Voltron-Evo; jonescg's new electric race bike

[jonescg]

Hi All,

I have a pre-build thread for my e-CRX conversion here on AEVA but I don't have a build thread for my new electric race bike. It's been a long and expensive journey to this point so I thought its time to share my experience. I do have a full build thread on Endless-Sphere, which you are most welcome to read, but for this forum I want to share not just what I did, but the reasoning and planning behind each design feature. So let's make a start, shall we?

Introduction

It all began back in 2011 when I'd built Voltron the electric Suzuki RG. It had a pair of Agni brushed DC motors fused at the shaft, they were wired in parallel from a 1200 A Kelly controller and 6 kWh of A123 lithium powered the 160 kg bike up to 180 km/h. Together with Dan and Jason/Jon, we made a bit of Aussie electric racing history. And it was a piece of sh*t. #89 was 'unique'.

eFXCRd3EC030.JPG (175.66 KiB) Viewed 6633 times

My building skills leave a lot to be desired, but the point is, I built it, I raced it, I had some wins and I had some DNFs. But boy, did I learn a lot from the experience. The bike handled like crap around corners, the motors were prone to overheat and throw molten solder, and the while bike was a safety risk should it ever get wet. I knew I had to do better. If I was to build another electric bike, it needed to be faster, have a higher thermal budget and be more 'modular' - that is, I needed to be able to pull each part off and put it back on again in minutes, not days.

What the new bike needed to be

1. It needed to be build from a proper racing chassis. Not some agricultural experiment from 1985. I had contemplated using a modern day sports bike as a basis - either a CBR or a GSXR. It would need to be based on a 1000 cc equivalent as these had the room and the strength.

2. It needed a single, very powerful motor. Not a pair of DC Indian smoke machines. AC was most attractive as brushes are a real weak point at high motor speeds. I needed it to be competitive with at least a 600 cc petrol bike - meaning I need at least 90 kW at the rear wheel.

3. It needed to be modular. I need to be able to hoist the battery out in one go. I need to be able to drop the motor out in minutes, or pull the controller out if I had to work on the suspension linkages. Essentially, I want to be able to do a full stripdown of the key parts, do a service and put it all together between races, not between seasons.

4. It needed to be rugged. IP67 type rugged. This bike is for racing, so it will be crashed and thrown up the road at 100 km/h. I'd like to be able to wheel it back to the pits and replace the broken bits and get back on track. Motorcycles can survive some fast crashes if they do it right, but not if the important components are held in place by compression straps and gaffa tape. I also wanted it to be raced in the rain without fear of shocks.

Donor chassis?
I'd not long had some success at Winton raceway when I started to make plans for the new bike. Where to start? Chassis, or components? Chassis selection was going to be tough as it limits your choice of components. I sought out donor chassis which had already been race-prepped. Eventually I settled on the GSXR1000. The 2004 GSXR had a huge main frame with enough room to fit stacks of cells and components. I even measured up a 2007 GSXR and it was even better - vastly improved handling with a big frame. I found a 2005 GSXR1000 for sale in Melbourne, and after much diligent saving, I bought it and had it shipped over.

And f**k me the frame was too small . Turns out the 2005 GSXR was the only bike that decade to have the smaller frame. Oh well, I thought, at least I have a mean 170 hp ICE bike. If I did try to build an electric bike from this frame I would be struggling to fit even 7 kWh worth of cells and who know what kind of motor.

It was looking increasingly like I need a fully custom racing frame - one without exhaust header bolts and countershaft mounts...

Motor selection
Around about this time I was trying to decide which motor I should use. I wanted it to be powerful. Stupidly powerful. More power than I would ever use in a race. Why? Because I needed my racing skills to be well clear of the thermal limits of the motor. My DC motors would have put out a mere 45 kW on a good day, yet they were always on the brink of incineration. Having more and using proportionally less of it eaves me with enough headroom to push my limits before the motors limits were pushed.

I learned that there was a certain power envelope which was absent in the electric motor world. This happened to be about the 60-90 kW region. It has since gotten better, but at the time I was a bit stuck for options. I could choose between the UQM Powerphase 125 motor, the Carbon motor, an Emrax motor, Remy, Yasa or Evo. One thing was obvious - power to weight was going to be the main driver here. And continuous power, not peak. When you are racing, you are hard on the throttle 90% of the time, so 'peak' just isn't good enough. Based on continuous power output, I needed something in the order of 2 kW/kg.

