Rotor in, Motor in

I have re-installed the rotor back in the motor, fitted the shaft encoder and re-fitted my IP65 spray can lid. The only silicone I had was the high temperature stuff that I used on the heater core. That worked nicely.

I'm glad border adhesive is useful for something (weight). After the huge trouble we had stripping it off my daughter's bedroom wall we swore we would never use it again.

Since I had to wait a day for the silicone to set, I turned my attention to the chargers and controller tray. I am going to drill out all the 4mm holes and use M4 rivnuts so that I can get stuff off the tray without having to remove it (the tray). I ran out and bought a 6mm cobolt drill (for stainless steel - it works really well) and tried to use a manual method to insert the rivnut - no good. I'll take the tray to work and see if I can use the tool there. So the tray is in the boot of the Super Snipe.

The blue circles are some of the 4mm holes - the red is a 6mm hole I have drilled out.
The DC-DC block (still on tray) is another matter. It's held on with M6 bolts through the bottom from inside the case (nuts underneath). It isn't impossible to get off without removing the tray - just difficult.




As of Sunday afternoon, the motor is back in the car.
It took me and William about an hour of messing around with a jemmy bar and many blocks of wood to get the rear of the motor to a height where I could get the Jack under it. From there it was relatively easy.

I have about half the chargers (six) left to modify. I have to change the current shunts in all the chargers to finalize my modifications for two current settings - 3A and 180mA. I have ordered some shunt wire but it's not due for a week or so. I can still finish installing the controller tray since the rivnuts will allow me to install the chargers afterwards.

Daughter board for current switching shown circled.

My two spare chargers (where I tested this modification) didn't need the shunts changed - they were 12 milliohm. The twelve chargers in the car appear to have anything from 6 to 9 milliohm shunts which makes the low current setting too high - hence the shunt change.

The modification allows the charger to charge at 3 Amps then, when the current drops to less than 300mA, the charger switches to 180mA Constant Current - which is the value that the rudman regulators (cell bypass resistors) in my packs are set. It'll means that charging the car is a set and forget operation - which is as it should be.

Traction Battery Pack Schematic

Something I haven't included in the blog to date is the Traction Battery circuit.
The little blue connectors that connect some sub-packs to others are Anderson PP75 connectors. They are heatshrunk so as to provide finger-proof disconnects. When the "Traction Enable" is off, the entire pack is isolated from the Controller, Heater and DC-DC converters.
The term "VFD" refers to the motor controller - known sometimes as a Variable Frequency Drive.

(Later addition. I see that this page gets a lot of views so I should explain that the Vogue battery pack is a 600 VDC system - which is an unusually high voltage for an EV. I have divided this into two 300 VDC "half packs" - a positive and a negative set of packs. Each numbered pack is comprised of 32 x 10AH Headway LiFePO4 cells arranged as 16S2P - essentially 16 x 20AH cells.)
(Updated 08 Jan 2014)

Some Fiddly bits

I hadn't expected to remove the controller tray quite so soon so had short-cut on a couple of items. The outputs of the DC-DC convertors were wired directly up to the 150A relay and since it had now become a "wiring loom" I needed to add some easy-to-unplug connectors. I also hadn't put a connector in the wire to the +300V contactor coil. I cut them both at a carefully considered point when removing the controller tray.

Here's a trick when soldering small connector pins. A handy vice made out of needle nose pliers and a rubber band. (Speaker connectors from SRM9000 radio.)

I use the same trick when holding connectors to be soldered. For the 20 Amp DC-DC wires I used a couple of XT60 connectors. These are another connector favoured by the serious RC Aeroplane guys/gals. I wish I had known about these before using the Deans connectors on the chargers.

Car side of connectors finished.
Ya gotta love heatshrink!












Once everything was refitted, the motor went fine with no battery warning alert when run. Strangely, the blue LED on battery pack #2 is faulty again. I'll get to that one night next week - maybe it's just coincidence. Now to fit the tailshaft.

Engine Bay BMS and Charger cables connected

A task I have not been looking forward to is trying to get the tangle of cables for chargers and BMS monitoring layed out so they look halfway reasonable. The result is about what I expected - I hoped for better but....
The grey cables are for the BMS monitoring bus. The small red and black wires connect the chargers to each pack via a fuse and a pair of diodes. (The charger has a fuse in the positive lead - I added one in the negative lead).

 

This is typical of the wiring mess that I'll have to clean up. The big black box is the 150 Amp relay that isolates the DC-DC convertors from the battery - overkill, but as I said in an earlier post - I had it.

The lower of the two grey relays is the motor fan relay and the upper of these two is the start/run latch relay.

Engine Bay Relays Mounted

The DC-DC Isolator, Start/Run and Fan Control relays are all mounted. I have also updated the control circuit diagram here to reflect the fact that I have moved the Start/Run latching relay to the engine bay. The wiring will be tidied up as it is terminated. The heavy red wire comes from the boot BMS monitoring. The loose wires draping down toward the battery tray will be used to connect to the relays, so I might modify the wiring loom on this side of the car as well - then again I can hide them pretty easily.
The odd looking mounting positions are due to using existing tapped holes that were previously for the ignition coil, starter solenoid etc.

