated guess.

The shipping itself wasn't that long, I have the charger now.

Matt

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Post by coulomb »

coulomb wrote: it seems that the lithium solution is more important than ever. Hybrid-battery.com has ceased trading; if memory serves they were the source for the replacement new cells for NHW10s.

Well, it seems that another company has taken over supplying new NiMH cells for Insights and NHW10 Prii.

From http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/Mk1 ... ssage/6136 (registration required):
Hybrid-Battery went out of business for financial reasons, not due to
problems with the product.

Another company in the US is selling the same batteries (from the same
manufacturer).

http://www.adoptapart.com/

They sell 20 sticks for $2000USD. The NHW10 requires 40 of these
sticks, so you need two sets. You cannot mix these cells with the
Panasonic EV/PrimeEarth EV cells (the original NHW10 cells), as they
have very different charge/discharge curves, so you MUST replace all 40
sticks at the same time.

They probably charge a deposit on the PTC strips and require you to mail
back the old PTC strips off your old sticks.

Ron Hansen
Well, it's good to know that that option still exists. However, now that Matt has shown the way, I'm more inclined to think that new LiFePO4 is a better use of $US4000 plus shipping than just getting an old Prius back to as-new condition.

From the same forum, a reader testimony (http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/Mk1 ... ssage/6149)
1998 Prius Blue 80000km Australia

Well here goes...

I'm the guy that has put the brand new batteries from Ron at
repair@... in the USA in my Prius 6 months ago. Now
apparently available from http://www.adoptapart.com/.

I've done around 3000km so far and It's been great. It drives like a new car ( as expected ) . No problems at all. Heaps of acceleration, hill climbing etc fine. Such a beautiful car.

I received them late last year and cycled each one to see if they are OK and to get some data for future testing if required. I then left them for a month or so and recharged each one to check self discharge. All OK. Only issue was I only managed to get an average of around 6Ah from all the sticks. This maybe my $200 tester as opposed to Ron's $10000 tester but I don't know. I was really looking for uniformity and a baseline for any possible future problems in around 13years
if I still have the car. 8Ah would have been nice though.
So it looks like you may only get ~6 Ah for US$4000. Headway 10 Ah cells from EVWorks are AU$16 + GST each in 20+ quantity, so a hundred cell pack would be AU$1600 + GST (cells only). These are capable of 10C operation, so they should handle the ~ 100 A peak current requirement. That leaves a fair bit of change left over for extra battery management and other costs of building a new pack. It looks like you could get about 20 Ah for the same sort of money as the ~ 6Ah NiMH, but over 3x the capacity.

So IF you can find the space, and IF you can solve the BMS and other issues, as hopefully Matt already has, then the Headway solution looks superior to me.

But as I said earlier, it's nice to have the alternative, in case you don't want to use the extra space and wear the extra weight, and/or have the hassles of convincing the hybrid system to accept the new pack.

So Matt... how's the project coming along?

[ Edit: forgot to add GST ]
[ Edited Coulomb: Repaired bad Unicode chars in preparation for conversion to phpBB ]
Last edited by coulomb on Wed, 28 Jun 2017, 06:40, edited 1 time in total.
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Antiscab's NWH10 Prius plugin Lithium conversion

Post by coulomb »

antiscab wrote: I did consider the headways, and they might be ok for staying as a hybrid

I was a bit concerned they wouldn't be able to take the 60A regen current the prius can throw out, but the 60A discharge is fine.

Hmmm. I'm just re-reading Ian Hooper's tests of Headways, and he finds that they can't even take 4-5 A charge current for more than about 25 minutes before his system cut back the current:

http://zeva.com.au/Research/Headway/

It would certainly be sad if the installed pack could not handle the regen current. But Ian seemed to stop at about 3.4 VPC; if you went to say 3.6 VPC or a little higher, you might find they could take a lot more current. So perhaps a little more research is required before Headways should be used in this application.
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Post by Simon »

I have been playing around with RC Lipo packs on my electric mountain bike and was thinking well maybe I could try them in the Prius. A single string of 5AH Lipo would cost around $600 but they only seem to like 7C continuous so probably need 10AH to ensure there is no heating of the cells. So 10AH of Headways costs a bit more but seems like a much more sensible option considering cycle life, ease of replacing a dud cell etc.
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Post by antiscab »

my conversion hasn't actually had any progress

I'm been busy trying to buy a house, and I have a bit of a backlog of customer jobs which is absorbing all my time :(

I'm also waiting on some my battery being replaced, as I lent 8 of the batteries (32 cells) to the AEVA Perth Branch to be used in the Emax scooter conversion

ev power has come up with a cheaper balancing system for the smaller cells. ev works has a new monitoring system

I hope to make this into a conversion kit, much like I have done with the Vectrix

I all works in theory, if I could just find the time to put it all together...

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Post by antiscab »

progress:
battery box tacked

now needs to be welded, then onto wiring....

Image

Image

box in rear photo looks deceptively small due to size of lion
Last edited by antiscab on Thu, 17 Jan 2013, 07:43, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by BigMouse »

Any progress on this? I'm very curious to see if an NWH10 PHEV can be done.
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Post by antiscab »

very slow progress

I have the battery computer mounted to the battery box, and the interconnects for the batteries made up

Also have the battery box bolted down properly now (12 x M6 bolts)

still have to make up the wiring harness between battery and car

also need to actually put battery in car

I'm just suffering from too many projects and not enough time off work
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Post by BigMouse »

Have to found any resources that talk about PHEV conversions in this model? I assume you've looked in to it before starting. How are you keeping the rest of the hybrid system happy with the new battery? Do you have plans to trick it in to having an EV mode?
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Post by antiscab »

I don't have anything in writing as to what will work, but here is what I will try

the original battery is measured in voltage in 20 places, spread evenly through out the pack.
I will do the same, so 1 wire every 5 cells will go back to the battery computer

I will fake the temp sensors with resistors if the battery computer requires it

I have been told the car determines battery SOC by pack voltage and a voltage vs current lookup table (no Ah counting).
The 100 cell LiFePO4 battery has a higher nominal voltage so should discharge the battery in preference to using the engine

There is no EV only mode, as max power drawn from the battery is ~15kw (50A current limit)

I will put a cycle analyst in to actually measure that




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