I'd narrowed it down to UQM, Evo or Yasa. Yasa was simply too expensive. It was a $14,000 motor, although on paper it's power to weight of 3.8 kW/kg might be worth every penny. UQM was also expensive - $22,000 but that included the inverter. It's power to weight was a bit low for my liking, and the size of the motor was hard to accommodate. Evo made two sizes - the AFM130 and the AFM 140. The 130 was 300 mm in diameter, while the 140 was 400 mm across. Remarkably, they were barely 115 mm wide. Axial flux is where the magic happened. Seems you can get much better power to weight by intersecting magnetic fields axially rather than radially. And torque! This motor has it in tiptrucks.

Lots of things lead to my decision to get the Evo motor. The $11,000 landed price tag was a bit hard to swallow, but it's certainly cheaper than the alternatives. But it had the high continuous power I wanted. The 130 or the 140? I settled on the 140 despite it's large diameter. On paper it claims 75 kW all day long, but the guys at Evo have tested it at 100 kW for several hours. They doubted the 130's ability to do this, but were confident the 140 could deliver. I committed to it

Motor assembly 001.jpg (231.93 KiB) Viewed 6633 times

It needs high volts. There were several winding configurations to choose from, and I chose the AFM140-4. I will get to the rationale behind this in my next post.

[jonescg]

AFM140-4; a means to a custom frame end

It was clear the big motor would need a custom frame. I tried to visualise all sorts of ways of getting the motor in there, and while they could be done, it would mean a compromise on the battery space.

Something I've always felt electric motorcycles were ripe for, was the concentric, or at least near-concentric swingarm. They are an engineering headache, but they get the mass of the motor down and out of the way. Contrary to popular belief, you do not want a low centre or gravity on a race bike. Need proof? Ride an E-max 110s scooter as fast as you can towards your favourite corner and attempt to throw it in (biker slang for 'make the turn as fast as you can'). It will push the front wheel to the point of loosing traction and it will buck like crazy. You need weight up high so you have control over the countersteering forces. But I digress...

The swing arm would need to go around the motor. Otherwise the motor would be too far forward resulting in a long chain deflection and no room for your batteries. Being a large diameter motor you couldn't run a jackshaft to the drive sprocket very easily either. Also, where would the shock absorber go? It needs to be set up as a cantiever, above the motor where it still offers plenty of travel but clears the motor. So I came up with some sketches to see how it would work.

Chromolyandallyframeideas.JPG (128.7 KiB) Viewed 6632 times

Eventually I came up with something I felt would accommodate the motor, satisfy the suspension needs, have a removable seat subframe (the first thing to get damaged in a crash) and be relatively easy to fabricate.



The large frame meant I could have a single removable battery pack while the cantilever swingarm would work around the motor. The motor could be removed by dropping it out the bottom. It also meant I could access the drive sprocket fairly easily, and ideally without having to remove anything large and heavy.

I asked around a few Australian firms to see if they would build the frame for me. Most said no, some said maybe but at a price (a very large one) and a few said it was 'impossible' to build an electric race bike. This post is for you then buddy

Eventually I found these guys: www.framecrafters.net

The father and son duo of Randy and Karsten Illg have been building custom frames for motorcycle racing for many years and are always pushing the boundaries of design. Their bikes are amazing and they win races too. They are explicitly NOT chopper guys. I got in touch with Randy by email and phone and he was very excited to be involved. There was a slight problem - they are based in Union Illinois. Shipping a custom frame to Perth won't be cheap, but I know the frame will be perfect so it's worth it.

I placed my order back in November and work has continued steadily since. I had to get Randy to build a mock-motor, as he really needs it to know where to place mounting holes and how to work around it. So he knocked this up based on the dimensioned drawing from Evo.



I had more or less settled on the dimensions of the battery pack too. Not certain about the height, but the width and length were known to be 320 mm x 220 mm respectively. With these figures he got to work on the frame. The swingarm could have been a custom job but I found that a Ducati supersport 1000 allow swing arm would almost fit the bill perfectly. I bought one off ebay sight unseen and had it sent to Framecrafters. The motor plates were machined and fitted to the mock motor, and these were set inside the swing arm.



These were ready to be fitted to the trellis frame. Their bi-metallic frames are epoxied and bolted together nice and tight. And they look amazing. Here it is in it's latest incarnation:

Bit of a fatty, but no fatter than a typical non-Honda Japanese litre bike.

Almost packed7.JPG (120.16 KiB) Viewed 6632 times

Looking nice and shiny

Almost packed2.JPG (213.44 KiB) Viewed 6632 times

I got them to throw a set of forks in with the shipment as it's going to be much cheaper to buy them in the USA than here.

