It's TWINS: Unveiling the Ultimate EV Motor

It's Christmas at EVTV. We've received a couple of long awaited shipments.

The most exciting is of course from Jim Husted - our Siamese Twin Netgain Warp 11 motors - assembled onto a single 100mm shaft. This motor has beefed up brush connections, beefed up field windings, and the new Helwig split brush redtop brushes. THESE brushes have been thoroughly pre-seated to the commutator. To save length, we have had the fans removed, making external blowers mandatory for cooling.

The result is stunning, a shiny black jewel of some 32 inches in length with brushed metal appointments that absolutely shines. It is a work of art in metal and destined to be the "Iron Man heart power pack" for our 2008 Cadillac Escalade EXT which ALSO sports a shiny black with shiny chrome motif.

The device weighs 512 lbs with the test stand it is on. It's a monstah. Ballinz.

Congratulations Mr. Jim Husted on a job well done. I don't even care if it works. We can get it to work. What I can't get is this kind of artistry in metal.

Total cost? Right at $20,000 including the dual Soliton1 controllers which we also got from Mr. Husted.

We're continuing to scratch our heads (and other extremities) over the transmission issue. We've discovered a number of pretty basic items on the vehicle that are tied into the existing 6L80E transmission electronics, including our status indicator, backup camera and collision avoidance radar, our backup lights, and I'm frankly not sure what all else.

As a result, I've talked Mr. Hauber into at least trying a trial mating of the Husted Siamese Twins to our existing 6L80E transmission.

All motors and drivetrains make claims as to power and current and voltage and torque and horsepower and kilowatts and all manner of things. We really have not had a good way to test all that. I talked with a company about a dynamometer but it started at $80K and quickly got expensive so we never did pursue it.

Mr. Hauber had a Siemens 1FV5139-6WS28-Z generator that he inherited from a company that had received it damaged in shipping. He offered it to me at an attractive price, and we negotiated down from there. I bought it for $1000 plus shipping and he had it shipped out and it arrived on the same day.

The concept is to build a test bench for electric vehicle drive trains. This really involves EVERYTHING in an EV, batteries, charger, controller, 5k pot, motor, transmission, DC-DC converter PLUS some sort of load to keep from over revving the electric motor. Pretty obviously, a generator would do that.

Not only would it do it, but our case is a bit peculiar. We could of course measure the output of the generator, correct for RPM and generator efficiency, and with enough badly written software calculate the power input to the generator shaft in Horsepower, Torque, and Killowatts. So we'll do that.

But unlike a standard dynomometer, we can take the output of the generator and put it BACK in the batteries. My own version of perpetual motion. Of course, we'll get out less than we put in, but it will still be useful energy instead of heat that has to be washed away with massive amounts of cooling water - which is how they mostly do this with dynamometers.

And so before ever doing the Cadillac, we're going to lay out all the pieces and get THEM working well on the bench. After we move the controllers and motors to the vehicle, we will still be left with a working test bench that we can use with OTHER motor/controller combinations, or DC-DC converters, or whatever.

I'm pretty jazzed about it.

I'm also pretty jazzed about our newest sponsors. First, Masterflux has signed on as an advertiser and is providing a unit of their Sierra series for our electric vehicle contest. We talk a good bit about this device, an air conditioning compressor with a wide input voltage AND a wide BTU output that we used on the Mini Cooper to get our air conditioner going - and quite successfully so.

Not mentioned in this video, because it has just been finalized, is our selection of a battery pack and a new major sponsor of EVTV - the Winston Battery Company. We tried to get their newest Lithium Sulphur batteries for this project, but simply failed by virtue of the fact that there won't be any until the first half of next year, according to Mr. Winston Chung, head of Winston Battery Company (previously Thundersky).

But we did work out a bit of an exciting deal - 70 of their existing Lithium Yttrium cells of size 400AH to power the Cadillac EXT. We'll build the vehicle, and of course test its range, power output, acceleration, etc with the Yttrium pack. Next year, when the Sulphur cells are available, we'll swap them out with the Yttrium's and do the same tests. This should be a fantastic opportunity to compare the newer LSP cells to the existing already excellent LYP cells to learn first hand the differences.

And of course, on exactly the same vehicle. Our many thanks to Ms. Amanda Cheung, who helped us communicate directly with Mr. Chung.

Of course, we'll be dealing with Winston Battery Company's new North American agent, Balqon Corporation of Harbor City California. This company was previously a large customer of Winston Battery Company. Mr. Chung has basically acquired a large holding in publicly traded Balqon, and indeed has ordered $15 million in drive trains from Balqon to install in electric busses in China. In the process, he has turned over all sales in North America of Winston Battery Company cells to Balqon.

The Thundersky group forum online has erupted into a total mess as a result of one extremely bizarre and apparently disturbed man who is posting 30 messages a day again with dire warnings of all that will befall you if you fail to employ a proper BMS and top balance your cells.

I was going to respond to all this when it occurred to me that I already had. So this morning I went and reviewed our show from November 13, 2009 - has it been 15 months ago? It really walks you through the entire thing with really quite unassailable clarity on the topic of top balancing and cell drift. There's very little added since then of any import. So instead of responding ad nauseum to the newbies reigniting this debate with all the energy of those who think they have discovered something, I'll simply link to the show again. I can't add much to what I said then. It's conclusive. It's clear. And in the intervening 15 months no one has come up with anything cogent refuting it beyond the admonition that in their opinion, they don't agree???? No data, no test results, no reports of inability to duplicate. As such, I have no further interest in the discussion unless someone somewhere can come up with something more artful than "is not, is so, is not, is so".