[Kevin Sharpe]

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

 

[skooler]

Subscribe

 

[Ai!]

Subscribed

me too) what a nice van You have!

 

[Yabert]

Nice! Keep us update.

 

[Karter2]

......Two energy storage options are being developed, battery (currently 48kWh), and hydrogen......

..hydrogen ? .....seriously ?

 

[Kevin Sharpe]

..hydrogen ? .....seriously ?

PLEASE, lets not discuss Battery v Hydrogen in this thread... many thanks

 

[Kevin Sharpe]

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)

 

[Kevin Sharpe]

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

 

[Kevin Sharpe]

Sources for some of the parts I purchased;

(1) metal hardware "kit" (end plates, threaded rod, brackets) from The Hybrid Auto Centre for $100

http://hybridautocenter.com/


(2) new 24 module busbar assembly from Nissan Parts Deal for $103.63

http://www.nissanpartsdeal.com/part...ation=electric-vehicle-battery,291_A004,295L1


(3) new 24 module busbar covers from Nissan Parts Deal for $1.39 each (3 required)

http://www.nissanpartsdeal.com/part...ion=electric-vehicle-battery,291_A004,295B8+D

 

[Kevin Sharpe]

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

 

[Kevin Sharpe]

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

 

[skooler]

Hi Kevin.

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.

Just a thought.

Mike

 

[Kevin Sharpe]

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

 

[skooler]

The donor cars were both built in 2014 with ~6500 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 that its working out just fine

Got it.

The leaf systems will work fine - when we did the Bex project it just worked. Although we put an additional pack in Parallel (with its own bms) rather than additional modules.



Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk

 

[Kevin Sharpe]

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

 

[skooler]

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.

 

[Kevin Sharpe]

We've started looking at options for reusing the Leaf's displays;

http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showthread.php/leaf-instrument-displays-177729.html

 

[Kevin Sharpe]

not much progress to report... we've built a bottom balancing tool based on the work of tom and evtv (see the following video for more details);

 

[Karter2]

Why the bottom balancing ?
I thought you were using the "sniffer" to ballance the packs ?

 

[Kevin Sharpe]

Why the bottom balancing ?
I thought you were using the "sniffer" to ballance the packs ?

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