Modifying Brake Regeneration

[ECO-AKJ]

I don't own a hybrid....yet, but I ran across this and found it interesting, let me know what you think!

AutoSpeed - A World First: Modifying Regen Braking

[Natalya]

All you have to do to get maximum regen in a Honda Insight is wire a switch to the stock brake pedal wires that closes the circuit between them. Now the car thinks you're pressing the brakes and it gives maximum regen.

From reading his article it sounds like the G1 Prius was wired differently from the G1 Insight and maybe that approach wouldn't work on that vehicle.

A concern with the G1 Honda Insight is that the hybrid battery management developed by Honda is absolute ****. Something you'd want to do if you were using this would be to increase the duty cycle of the IMA cooling fan, or wire in a switch to keep it always on. The added heat from full-regen charging could potentially lower the life of the batteries if you don't also add extra cooling.

Something else to consider is that over-charging the bybrid battery ina G1 Insight also reduces its life. You really don't want the cells above 80% unless you're doing a balance charge.

I know the G2 Prius has some really hard internal controls on the battery voltage and charge levels and tries to keep them within, I believe, a 20% range. On a G1 Insight if you "over-charge" the hybrid battery with a switch like this the car will eventually stop trying to regen, and now you have to use the manual brakes only.

Maybe there's a way to create a diverter of some kind, for when you've overcharged but still want to use electric brakes, where it sees the hybrid battery is full so it sends the power into something else like a giant resistor with a heat sink or some fans or something, or even a secondary battery or super capacitors, so you can either burn that energy off as heat or use it later.

The G1 Insight has a "State of Charge" metric stored in one of its computers. Maybe you could detect 95% SoC and then activate a relay so it starts dumping regen energy into something else, so you can keep getting it, but then when you used some charge as hybrid assist and the SoC goes back down the relay turns off and the regenerative braking goes into the hybrid battery as normal.