The aftermarket cell replacement saga

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ThisNonsense

New member
Joined
Dec 1, 2018
Messages
4
A couple of months ago I started having an issue with a couple of cells in the pack of my Mitsubishi Minicab Miev. It's a van based off the iMiev, so much so that it's almost just a different shell around the outside. Initially it was just one cell that had gone bad, but I could see that it was self discharging slowly and the balancing circuits weren't able to fix it during a charge and since there aren't a whole lot of iMievs in Australia to begin with I had to improvise a little.

Band aid fixes and recommendations for pack removal
The first fix as a bunch of 18650 cells that were recovered from laptop batteries and had their capacities tested to try to match it to the other cells in the pack. I won't go into this fix too much other than to say it held up surprisingly well until the inevitable happened about a month or two later and the pack of 18650s eventually started dying too (who would have guessed that laptop batteries don't like being discharged at 1C with peaks up to 2.5C? :roll: ).

TKhiRjK.jpg

(Note the 18650 pack in the bottom right corner)
39ByVGc.jpg

(Yes, it is held together with electrical tape and connected through welding cables. What else did you expect?)

Thankfully, by the time the 18650s were starting to become very unhappy another cell in the pack also started dying. So, now with two dying cells I decided to do the smart thing and grab some aftermarket 40Ah cells from Taobao (the rest of the LEV50 cells in my car are around 37Ah last time I was able to see full pack capacity). I also bought a 70Ah cell for my friend to use and to compare sizes against the LEV50s in my van.
Dropping the pack wasn't too hard since I'd done it before when I installed the 18650 pack, but I definitely recommend using a car hoist if you have access to one, but we made do with a couple of jacks, jack stands, some wooden blocks, and a pallet jack (though any kind of dolly can work). (If you're looking for a how to guide, check out https://www.speakev.com/threads/c-zero-battery-pack-repair.137750/) It would especially help to use a car hoist if things go wrong and you end up having to install, remove, and reinstall the pack several times because you either forgot to do things or things weren't connected properly! ;)

Preperations for replacing the cells
It might not seem obvious if you've never stuck your head inside an iMiev battery pack, but there are a couple things you need to do before you can actually connect the new cell into the pack. Obviously there's the simply stuff like balancing, but there's also things like terminal connections and spacing, balancing connections, and cell packing. I'll try to deal with each one separately.
Firstly, the terminals on LEV50s have captive M8 bolts which connect to the bus bars between the cells. All of the batteries that I could find from China do not. So you'll need to make your own terminals. For this we used some 5/16" (I think?) brass threaded rod cut into short pieces, some annealed copper pipe which was crushed flat, and some brass nuts to suit the threaded rod. We crushed the pipe flat, tapped it for 5/16" thread, then screwed in short sections of threaded rod and soldered it in place. Then we soldered our home made bolts into place on the terminals of the batteries. The batteries we bought came with small tabs that I think ended up being zinc coated stainless steel. We removed the tabs beforehand because we didn't need them and wanted better contact between our bolt and the terminal.

50E1VWV.jpg

(The replacement cell is significantly smaller than the original cells. Possibly suggesting that it's not actually 40Ah after all. We also removed the tabs that you can see bent over the sides of the battery.)
Knt4wlX.jpg

(Our little home made bolts. They were surprisingly easy to fabricate when you know a guy that used to run a sheet metal fabrication shop ;) )
Nxccsig.jpg

(Soldering took a bit of work, there's quite a bit of thermal mass to draw heat away from the bit you're trying to heat up. Don't mind the black goo, it is liquid electrical tape)

When it came to terminal spacing it worked out really well, the spacings of the terminals turned out to be close enough to the terminals on the LEV50s that we could just position the bolt in the right place on the terminal. If you need to extend the bolt past the end of the terminal I'd probably recommend using longer sections of the annealed copper tubing to get it in the right place.
The next issue is the balancing leads. On the LEV50s in the iMiev, the balacing board screws directly on to one of the terminals of the cell itself with an M3 (I think?) screw. Unfortunately, the cells from China don't come with any tapped points on the terminal and we were unwilling to take the risk of trying to tap directly into the terminal. So what we did was take a small length of wire, solder one end to the the correct terminal, solder the other end to an M3 bolt then thread it through the hole in the balacing board and hold it in place with a nut. This seems to have worked successfully for the most part (more on this later). (No pictures of this section, it was done pretty late at night and we were done for the day)
Finally, packing. Since the new cells and the LEV50s are of a different size you'll need to make sure that the new cells can will be kept in place without putting any stress on the balance board or the tabs of the other batteries. For this project we ended up using spray foam insulation since it expands pretty well to fill the space and sets pretty hard to hold everything where it needs to be. Initially I was going to just use bits of corrugated cardboard, but ended up being talked out of it. I'm pretty happy with how it has held up so far. I've driven a little over 1000km since putting in the new cells (including some very harsh speed bumps in a school and a university) and everything has held up fine. The only thing I'd mention about using spray foam to hold stuff in place is that it makes and future service work pretty much impossible without having to ruin the foam.

dOcf5ve.jpg

(There's quite a bit of spill over from the foam. We ended up cutting it away at one point in the hopes of speeding up the curing process. I think since there wasn't much surface area exposed to air it made it take a lot longer to set)
uJcHSkq.jpg

(You can see one of the replacement cells in the bottom right where the old 18650 pack was sitting. The other is covered by the disconnect busbar, it's right next to the length of foam.)

