Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

super caps are also hugely more dangerous. I like where this is going.

how much onboard generator do you need to make this idea work? At what point are you installing a small car engine that drives a dozen alternators to provide the electricity?

20+ Time Loser FutilityMotorsport
Abandoned E36 Build
2008 Saab 9-5Aero Wagon
Retired - 1989 Dodge Daytona Shelby 2011-2015 "Lifetime Award for Lack of Achievement" IOE, 3X I got screwed, Organizer's Choice

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

We only average 9kw around the track. This is not a fast car. We will use 30kw when accelerating though. Theoretically we should be able to run a 10kw portable generator powered by a 1 or 2 cylinder lawn mower engine and use the super caps as an energy sink to store power while we are decelerating to power our next acceleration. That's how it all works in our heads.

If I take a portable generator out of its frame and remove all of the extra stuff from it, then I should be able to bolt it down in the back hatch area.

A bank of caps that will give me 30 seconds of full power will take up 2 cubic feet of space. That should fit in the car as well.

I don't know about the danger. One explodes and is over with. The other creates a super-hot fire than can't be put out until it burns itself out. Either is probably less dangerous than a tank full of gallons of a highly flammable liquid.

Everybody grab your brooms, it's shenanigans!

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

The danger comment was more about what happens if you try to discharge through yourself. But you're already dealing with the battery packs, so it wasn't a serious comment.

I look forward to seeing where you guys go from here.

20+ Time Loser FutilityMotorsport
Abandoned E36 Build
2008 Saab 9-5Aero Wagon
Retired - 1989 Dodge Daytona Shelby 2011-2015 "Lifetime Award for Lack of Achievement" IOE, 3X I got screwed, Organizer's Choice

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

Yeah, we try not to touch the car any more than we have to.

Everybody grab your brooms, it's shenanigans!

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

Congrats on the IoE win! I've enjoyed reading about your progress. When I heard Lemons let you keep running during the CMP quiet hour, I laughed my ass off.

I can't believe you're thinking about re-engineering the whole car just when it sounds like you're finally getting a hang of the battery situation, but I would never discourage such ingenuity. Keep up the good work!

181

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

SpaceFrank wrote:

Congrats on the IoE win! I've enjoyed reading about your progress. When I heard Lemons let you keep running during the CMP quiet hour, I laughed my ass off.

This is BRILLIANT!

And yes, I'm sorry for my lack of manners. Huge CONGRATS to you and the team for your IOE to go along with your IOEE. I'm totally rooting for you all to keep climbing that ladder to a Class C win!

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

Build number two?

https://us.letgo.com/en/i/1981-jet-elec … 08e938fb21

1988 Escort GT
2017 CMP Spring Heroic Fix
2018 CMP Spring IOE

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

I encourage everyone here in the strongest possible terms buy and race this car.

Everybody grab your brooms, it's shenanigans!

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

SpaceFrank wrote:

I can't believe you're thinking about re-engineering the whole car just when it sounds like you're finally getting a hang of the battery situation


We think we've got a handle on it, but there's still a lot that is broken with the system and it still has a lot of pieces. We also blew up some batteries this weekend and need another $1500 Volt pack to move forward, so if we're dropping $1500 anyway.......

Getting the IOE kind of made us rethink the enterprise; we could continue to refine it as is, or we could declare ourselves victorious and do something totally different. In the end, we thought that it would be more fun to convert it to a terrible hybrid race car than to keep trying to work the bugs out of it as a terrible EV race car. Plus, after buying them and charging them and blowing them up and moving tens of thousands of pounds of them in and out of the car in a weekend, we have come to dislike batteries.

Everybody grab your brooms, it's shenanigans!

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

If someone wants it I can help facilitate it. It's only about 15 miles from me.

1988 Escort GT
2017 CMP Spring Heroic Fix
2018 CMP Spring IOE

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

https://youtu.be/9lRcd2D-iRA

It's pretty boring until 34:22 when the battery alarm sounds. 108 cells, there's a monitor on a single 12S module. (the lowest partial charged block.) The entire pack was still reading 138.9V. Sadly the camera was too low to keep seeing the buzzards eating a dead something before T8.

Duff Beer Civic (#128) -- 2014 Sebring - Class B (#1 of 7), 2016 Barber - Class B
1981 Jet Electrica 007 [Plymouth Horizon TC3] (#128) -- Mk.1 - Index of Effluency Eco (IOEe) @ 2016 Lemons South Fall, Mk.2 - Judges' Choice @ 2017 'Shine Country Classic, Mk.3 - Index of Effluency @ 2017 Southern Discomfort

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

What happened with the battery failure?