Oh that's right, I was going to tell you about the motor winding selection. Next post

[jonescg]

Danger! High Voltage!
Buying a really powerful synchronous AC motor is pretty straight forward until you start to read into it. Typically it's not the motor which is all that hard to decide on; it's the inverter (controller, variable frequency drive) to run it that seems to be the sticky point. You need an inverter which is rated at or just below the power output of your motor. Any more and you risk cooking the motor, any less and you will cook your inverter. Inverters come in three sizes - small, big and epic. If your motor is between these sizes, it's not a big problem, you just won't get full use out of it. I found many inverters out there which are able to do the job, but which one was worth it?

I'd considered inverters from UniTek in Germany, Sevcon in the UK, Rinehart in the USA and Tritium here in Oz. Given my motor was capable of 100 kW continuous, and up to 170 kW peak, I really needed an inverter capable of more than 100 kW. The Tritium Wavesculptor was a good contender as it was much cheaper than the rest, and still promised 165 kVA. With a maximum battery voltage of 450 VDC and peak motor currents of 300 A rms (root mean squared) it was looking good. However I worked out that it would fall short of what the motor was capable of. A 450 V maximum would mean about 400 V from the battery nominally. Given the sine wave nature of the power delivery to the motor, your motor would only see 283 V rms. So motor power is actually going to be 283 V rms * 300 A rms * 0.77 (motor power factor) * 0.91 (motor efficiency) * (sqrt 3)= 103 kW peak. This is a lot of power by anyone's measure, but not enough to really make use of this motor.

I needed more like 150 kW peak from the motor, given the continuous needs of racing. So the Rinehart PM150 series will fit the bill. These inverters come in two flavours - 360 VDC maximum battery pack, or the 720 V maximum. Hmm, these voltage sound kind of high...

This is where the motor winding comes in. I asked Evo which one I should get and they suggested either the 3 turn or the 4 turn motor. The 3 turn motor would operate on a lower base voltage (450 V DC bus) but it would have less inductance, resulting in a choppier wave form, more inefficiencies and thus heating. Heat would damage the permanent magnets in my $11,000 motor so I was cautious... The 4 turn motor was going to be better in this regard, but would call for a >700 V DC bus. Wow. OK, do I go for the low base voltage motor and accept a motor spinning slower than I want it to as the inverter is only capable of handling up to 360 V DC, or go all the way up to 700 V DC and use all of the silicon available?

It comes down to field weakening, and the inverter's ability to adjust it's timing such that the back EMF being generated by the spinning rotor is defeated by changing the timing and duration of the stator magnetic field. This allows the motor to spin faster at the expense of torque. At least this is my crude understanding of it. The 4 turn motor was better able to spin up to full speed by means of field weakening than the 3 turn motor given the higher motor voltage.

So I wasn't making a simple decision on the winding configuration, I was making a decision on the motor, the inverter and the battery voltage all at once! Why buy a motor designed to run on a lower, yet safer voltage if you aren't able to take advantage of the power available from the inverter? Volting up was not impossible, but certainly challenging. I have settled on the PM150DZ and hope to purchase one this year. Not sure what their price is, but it's close to $10k.

I settled on 700 V DC at top of charge - the maximum allowed by TTXGP and about as high as I would ever want to go. This meant the PM150DZ inverter was going to be able to spin it up to full speed (5000 rpm) and I could take advantage of most of the silicon available in the inverter. After all, doing the motor power numbers on this inverter gives me 158 kW at 640 V DC nominally.

So that's like, 168 cells in series!?
Not only was it a lot of cells in series, it had to be this number so that I could build a convenient battery pack from the LiCo cells I solder together. My pack measures 320 x 220, which is two lots of four cells side by side. The number of cells in each quarter pack had to be a number which can be divided by two to give an odd number - an odd number means the cell terminations can turn around and come back up the other way. Confused yet?

So I have four blocks of 42 cells with the negative at the top left. The cells snake down to the bottom, and at cell 21 link across the the negative of the adjacent stack. This then snakes it's way back to the top where the positive of cell 42 is on the opposite side as the negative. However it is now able to snake back down the second block of 42 cells. This way I have all of the cell terminals at the top of the pack where I can isolate them, put fuses and contactors etc. It is probably the most space efficient way to stick 9.2 kWh worth of cells into a 50 litre volume.

I have the motor's needs met by the inverter, and the inverter's needs mostly met by my battery. The battery's needs are met by the space constraints of the bike. All that's left now is to design the crash-proof, water proof enclosure for my cells.

