I purchased the van three years ago and spent the first year getting it through an MOT ready for conversion to electric drive. The van had spent many years in Thailand and was full of repairs using metal from oil drums, etc.
Today, little has changed with the van itself although I'm making good progress preparing a Nissan Leaf drivetrain for reuse.
Two energy storage options are being developed, battery (currently 48kWh), and hydrogen.
Here's a very crude video that I made a couple of years ago... cringe
I've assembled a 48kWh battery using modules from two 2014 ("Gen 2") Nissan Leaf's. I wanted to reuse the Leaf BMS and 'simply' paralleled up modules to create a pack with twice the capacity of the stock Leaf without requiring any change to the Leaf's system
The biggest challenge is weight... 400kg (~880lbs)
I've reused as many Leaf battery parts as possible, cutting up the orange insulators to accommodate some new busbars that I had laser cut. I was very surprised by the low cost of parts from Nissan and other vendors
Here are the laser printed busbar drawings (Note that I used 2.0mm copper whereas the Nissan originals are 1.6mm)... I'll add the dxf files when I get a moment.
I'm planning on having some silver plated busbars made if anyone want's them
I've been balancing the pack using Wolf's "Nissan Leaf Battery Sniffer" while I've been disassembling the car. As you can see from these LeafSpy shots I did not bother matching the SOC before assembling the packs but it seems to be working out just fine
From what I can see each parallel module has been paired with a module from the same donor pack.
Would you not be better having a module from each donor pack in each parallel module pair?
The two battery packs are likely in different conditions (even if only marginally) and there is the possibility of minor differences in the cell batches.
The two battery packs are likely in different conditions (even if only marginally) and there is the possibility of minor differences in the cell batches.
The donor cars were both built in 2014 with ~5500 and ~10500 miles on the clock and are probably as close as I'm going to get from wrecks. I hope the pack we install in the van will use modules from the later 30kWh batteries and I will spend time bottom balancing those
For now I'm primarily interested in how the BMS and other Leaf systems cope with the increase in capacity... early indications are encouraging
We've started pulling the Leaf's wiring harness apart... the plan is to keep the tabletop Leaf working while we identify the interconnections between the various components
Let me know if you have any questions on thia bit kevin. We did exactly the same a couple of months ago.
Amazing how much can be removed!
The method we used was to red tape all connectors that were needed and then simply remove the rest. You'll find a lot of the needed connectors have significantly fewer wires afterwards!
Also, be waey of the splice blocks. Can can be very confusing/misleading.
I plan to bottom balance the final pack because I'm using cells from two cars... I'm just testing the balancer I built, normally I connect Wolf's battery sniffer whenever the car is not 'running' on the bench
I intend to use the complete unit driving the wheels without the VW transaxle.
I had hoped to keep the inverter and charger on top of the motor but that would require extensive cutting of the bus which I'm trying to avoid. Current plan is to mount the motor only on the new IRS and run it in reverse by swapping the phase connections between the motor and inverter (as originally suggested by Mike Schooling). I hope to test the phase swap next week and with luck the new IRS will be here before the end of the month
Hi Kevin.
In the above post (Nov 13) with the photos of the stripped shell and the Tekna on the trailer.......
..is that tow car a PHEV Outlander ?
If so what are your comments on it regarding general practicality , reliability, suitability for Family use etc.?
Just compiling a short list...
Thanks.
Im liking that new front end for the Spit. That is a first seeing one of these styles for the Bus. I might just be interested in getting one if the shipping and duty costs are reasonable.
not much progress to report... I have removed most of the Leaf wiring loom and everything was working until yesterday when a fault developed which is preventing the system from reading the key and starting
Unfortunately, the service manuals that I have are for US cars and many details are different
so I found the problem that was preventing the system from starting today... it turns out that the steering column uses the same type connector for both the EPS Control Unit and the Steering Lock Unit
The US Leaf service manual does not have any information on the Steering Lock Unit (I suspect the hardware is only installed in UK cars) and therefore it took some time to understand the DTC's that LeafSpy was reporting. I finally figured it out using the following SEC file from an Infiniti;
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