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

Roger turned one too many laps on a partially charged pack - chasing down the astro van. In the process, one (or more) cells were pulled below 1.4v -- it had recovered to 1.4 by the time we checked it. I'll take it apart when I get everything off the RV. Charles did the same thing with a second partially charged pack -- without a BMS, we have no way to know the state of any single cell, and our chargers are too stupid perform a partial charge. (our arduino-signal-wire balance cables didn't help)

Duff Beer Civic (#128) -- 2014 Sebring - Class B (#1 of 7), 2016 Barber - Class B
1981 Jet Electrica 007 [Plymouth Horizon TC3] (#128) -- Mk.1 - Index of Effluency Eco (IOEe) @ 2016 Lemons South Fall, Mk.2 - Judges' Choice @ 2017 'Shine Country Classic, Mk.3 - Index of Effluency @ 2017 Southern Discomfort

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

jfbeam wrote:

https://youtu.be/9lRcd2D-iRA

It's pretty boring until 34:22 when the battery alarm sounds. 108 cells, there's a monitor on a single 12S module. (the lowest partial charged block.) The entire pack was still reading 138.9V. Sadly the camera was too low to keep seeing the buzzards eating a dead something before T8.

wait, where are all the other cars?

https://www.facebook.com/greatglobsofoil/
This car....Is said to have a will of it's Own. Twisting its own body in rage...It accelerates on.
1978 Opel/Buick Isuzu(C>B>C>B) , 1996 Nissan Maxima OnlyFans (B) , Sold 1996 Ford Probe GT(B),

190 (edited by ukemike 2017-05-05 08:33 PM)

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

This should eventually get moved to the Epic Builds section. 

Could you just use an overpowered ICE spinning a big generator to power the electric motor?  It would still be a hybrid, but it would be wildly inefficient, ridiculous, and bizarre, but potentially more racy than what you have already.

Oh and here is my theme suggestion

Kilowat Guy!

https://www.google.com/search?q=electri … ilowat+guy


Has someone filmed one of your battery changes?  It'd be awesome to see a time lapse of that.

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

And the sound of being green. [ https://youtu.be/ZpSHSGavfLQ ] We did about 7mpg this time.

Duff Beer Civic (#128) -- 2014 Sebring - Class B (#1 of 7), 2016 Barber - Class B
1981 Jet Electrica 007 [Plymouth Horizon TC3] (#128) -- Mk.1 - Index of Effluency Eco (IOEe) @ 2016 Lemons South Fall, Mk.2 - Judges' Choice @ 2017 'Shine Country Classic, Mk.3 - Index of Effluency @ 2017 Southern Discomfort

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

kakarot1232001 wrote:

wait, where are all the other cars?

It was quiet hour.

Everybody grab your brooms, it's shenanigans!

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

jfbeam wrote:

And the sound of being green. [ https://youtu.be/ZpSHSGavfLQ ] We did about 7mpg this time.

That's about what our 460 Big Block LTD gets on track.

Tunachuckers: 15 Years of Effluency
'08 - '10: 1966 Volvo 122, "Charlie"
'10 - '18: 1975 Ford LTD Landau --> 2018 - current: Converted into 1950 "Plymford"
'22 - current: 1967 Volvo 122, "Charlie ]["

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

So, it looks like our next step is a big onboard generator feeding a bridge rectifier and a couple of filter caps, which should give us 168VDC. Feed that in to a series DC motor controller. Wire the controller to full-tilt-boogie, but set a hard input current limit (kind of a cheap/dirty CC power supply), then feed the output of that in parallel to an energy bank (batteries or capacitors) and to our AC motor controller.

I have an alternate plan using a programmable 12Kw EV charger set to CC mode as the CC power supply, but that's a lot more expensive.

We'll have about 20 seconds to get up to speed after a corner, and then maintenance throttle to the next turn while we recharge our energy bank. I can see no way in which this plan can possibly fail.

All of this will hopefully debut at the fall CMP race, while we roll out in another new car at NCM. The NCM car should have no electricity of any kind, a purely mechanical race car.

Everybody grab your brooms, it's shenanigans!

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

Update, after kicking around our options, experimenting with driving the car around town with limited current, and speaking with the engineers who designed the 12Kw EV charger, the plan has transmogrified.