[jonescg]

Designing an isolated battery pack
One thing about high voltages is that they carry higher currents for a given resistance. The resistance of humid air is pretty high, but at 700 V top of charge, there is a real risk that someone could get a shock without even going in search of one. So isolation was important.

I needed to be convinced that electrically isolating the pack into lower voltage units was a good idea. Thankfully the AEVA has some great folks who are very knowledgeable on these things, and the Webber/Coloumb duo with their wealth of experience of trying to make a high voltage MX5 could offer plenty of sound advice.

I wanted to keep the 42 series blocks of cells separated from each other physically as well as electrically, so I designed a polycarbonate box with dividers. The terminals are at the top, so mounting isolation contactors and fuses up there will be easy. I also wanted to design the pack so it was fully self-contained. All isolation, monitoring and charge logic could be done from inside the enclosure. Also, I wanted it so you can't get power out unless you put 12 V into it. It was a tight fit, but through the use of a main control box on the outside I could house a shunt/current sensor as well as the main contactor for providing power to the inverter.

This is what I came up with:



The cells go in the bottom, the isolation contactors and fuses go in the middle shelf and the battery monitoring electronics go in the top shelf. Power is fed via the mid shelf to the control box on the back of the pack. The charge leads are accessible from the front of the pack while the 12 V logic to drive all of the contactors is contained in the control box.

The M8 stainless steel studs are where the battery sub-packs slide in and terminate. They will use forked copper bar just like fork terminals. This enables all of the isolation equipment above to be ready and in working order before you slide the packs in. The studs are fixed in place so there is no need to hold an insulated spanner underneath while you ratchet up the nut with a socket.

The 42 s packs will have use centralised monitoring system. Yes, this means having 43 wires which are directly connected to the cells ending in a large serial plug which plugs into a monitoring circuit on the top shelf. It won't do any balancing via bypass shunts - just sound a warning if a cell is out of range. This board is in development right now.

What does a 42 series wiring harness look like?


They will be soldered onto the sub-packs once they are build and once neatly cable-tied up, will plug into the BMS units on the top shelf, like this:

See how leaving the gap in the middle was deliberate

This is what the pack looks like now that I've finished everythig except the batteries which slide in:


The top of the pack, looking through the BMS shelf. You can see the careful layout of the contactors, fuses, terminal studs and the like.


I have used that 'noodle' stuff wherever a wire might potentially rub on a conductor or edge of polycarbonate. Split conduit for everything else. The charge leads go across the half-packs and together with the charge enable pair, head out the front of the pack to the charge socket.

The right hand side:


With the BMS shelf removed, the packs will simply slide up and onto the supports with the stud in the middle. The charge ring-lug is positioned and the M8 nuts is tightened down with an insulated 13 mm socket. Then the BMS shelf is returned and the pack is ready for it's side covers!



When my frame finally arrived from the USA I dropped the battery in to see how it fit... and it didn't. However, by mounting the main control box at an angle under the tank cover it will actually fit quite well. All is not lost






Lithium Cobalt cells - won't they burn your house down?!
Then don't park your bike in the house. Geez.

But what of the cells themselves? These much maligned cells are the backbone of the radio control hobbyist. Built into a pack like this they store nearly 130 Wh/kg and about 200 Wh/l. They can crank out the amps like crazy while the voltage sags very little. I have done a discharge test on these cells at 13 C and the voltage sagged by about 5%.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLD1iKYV_cg

Like all LiCo cells they cannot be taken past about 3.5 V or irreversible damage will be done. Attempting to charge them from this state may cause excessive heating and potentially a fire. Not what you want when you have 75 kg of cells there. But they are the right price and they deliver the goods.

How are the 42s sub-packs built?
I got Dmitrii in Melbourne to generate Gerber files for me, based on some crappy MS Paint sketches. The cells come from Herewin in Shenzheng, and are the 5 Ah, 40C type. These cells are exactly 50 mm wide and 9 mm thick; again, all part of my elaborate mathematical invention.

I start with a jig, made to the exact dimensions I'm after, give or take a mm. The jig doesn't really serve to compress the cells, rather keep them square and prevent them from slumping to one side.


Then, after trimming the tabs back to about 5-7 mm in length, I slide them into the slots on the board in the right order. If you get it wrong, there's a 2 in 3 chance you'll get a little spark to keep you in your toes. I bend the tabs over firmly with a blunt plastic tool and make sure they are fairly flat.


Then I go through and scuff each tab with the Dremmell. This takes a while but it;s necessary to get some good tinning. I tin the tabs generously with solder and my 80 W iron.


