Month: December 2017

LiMn/LiMnO2-Lithium Manganese Oxide. Adding manganese to the cathode made this chemistry more stable and less sensitive to individual cell balancing issues. If you were using LiFePO4, and one cell began losing its amp-hour capacity, the rest of the pack would get dragged down to the weakest cells level. Demanding high amps with one weak cell in the pack would cause the entire pack to wear out much earlier than it should have.  With LiMn, the packs just seems to stay in balance, with all the individual cells aging equally. Good question. The answer comes down to the difference between “nominal voltage” and “actual voltage”. LiFePO4 cells are nominally called 3.2V cells, because this is their voltage in the middle of their discharge curve, at about 50% discharge. They actually charger to a higher voltage though, about 3.7V per cell. That means that you need a charger that has an output voltage of 3.7V x 6 cells = 22.2V DC. This is going to be a bit harder to find because most LiFePO4 packs come in multiples of 4 cells, (4, 8, 12, 16 cells, etc) so finding a charger for a 6S pack might take some searching. This charger is a good quality one meant for 8 cells (output voltage of 29.2V DC) but if you put a note in the purchase order, the seller can adjust the output...

Another disadvantage of lead acid batteries is the shorter lifespan. Most claim to be rated for over 200 cycles, but in practice I usually find many SLAs start showing their age at around 100 cycles. They’ll still work as they get up in years (or charge cycles), but you’ll begin seeing your range quickly decreasing. If you were traveling 15 miles per charge when the SLAs were new, a year later you could find yourself barely getting past 10 miles. Most inexpensive NiMH packs are not really designed for discharges greater than 1C. That means that if your ebike draws 15 amps on average, you would want a pack that has a capacity on the order of 15 amp-hours more. Just kidding, here’s a little more detail. 1) Yes, actually you could just use one strip of nickel on series connections to make the electrical connection, but one strip of 0.15mm thick nickel strip can only safely carry less than 10A. Ideally you want at least one strip for every 5-7A you plan to pull through the battery. 2) You can definitely do the series connections first, it is just habit for me to do parallel connections first. Also, on larger packs I like to do parallel groups first and then glue them together and do the series connections as I glue each group. 3) People have explored this idea...

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