Quick charge project

[sefs]

I made some progress today on my project to add additional charging capability and/or add chademo capability. Today I used a brusa charger to charge the battery via the high voltage junction box. The unknown was whether the car would accept current from an external source without faulting. Well, now I know it will accept current, and the chademo project seems to have the green light for now.

 

[michael]

I've wondered how external chargers work....it's clear you can push charge into the battery pack and monitor the overall voltage, but what (if anything) do you do to monitor the temperatures and cell balance?

Or is that the reason fast charging is limited to maybe 80%? Don't monitor the balance, just charge the whole pack to a safe and reasonable level?

I could imagine that temperatures are not an issue...is the idea that the TMS will do its job no matter what the cause of the battery heating? It doesn't care whether from a fast charge or a hot sunny day?

I'd like to know more about how these are handled safely...

 

[sefs]

Cooling would be handled by the car. While it's in ready to drive, it will cool the battery to keep it in the temperature range. The only thing I have to work on is the battery heating for winter. The battery heaters only activate while charging. I have done some tinkering with bypassing the heater relays for force the heaters to run.

As far as balancing, I'm not too worried. A quick charge or two should not take it too off balanced. It will be balanced next time I nominally charge.

 

[michael]

Cooling would be handled by the car. While it's in ready to drive, it will cool the battery to keep it in the temperature range. The only thing I have to work on is the battery heating for winter. The battery heaters only activate while charging. I have done some tinkering with bypassing the heater relays for force the heaters to run.

As far as balancing, I'm not too worried. A quick charge or two should not take it too off balanced. It will be balanced next time I nominally charge.

I was thinking you could possibly plug in the regular EVSE cable and set it to value charge at some odd time. I think that would cause the car to cool the battery if needed...but you are right, you will probably quick charge and be on the road promptly so no harm in any event.

And yes, I agree about the balancing. particularly if you charge it only to say 80% which I think is typical of fast chargers, some imbalance not a factor.

Very clever....I like the idea!

 

[sefs]

I amped it up a bit tonight. I'm currently pulling 30 amps on the stock charger and 15A on the brusa for a combined 45A of charging power :twisted:

The car is taking it like a champ, no errors or anything. The battery is only 57.2F, and hasn't gone up that much. If nothing else, I'm going to mount two of these under the hood with another J1772 and be able to pull from two charging stations at once :lol:

 

[Olagon]

I amped it up a bit tonight. I'm currently pulling 30 amps on the stock charger and 15A on the brusa for a combined 45A of charging power :twisted:

The car is taking it like a champ, no errors or anything. The battery is only 57.2F, and hasn't gone up that much. If nothing else, I'm going to mount two of these under the hood with another J1772 and be able to pull from two charging stations at once :lol:

Will this void your warranty? Looks like you had to cut through the insulation under the hood.

 

[sefs]

If I damage a related component, it wouldn't be covered. But no, I didn't have to cut anything, this is completely reversible.

 

[sefs]

Some more testing tonight. I ran the Brusa boosting the OBC from 2.5% SOC up to 82.5% SOC. Any guesses for the time?

1 hour and 30 minutes!

51% SOC in 50 minutes!

I've run the numbers, and I think I'm going to add a total of 2 Brusa's. I'll set it up so I can charge off of two EVSE's at once. I'll have to revise my estimator (because I was estimating that 80% SOC was going to take 1:45 and I beat that by 15 minutes), but I think I should be able to do 80% in 60-70 minutes.

Fun times!

 

[sefs]

Data from last night's charging session with the Brusa.

 

[michael]

First of all, let me salute you for your ambitious project and the way you are approaching it.

As I understand it, you are using the external charger in conjunction with the onboard charger. I would be eager to see:

1. When the battery temp reaches 98 F, does the TMS cut in? If so, how well does it maintain temperature. Apparently your starting temp has been low so you haven't reached this point, so to do this you might need to take special steps (or wait til summer...)

2. Does any sort of cell balancing take place? I would suspect not...in this case, is there some way you can know to terminate charging? Or is the plan to simply terminate fast charge early enough that there is no risk of any cell reaching full charge?