I don't normally put the fly-wires on before soldering the copper bus down, so just ignore them. I usually loop a nice ring of soler wire around the pad and lower a tinned copper block down.


I then lower my third hand down with a piece of insulating material before soldering the block with a pair of 200 W irons. As long as you are quick, this doesn't damage the cells. I use a 5 kg lump of steel.


Then then the bus has been soldered down I can put a G10-FR4 layer down with holes Dremmelled out where the balance leads go. These holes are typically about 12 mm in diameter, so I can fit the point of a hot 80 W iron down into the PCB plated holes. The packs will have the DD-50 already wired up, so it's just a matter of soldering the right leads in the right order. It will look a bit like this:


Except 567 mm long, two cells wide and with 43 leads going to a serial socket. This serial socket will have enough length to go past the switchyard level and up to the BMS level.

I'll get onto the wiring of the high voltage stuff in my next post.

[jonescg]

The wiring diagram
Isolating the battery into four separate sub-packs of 175 V each (maximum) would be achieved using Gigavac contactors which come with a set of auxiliary contacts. I specifically wanted these as it allows you to run a separate circuit through them to an LED to let you know that it's shut. I think all contactors in use in EVs should have this feature. I wanted these to open every time the bike was turned off, and the only time 700 V was available was when the bike was being ridden. So some clever relay logic was needed. Again, with the help of the AEVA forum a new diagram was made up, incorporating a precharge delay as well as some "charge enable" logic which disabled the main contactor so you couldn't ride off with the charge lead in.

Charging was going to be a pain. Finding stuff that's rated to 700 V isn't easy. So I had the option of either running two 350 V chargers in series and charging at 700 V DC, or I could fully isolate two half packs and charge them at 350 V each. This way 700 V wouldn't be found anywhere in the system. I opted for this latter choice as suitably rated parts can be found, and because the pack was already going to have a half-pack isolation contactor anyway. I just needed to draw this all out:



The relay logic board was able to power the quarter contactors separately to the half contactor, as well as the main contactor. The idea being that upon connecting a charge plug, a pilot circuit is completed. This energises the 'enable' relay coil, which switches the quarter pack contactors on and the half contactor off; creating two isolated half packs.

This was a bit too much for a 'squished fly' circuit, so I got a friend to generate some gerber files which I could send to China for the production of some PCBs:


Once populated I could do some testing:




Precharge, discharge
When turning the bike on, a switched +12 V signal closes the very expensive 1300 VDC rated precharge relay, the quarter contactors and the half contactor. Several seconds later the main contactor closes. This is important as the 560 uF capacitors in the inverter will create an impressive explosion if I don't charge them up softly. I plan on using four paralleled resistors giving 500 ohms. Using this awesome calculator:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hb ... apchg.html I determined that my precharge will be 99% over in 2 seconds. I can set the timer resistor to 23k ohm to give me a 2.5 second delay.

As the gigavac relay is a SPDT relay, I can use the same devise to discharge the capacitors when the power is cut. This is another rule stipuated by TTXGP - if the capacitors are still charged when the bike is turned off, there is a risk someone will get defibrillated should they go near the inverter.

I have spotted several issues with this circuit since devising it. Particularly, if the precharge relay fails for some reason, I have no way of knowing about it. Before you know it, 2 seconds later BAM your main contactor is welded shut. I had originally planned on using a two position key switch where position one is the precharge step and position two is the ON switch. It relies on the user to count to three before going all the way to ON. So what do you do? If I had a voltage monitor across the terminals I would be able to see the voltage quickly increase to full pack voltage before the contactor closed. If you see no such thing, your precharge circuit has failed and you have a chance to turn the key the other way and fix it. However the timer would give you 3 seconds to turn it the other way! Really I need a precharge system which prevents the contactor from closing should the voltage not rise to within a few volts of maximum. I know there are solid state relays out there which can do SPST switching, but the discharge is an important feature which I can't go without. Needs thought...

Here is a video of the relay logic in action -
[youtube]UU1yurc3FUpXaNOGq6ZDZ_8w[/youtube]

LEDs are hooked up to the auxiliary contacts of each Gigavac so I can see if one is welded by inspecting the LEDs. The contactor most likely to weld is the main contactor, but at least if it does, there is additional isolation to prevent a fire. Maybe an optocoupler attached to the LED could prevent going from ACC to ON if any LED is illuminated?... One for another revision.

