Quote:
Originally Posted by esoneson
Adam,
This is fabulous work. I take it you do this for a living when you aren't up to your elbows in grease.  |
HA, I wish this was my job. I am a shipping and inventory manager for an energy management company thats part my father-in-laws. I just do this stuff as a hobby. I do a small amount of electronics stuff for work, Like right now im working on a custom wireless monitoring system to get some signals across a very large mall. Its very interesting.
Quote:
Originally Posted by esoneson
The limitations that I saw in Paul's basic kit seem to be totally solved with your design/implementation. I was worried that I would need more amps with my application and it seems you have solved that in spades. Paul has been saying that his will support 500 amps with no problem and that is with 11 mosfets sharing the load. Can I safely assume that your design will handle more than 1000 amps? I know that the mosfets are designed with a limit of 200 volts and Paul mentioned that he thought that 144 volts was the max safe limit that should be followed. But then again you are looking at 161(?) volts. Is your confidence in that limit based on any other changes that you have made?
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Well, First off I would have not come this far with the controller if it wasn't for Paul, he has come up with a terrific design. My budget was just above what he had planed for. Thats how this became. Paul says 50A per mosfet/diode pair. That is with the regular diodes that hold the controller back. The ones I am using are good for 90A each up from 60A. So even at the low end of 50A per pair, that 1050A total for the controller. If you bump it up to 80A for my upgraded parts, thats 1680A total.
As for the voltage, Right now, I'm setting the limit at 144V like Paul's controller. We are working together to raise the voltage hopefully above the 162V goal of mine. I have drawn up a simple test circuit board with 2 mosfet/diode pairs and 4 capacitors. I will be using this with a 14.4khz PWM generator circuit. I have up to 20 SLA batteries I will be hooking up to the small power circuit to measure the voltage spikes. I have a 2HP treadmill motor on the way for a load as well. I will start with 11 batteries fully charged at 12.74V each, yielding 140.14V. I will take a measurement on the O-Scope, then add a battery and repeat. I will be charting open voltage, load voltage, current, and temperature in an excel table. Depending on how bat the voltage spikes are at the certain measurements, I will keep adding batteries. 16 Batteries fully charged will be 199.04V, So I dont think I will be going that high. I do hope to be able to make it to 14 batteries for an open circuit voltage of 178.36V.
Quote:
Originally Posted by esoneson
I am still in the design stage of what I want to do. And what you have here seems to fit quite nicely for me. Any chance that you are going to offer a kit or at least pcb's and bom to aid the ambitious folks lacking in EE skills like myself? I'm sure that I am not the only one thinking along these lines.
Nice work and I appreciate you sharing those purdy images. 
Thanks again.
Eric |
I can say I will offer at the least the BOM, but there is almost nothing different from Paul's, just a few components. I would like to offer a kit, but i don't know if that will happen. If I can find a supplier in the states for some form of heat sinked case, I will purchase one and modify the design to fit it.
-Adam