 

[sefs]

Thanks for the kind words, I've been thinking of doing this since the month 2 with the FFE :lol:

1. On the battery temperature, you're correct, it's too cold here right now to have the battery at that temp with a single charge. I would have to charge, discharge, and then on the second charge it would be at that temp; but that's kind of an all day affair. I'm definitely looking into the temperature response, because I need to incorporate that for Chademo charge rate controls.

2. Cell balancing is still permitted to take place. I terminated last night after about 85% SOC. After that, it was business as usual. Since the actual pack stops at 90% actual SOC, I'm not very concerned that it would make a single cell go crazy, but the BECM will fault and shut down if a cell would fault. I'll integrate this into the charging controls as well.

 

[grossebrebis]

Any new update? I really want to make my car Chademo compatible or ccs combo! I will follow your thread for sure! And I've done some research the brusa charger not supposed to work on the 50hz? where i living we all are on the 60hz.

 

[sefs]

I'm still working on it. I've just been a bit busy with work. I've been working on getting the can codes from the car to control the chademo charging session with the Arduino. The brusa is 50/60 hz. That will be getting mounted under the hood soon as well.

 

[magudaman]

Wow! Very exciting! I have been dreaming about putting in a 10kw charger to the car to allow me to put a 10kw generator on a hitch. This would essentially work as funky range extender. Still not sure how the car would react as it accelerates and see 10kw less than it expects.

As you start to really look toward the DC fast charge capabilities keep in mind there are now two standards. I just saw a station the other day that upgraded to the new j1772 combo port, thought that was pretty exciting.

Keep up the good work! I will be watching this thread for sure!

 

[Josephus]

Bump.
+1

very interested.

if Chademo could be made to work, I'd not only pay for the parts, I'd pay someone to install it.

 

[sefs]

WE HAVE CAN COMMUNICATION!!!! WOOT

Okay, I just started to log messages, but this is a HUGE step. I admit, I did a dance. :lol:

 

[Tom French]

Are you charging from the oem port.?

Do you need to consider wire size while dual charging.?

Eager to see how this bubbles up.

 

[marxx]

This is very exciting news. Congratulations!

Could you provide us with some details? How did you connect to the CAN bus? How do you log? Are you using a Raspberry Pi?

Questions, questions, questions

For Europe it would be interesting to get the Brusa NLG6 fast charger connected to the FFE:

http://www.brusa.eu/en/products/energy/chargers-400-v/nlg6-fast-charger.html

That would be a great advantage. Charging a Focus with 22kW at home ... A dream come true ...

Respect and greetinx from Germany

marxx

 

[sefs]

Are you charging from the oem port.?

Do you need to consider wire size while dual charging.?

Eager to see how this bubbles up.

Tom, I did consider swapping out the OEM port for an upgraded port, but as there are very few J1772 high ampacity stations, I decided to go with a second J1772. It will go under the hood. My intention is to use it on road trips where I can pull from two J1772 stations at once.

 

[sefs]

This is very exciting news. Congratulations!

Could you provide us with some details? How did you connect to the CAN bus? How do you log? Are you using a Raspberry Pi?

Questions, questions, questions

For Europe it would be interesting to get the Brusa NLG6 fast charger connected to the FFE:

http://www.brusa.eu/en/products/energy/chargers-400-v/nlg6-fast-charger.html

That would be a great advantage. Charging a Focus with 22kW at home ... A dream come true ...

Respect and greetinx from Germany

marxx

I connected to the CAN bus through the DTC port (this is the one behind the door under the headlight switch. The other OBD2 style port below all of the knee bolsters is the same, it's just at the CAN gateway. The DTC port (it is white and behind the knee bolster door) is the one recommended by Ford to use to interface with the car.

I am using the Can Due from EVTV. It is an arduino based CAN interface device. If you want to get started, I recommend it, with the condition that you know some C programming.

It would be pretty easy to integrate the BRUSA 22kw into the vehicle. However, I don't have 50Hz or three phase at home, so it isn't very useful to me. However, I have done pretty much the same thing with the 3.3kW BRUSA unit.

I am having a replacement high voltage junction box lid machined so I can add cable glands to hook up to a new junction box. This will hold the contactors for Chademo and the battery voltage access for the BRUSA.