So my main control box needed an appropriately rated voltage divider. This calculator is pretty handy for this job. I sourced a pair of 5 watt, 680k ohm resistors, which I can put in series with a ~9.7k resistor for producing a 5 V signal proportional to the incoming voltage. I want it to be as close as possible to 5 V at top of charge, so I discovered this resistor combinator: http://www.qsl.net/in3otd/parallr.html which lets you come up with something pretty close to your desired resistance by paralleling or series-ing standard R value resistors.

The resistors at the bottom of the board are the voltage divider. Appropriately rated I might add . This sends a 0-5 V signal to the Cycle Analyst which then multiplies it by ~140 to give the pack voltage. The Cycle Analyst itself is powered by a separate 12V supply, however the grounds will be connected. Therefore I will need to power the CA through a small 12 V to 12 V DCDC converter for proper isolation.

Justin from E-bike.ca has been constantly improving his Cycle Analyst, which does all this and more. It still had the problem of running high voltages, so he changed it so that you can read up to about 800 V. He's such a great guy he even made a special splash screen for me!

[jonescg]

I might use this post as a tally of the costs.

This has not been a cheap bike to build. I will list them in order of components, and tally them up at the end.

Motor:
AFM140-4 shipped from the UK                     $11,000

Controller:
Rinehart PM150DZ inverter -               about $9000

Battery:
Cells, busbar and PCBs -                  about $7000
Battery Monitoring System -                      $2000
Polycarbonate box fabrication -                  $1100
200 A, 700 V rated fuses (4)-                    $600
Gigavac Contactors (4) -                         $550
High Voltage Precharge relay -                   $280
Precharge resistors, PCB, ABS box -              $160
Balance leads, DD-50 plugs (4)-                  $150
HV cables, lugs and busbar                      $100

Chassis:
Custom frame, motor mounts, linkages-      about $8000
Fairings, accessories, 12 Wiring loom etc-       $1000
Running gear (brakes, forks, shock, wheels etc.) $2000

So we are a bit over $40,000. It might be a bit less, but most likely a bit more. This is what I expected, so I'm not too concerned. It will just take some time to save up for the bits I don't have yet.

Race bikes run on money you know

[Johny]

I'm loving these posts - so well written and easy to follow your reasoning. Thanks.

[jonescg]

Cheers! I will try to add to each section as an edit, rather than force the poor reader to trawl through pages and pages of posts. If you fear you might miss something don't worry I'll also make a reply post to alert readers to it, and of course initiate discussion about it. I have made some more progress on the battery box, and as the frame improves and has bits added to it I'll add them in.

The precharge thing has me bothered though. In theory it all makes sense, but if the main contactor opens milliseconds before the precharge relay, the relay will have full pack voltage across it, via the resistors. If the relay welds then I have a fire between my legs. But a fuse isnt going to help here either, as the maximum current ever to be seen across this resistor is about 2 amps, for a few miliseconds. If it's fused across the pack voltage, it won't blow. But the resistors will get mighty hot. Sure, I have the other contactors to isolate this pack, but I'm trying to avoid such a situation.

[Stiive]

Nice one... subscribed

[Johny]

The precharge relay should be able to open 2 amps safely - that's why it was expensive.

[jonescg]

Updated the post on my battery stuff.

[GRMarks]

Hi chris, don't know if you remember but we met at winton when you had the RG.

Wow what a big motor for a bike! Maybe you could put a tyre on it and run it as a hub motor ha ha ha.

Do you foresee any handling problems because it is a bespoke frame. Or can or handling problems be tuned out by the suspension tuning?

Did you consider making your own swing arm and bolting it to the motor and put a pivot on the motor (maybe underneath it). After all there's not too many pot holes on race tracks. The motor would hardly move. Yes it would add a bit of mass to suspension movement but nothing like the catavolt with its twin hub motors. Or you could get really fancy and have the pivot point inline with its centre shaft. Too late now, but wondered if you considered these and rejected them? If so why, would love to hear your thinking on this.

Also I have wondered about building a frame out of flat folded aluminium sheet (a basic square U shape) then mount forks and swing arm to it. Your thoughts?

Glenn

PS another great post.

[jonescg]

Hi Glenn!
The guys who are building my frame build race bikes for a living. They know geometry and clearance, dampening, spring rate and rebound like making breakfast. So I have confidence in them. They borrowed several parameters form a GSXR1000, which is a good starting point.
I did consider getting a custom swing arm made which would push the motor back another 30-40 mm, leaving more room for a battery pack. But the custom swinger was a big expense, and a Ducati SS part would achieve much the same thing.