We need a lot of current for a good while, probably enough to make super caps impractical unless we pour tens of thousands of dollars into the battery box. Since we already have a huge crapload of Volt batteries laying around, we will probably be sticking with batteries.

The engineers for the programmable charger have assured me that it will survive this use case at our duty cycle if we get it enough clean air to keep it cool. This may require some kind of roof-mounted air ram scoop, but we wanted to do that anyway, just because racecar.

We were lugging the motor at CMP, which probably contributed to our overheating issue. After doing some experimenting, I have reassembled the shift linkage so we can use first and second gears again, and we will be using them going forward. This motor is happiest if you rev the hell out of it. The built-in fan also doesn't move much air, so I will be adding a manifold to one end of the motor and using some fans, probably Prius battery box fans, to move more cooling air through the motor.

All of this is still adding up to series hybrid, with the guts of a portable generator mounted where a passenger would normally be, a big-ass programmable charger mounted somewhere where we can get it a lot of air (roof?), and 25% more batteries, which will be managed using hacked Nissan Leaf BMS units.

It should be faster, have greatly extended range (hours?), and turn even more quiet hour laps than before, all without banks of generators running in the paddock or swapping out thousands of pounds of batteries.

I've been selling off generators, chargers, power supplies, and batteries. As of today, I had enough in the PayPal account to order the fancy charger, which should be enough for me to run a test configuration using one of our existing generators and battery packs to see if this idea will work at all. I should know something in 2-3 weeks.

Everybody grab your brooms, it's shenanigans!

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

I'm voting for "roof mounted generator". Once the gas tank is removed (which we have to do anyway), the thing only weighs 120ish pounds. The cage won't even know that's there. The leaf BMS will definitely work as a monitor, however the balancing function may not work with 25% of the batteries "missing" (36 cell strings vs. the nissan's 48 -- times 2... they made it as two sections because there's a fuse in the middle of the pack.)

Duff Beer Civic (#128) -- 2014 Sebring - Class B (#1 of 7), 2016 Barber - Class B
1981 Jet Electrica 007 [Plymouth Horizon TC3] (#128) -- Mk.1 - Index of Effluency Eco (IOEe) @ 2016 Lemons South Fall, Mk.2 - Judges' Choice @ 2017 'Shine Country Classic, Mk.3 - Index of Effluency @ 2017 Southern Discomfort

197 (edited by mechimike 2017-07-11 04:29 AM)

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

You might have an...interesting time getting fuel up from a cell to the generator.  Fuel doesn't flow uphill as well as electricity does.

Tunachuckers: 15 Years of Effluency
'08 - '10: 1966 Volvo 122, "Charlie"
'10 - '18: 1975 Ford LTD Landau --> 2018 - current: Converted into 1950 "Plymford"
'22 - current: 1967 Volvo 122, "Charlie ]["

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

I was going to use a cheap low pressure electric fuel pump.

I like the roof mount idea, leave it in it's tubular steel frame and u-bolt it to the main hoop. Put the charger in the passenger seat area and load an extra battery pack in the box in back.

I love it when a bad plan comes together in an extremely sketchy manner.

Everybody grab your brooms, it's shenanigans!

199 (edited by Spank 2017-07-11 01:42 PM)

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

I hold no authority on anything. But seeing what I've seen, please reconsider having fuel pumped to a terminus over the head of the driver.

The counter-argument is, of course, that it is MUCH better to have it upstream of the driver in a 70mph headwind...

Re: "Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car

Spank wrote:

please reconsider having fuel pumped to a terminus over the head of the driver.

I've had the same visions of refinery fires. The fuel pump has to be at the engine pulling from the cell. I don't want anything pushing gas over my head.

Of course, there's also the possibility to put it... in the engine bay. I'd rather not have any additional sources of heat in there, but there's room for it, esp. if the controller is moved to the firewall. For that matter, it could be mounted under the battery box, where the factory charger used to live. (where a normal omni's gas tank would've been) We'd have to heat shield the battery box.

Duff Beer Civic (#128) -- 2014 Sebring - Class B (#1 of 7), 2016 Barber - Class B
1981 Jet Electrica 007 [Plymouth Horizon TC3] (#128) -- Mk.1 - Index of Effluency Eco (IOEe) @ 2016 Lemons South Fall, Mk.2 - Judges' Choice @ 2017 'Shine Country Classic, Mk.3 - Index of Effluency @ 2017 Southern Discomfort