DC-DC Relay

As mentioned many posts ago in this blog, I have two Switch Mode Power Supplies (DC-DC converters) that will supply up to 40 Amps for the 12 V systems in the car. I do not want to connect them directly to the little 9 AH, 12 V battery because if the car is left idle for some time the DC-DCs will drain the 12 V battery.
So there will be a relay in between the DC-DCs and the 12 V Battery. The relay will turn on when the high voltage system is energised.

A Tyco 150 A relay seems to be a good overkill. Seriously - I had it - and it gives me some convenient 6 mm terminal posts to connect things to. The coil doesn't draw any more current than one of those automotive Narva (or similar) 70 A relays.

The two purple wires go to the coil.

I will try to get it mounted and partially wired tonight.

Easter EV Progress

I often hear of English cars being critisized for poor electrical systems.
I can kind of see why. After pulling the trim off the passenger side it revealed that the wiring has missed the channel allocated for it and been glued below it by the trim adhesive.

   

The result is that the wiring was too short to go around a corner and was pulled tight across an edge of metal.

The purple/white wire is the door switch wire for the interior light. The metal is sharp where the wires drape over the top.

It would not have been too long before the interior light was doomed to flicker on and off of it's own free will.

The cover panels have been re-fitted to the firewall. The remaining hole is for the heater wire cable gland.

12 Volt battery mounted.













With battery. The battery is very secure - surrounded by rubber. The packing strap may be enough to hold it in. You can see the red rubber to the right of the battery with a 10mm hole ready to finally secure the top battery tray. I am using a 9 AH AGM deep cycle battery. No real reason for the deep cycle other than it was easy to get.

The red cable draped around the area in all the engine bay pictures is the BMS monitoring wire that comes from the boot.

This is the 12 VDC to 240 VAC inverter that runs the motor fan. (They could not supply a 12 VDC version way back when I ordered the motor.)

The inverter is mounted where the old ignition coil used to live.

I used two peices of aluminium angle that were offcuts from the rear battery tray and ran a peice of 2 mm aluminium over the top. The inverter sits on a piece of black neoprene rubber with another small strip under the aluminium that loops over the top.

Another minor problem solved. When I opened any door to the wind-stop position then closed the door again it made a sound like a gunshot. The door wind-stop rivets had to be drilled out when the car was re-painted and the bolts that they were replaced with were too loose. I reemed them out to 7.1 mm and fitted uncompressed stainless steel rivnuts (nutserts). A nice clean close now with almost no sound.

12 Volt System for Headlights etc.

Someone asked me last week what I would be doing for the 12 Volt system in the Vogue. Would I just have a big battery that I charged when I charged the battery pack.
Well, that's an option and one that some conversions use.
I don't like the idea much because I can imagine sitting comfortably in peak hour traffic on a cold, rainy night listening to great music (with no engine idling over), when the 12V system starts to fail.
So the option I have chosen is the have a small 12V battery - say 7 to 12AH sealed - which has the primary function of closing the main traction contactors, then have a DC to DC converter that runs the 12V system from the main traction batteries. The DC to DC converters are usually quite expensive but the Vogue's 600 VDC pack can be easily tapped in the middle to create two 300 VDC voltage sources. Since 300 VDC is very close to 220 VAC peak voltage, an easy source of these converters is eBay Switch Mode Power Supplies.

 A risk I had to take was that the supplies went into "fallback" mode when they encountered a large current - the headlights switching on. The ones I bought were OK - they deliver 20 Amps into a near short circuit. They also adjusted up to 13.8 Volts with no problems.
The only problem with these supplies is their open construction - and the small fan which I didn't want (circulating dust).
So a bit of searching "upstairs" at work found this part of a freight train radio system power supply.

A bit of work with the angle grinder and an aluminium cut-off wheel.
Then some countersunk screws, a few holes and tapped threads and another bit of 2.5mm aluminium, then a long search for sealed plastic cases the right size and...

The finished product. Splash and dust proof - no fan - just a large heat sink. They are bolted back to back with the lids on the outside to allow wiring. A single unit delivered 13.6 VDC at 10 Amps for 30 minutes without excessive heat build up. The outputs of the two power supplies will be paralleled with a suitable length of wire from each one's output to ensure reasonably equal load sharing. It's also reassuring to know that one of these can power the entire electrical system in the Vogue on that rainy, cold night. There would be a slight mis-balance in my packs but that's better than having to be towed...

Here is the latest Google SketchUp of the engine bay components. The DC-DC converters are on the right. I really did draw this before I made them (but after I found the boxes and the heat sink).

This is one of two engine bay layouts I am deciding between. The main difference is that in the other one, the controller is sideways to get better airflow. This layout only has 30mm clearance in front of the controller.