The motor was too big to put anywhere else. Another reason I got the AFM140 was because I plan on dropping it into the CRX when I'm ready to convert the car. By then I might have found a lighter, smaller, more powerful motor which can be a drop in replacement.

I did consider a concentric output shaft but this requires some very fancy bearing engineering and it really doesn't offer much of an advantage, except opening up the front of the bike for more batteries. I really wanted to keep the weight at about 200 kg max, so I'll try to same the same space with better cells rather than more.

Can't see why you couldn't use a monocoque frame on a bike, except cost and complexity. I guess I need to go with what's known, hence the trellis frame.

My battery box is nearly done, so I should edit the post again...

[GRMarks]

Hey Chris, don't these cells get really hot in model helicopters etc?
Do you have a air gap or some other thing between to cool the cells?
I know the cell in my tiny helicopter gets really hot, it discharges in about 7 to 10 minutes I think, but its also very tiny.

Your motor in your crx will make it breath fire, its hard to imagine it in a bike. Burning rubber comes to mind ha ha ha. Maybe you will need some traction control. I can see you hanging the tail out around corners in a power slide.

The top linkage looks a bit dodgy in the pic. Why so complicated? why not mount the shock directly to the swing arm and frame, no linkage.

How much does the empty battery box weight, looks heavy? Does it have cooling fans in it?

Can't wait to see some numbers about performance.

Glenn

[jonescg]

Hi Mark,
The cells only get really hot if you discharge them ad really high C rates, and most of this heat happens in the final 30% of the discharge. The reason your RC heli battery gets so hot is because the main leads are just 12 AWG wire soldered to the tiny tab. All of the heat generated there has nowhere to go, so it sinks right back into the cell. I have big lumps of copper to soak that heat away from the cell.
I'm a strong supported of "if your battery is getting too hot, you're doing something wrong". Danny had to engineers some elaborate cooling systems into his bike because he was discharging his cells at 20C, 10C average. I will be doing 13C max, 7C average. His cells are very vulnerable to physical damage and water ingress with all that cooling, while mine is waterproof and crashproof. The heat of the pack will still leak out through the polycarb, just not as fast. I can always install cooling fans if I need to. Safety was my main design criterion, followed by space efficiency then weight.

The battery box, which includes everything (control unit, contactors, fuses, current shunts etc.) weighs in at 14 kg. I will put about 71 kg of cells inside, so 85 kg all up.

The shock linkage in the image is a placeholder, I will update the thread now that I have some final pictures of the linkage in place. The linkage is so that we can clear the cables as they leave the motor, and we get some more travel for less shock movement.

The bike is ready so send now, so I just have to pay the reminder of the invoice and then brace myself for the shipping fees

[jonescg]

Frame is in my hands now. I have been updating the posts accordingly. Great to have it finally in my shed where I can size it up and fit the goods.

[Simon]

Good news! Where is motor controller?

[jonescg]

Still sitting on Brett's shelf, waiting for me save up enough money to buy one . It will fit underneath the seat/tail. I hope to spend the weekend putting the motor into the bike and getting it ready for some wheels.

[GRMarks]

Chris you could buy a new main control box and drill holes in the bottom (rather than the side (or is that top???)) to line up with the holes in the battery box (only need very short cables) and no need for the black plastic collars on the end where they enter the box. You could mount it higher up then, out of the way of the suspension.
Do you have the front forks, rear suspension and wheels yet?
How long do you estimate before it is finished?

Glenn

[GRMarks]

By the way, its a race bike you don't need a controller, just an on/off switch right? Zero power/100% power, then you could pretend its a 2 stroke!

[jonescg]

Hi Glenn,

Yes I tried everything and concluded I need to enter the cables from the back. It requires a couple of 90 degree brackets to be made so the cables can bolt on with M8 bolts. I will have to get a new PCB made up as the left hole goes right through a high voltage trace and the two 12 V signal conduits are very close to the high voltage relay. This is a pain in the arse, but it will make the box fit beautifully inside the space available and there will be two less cables in the way of the shock.

The linkage works nicely and very linear.

Short linkage rod:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSEPoJVP ... e=youtu.be

Extended linkage rod:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cno_kofA ... e=youtu.be


I have forks, but no wheels or brakes, custom shock, cells or inverter. There's still a good $15-20k to spend on the bike before it's operational.

[jonescg]

SO today I decided to mount the motor into the frame. First I had to pull the swingarm pins out. There is no thread on the inside of the pins, so I needed to 'pull' them out somehow. Solution - a 12 mm Dynabolt

Next step was to bolt the motor plates on. Turns out you can't drop the motor out and leave the plates in place as the outrunner bearing and shaft won't clear it. Not a big deal though - just have plenty of blocks and a jack handy.



Win #1 - the motor plates fit perfectly.

Then I noticed that the thrust bearings were exposed to the elements, and probably needed some kind of covering. So I cut a bicycle tube up and slipped them over the receiving end of the pin assembly. Perfect!



Win #2 - the dust covers work!

Then I had to muscle the motor over to the bike and mount it in place. A bit tough on your own but easy with another modestly strong person. I found it easy to attach the rod ends first and then pull the motor up to the swing arm assemblies.

Motor assembly 005.jpg (186.88 KiB) Viewed 6632 times

Win #3 - the motor fits!

My real concern was the cable run. As it turns out, 50 mm2 cable can be held down close to the motor and still clear the shock, but I will still put a composite cover over the cables and hold them down firmly.

Cable run.jpg (246.69 KiB) Viewed 6632 times

Win #4 - the cables are clear!

I also inspected the chain run, now that the motor and output shaft were shuffled across to line up. The outrunner bearing was essential as there would have been some pretty serious force on that shaft at 40 mm.

Win #5 - chain run is clear and straight!

So I picked the whole lot up and put it on the table. It was a heavy setup; the motor and plates weigh in at 50 kg, so there's an easy 5 kg worth of ally that can be removed from the plates. The swingarm is 5 kg, and I'm guessing here, but I think the frame is about 20 kg. While it was up there I decided to position the ZX10 fairings to see how it all looks. Pretty hawt!




Win #6 - it looks pretty fine!

Now I need to find some Gixxer wheels, but importantly I need to get a rear brake assembly sorted. [/quote]

[Renard]

My goodness! Very impressive work.

You wrote:

"The way I currently have it, I have a 50 W, 520 ohm precharge resistor, impeding inrush current to the 560 uF worth of capacitors in the inverter. This means precharge is over in 1 second, and the main contactor closes after 2.4 seconds.

On turning the bike off, all contactors and the HV relay are opened, leaving the only closed circuit being the discharge of the capacitors (which takes about one second). In both cases, there should be no current flowing other than the 1.4 amps through the precharge/discharge resistor.

It's the opening under load scenario that I am cautious of. Say I am hammering along at 250 amps, 640 V, and for some reason my 12 V supply fails momentarily. All three isolation contactors and the main contactor will open, and the HV relay will switch to NC, potentially allowing an arc to be carried across the last contactor to open. I don't know if this will really happen, but I have seen some catastrophic events involving precharge relays."

I see you have Gigavacs, and if you look at their data sheet you'll see that at 250A and 650V, they can break many times before failing. So I don't see this as a significant worry.

You could also reduce the value of yor pre-charge resistor. For example, if it were 100ohms, you would be at 97% of full voltage after 200ms. This reduces the danger of switching the main contactor on before fully pre-charging. You don't have to worry about the resistor wattage, as whatever the resistance, you always have the same 137 joules of energy to pass through it -- a high current for a short time or a low current for a longer time.

[jonescg]

The Gigavac high voltage relay is the real trooper in all of this - he switches the precharge on and off, and discharge off and on, respectively. I am worried about it more than the contactors, as it's not supposed to deal with more than a couple of amps.

I have the option of halving the resistance again by using 1kR resistors, ensuring it's all over even quicker, which I might yet do. Too bad I only ordered 2.2kR resistors...

I have made some progress of late. Since I have been out of work for quite some time, the bike hasn't been seeing much attention. However I did move the main control box up to the new, frame-clearing position. It makes for a much neater package. I also had to replace the cables with busbars. This was a real headache to get it all lining up - Dremmel, check, fit, dremmel, check, fit... bend, twist, file, fit...



I have joined several of the ground wires so the rats nest is a tiny bit simpler. The four spaces are where the wirewound precharge-discharge resistors go.





I hope to get a fibreglass tank cover made up which *just* covers the battery pack while looking quite stealthy.

[jonescg]

I decided to do a bit of a mock-up of the bike with some old tyres and the not complete (well, minus the cells) battery pack.






The battery pack sits a little taller than I like, but I can work around it. I decided on a 345 ohm precharge resistor combination, so it's 95% complete after half a second. The LEDs are also in parallel with a harness which will run up to the dashboard to let me know if any contactors are welded.

I need to find some wheels (2009 GSXR1000 front, Ducati 900ss rear) and some rearsets (footpegs and brake pedal). I never use the rear brake, but the rules state you need one. Not sure what I could use the gear selector pedal for - super strong regen button?