Issues encountered along the way
Everything seems to be going fine so far. There was a bit of a problem initially, mainly caused by me forgetting to install a couple of bolts when putting the battery back together which resulted in one of the cells disconnecting entirely and the van having to be towed back to a friends house and spending nearly three weeks in his shed. :oops: I think something to do with the jostling and sporadic connections during the initial drive killed the chip on the balancing board (and LTC6802G-2 in case anyone is interested). Initially it just looked like one cell had disconnected and was reading 2.10v (the minimum that any cell can read due to how the balance board reports voltages) but by the time we dropped the pack again, re-added the bolts, re-installed the pack, and checked the cell voltages it looked like every cell on that board was dead. We confirmed that all the cells were fine, and tried swapping the eeprom chip from the balance board to one of the other balance boards (a la Rupert Burbidge https://www.speakev.com/threads/c-zero-battery-pack-repair.137750/page-5) and the known good board registered as the bad board without any abnormal voltage readings. We then tried the eeprom from the known good board on the bad board and, sure enough, it ended up registering as the known good board but with all the voltages reading 2.10v. In the process of trouble shooting we ruined two of the balance boards (we tried to swap the balancing chip with very limited success) and had to buy some from someone in Australia who happened to have a wrecked iMiev battery laying around. With the eeproms swapped to the boards from the other pack and the battery re-installed, everything started working fine.
I spoke a little earlier about having an issue with the balancing. Basically, one of the new cells is not being correctly balanced. It's not out by much, but the cell is consistently 0.035v higher than the other replaced cell, and is always the first cell to reach 4.10v (full charge as far as the BMU is concerned). This is mainly an issue because the two new 40Ah cells aren't really giving me that capacity (more on this later too). I think maybe the balance lead has come loose (it wouldn't surprise me if I hadn't tightened it properly when we first assembled the pack) however I haven't had a chance to drop the pack again since I've started getting suspicious about how this cell is out of balance.
One final issue that was due to the previous repair attempt is that one of the nuts seized onto the threads of the captive bolt on the cell next to the one that was replaced with 18650s. When we re-attached the bus bar we probably over tightened the nut and it ended up welding itself in place. When I went to undo the nut I broke the plastic holding the bolt captive and it began to spin freely. We ended up fixing this by bending the terminal up, cutting the bolt free, replacing some plastic beneath the terminal. We then bent the terminal back into place and soldered the bus bar in place. It's not an ideal solution, but it works.

Uz1EKFg.jpg

(Be careful when tightening the bolts that hold the busbar in place, that just some heat resistant plastic (bakelite?))
CT0KLga.jpg

(We had to replace the plastic underneath because the case appears to be neither body positive nor body negative and we didn't want accidental shorts)
jo3WCpo.jpg

(After soldering the busbar back in place everything fit back together fine. It will make it a little more difficult to work with this pack in future as it means I have to completely disassemble it before I can remove any of the cells.)

Results
The first thing I'll mention is that so far everything has been going well (since I replaced the bolts and the balance boards we killed). The cells have held up fine and there doesn't appear to be any degradation going on with the new cells from their treatment. Unfortunately, they're also not giving me anything near 40Ah. In fact I seem to be getting something close to 20Ah, but the BMU is taking a while to adjust down. I think there are a couple of reasons this might be happening.
Firstly, I'm a little suspicious of the rating given on the Taobao listing. I wouldn't be surprised if I've bought cells that are 30Ah at 1C discharge and 40Ah at 1 amp or something like that.
Secondly, since the iMiev BMUs only work from 3.60v to 4.10v and the capacities listed for the battery seems to be measured from 2.75v to 4.20v I'm pretty sure there's going to be about 10% to 20% loss in "usable capacity" as measured by the car.
Thirdly, I'm being held back a little by one of the cells hitting full charge first and this meaning the other cell reaches empty first. Once I get a chance to check the balancing lead I'll have to see if that makes any sort of noticeable difference.
Finally, I think there's a calibration issue either caused by trying to voltage match the cells before they were installed (so the BMU isn't sure how much capacity it actually has any more) or by a difference in voltage curves for different lithium battery chemistries. The calibration issue makes some sense to me because when I took the old cells out, they were very nearly dead and nearly a third of a volt lower than the rest of the cells. When I installed the new cells I had to put about 10-15Ah into them to bring them as close to being in balance with the rest of the cells as I could. This might mean that the BMU doesn't know about those extra Ah at the bottom. I've noticed my car seem to go into turtle mode when the last cell hits about 3.67v under no load (maybe around ~3.5v under full load) and thinks it has about 2.5Ah remaining, both of those seem a little wrong to me. The other option is the difference in voltage curves, this one is based on the idea that the "Amp hours remaining" value given out by the BMU is calculated based on the voltage of the pack each time the car starts up and then is tracked based on current draw during driving until the car is started again, and then the process starts again. I might sound a bit odd, but I've noticed that if I charge the car to full from turtle mode (~2Ah remaining) I'll put in about 6kWh. This works out to be ~17Ah, but the readings from the BMU will say ~25Ah total capacity and ~22Ah remaining (meaning the car thinks I've put in an extra 3Ah). If I drive home and end up with ~15Ah remaining and everything seems fine, then I'll come back to my van the next day and suddenly find I'm down to ~9Ah remaining. There doesn't appear to be any self discharge occurring, all the cell voltages are still the same and it doesn't appear to drop in capacity if I drive around for a bit and then come back a day later. This change also shows up as a mysterious drop in range despite the car sitting stationary. (There's also a possibility that the program I'm using, HOBDrive, calculates the remaining capacity itself but that wouldn't explain the drop in range.)
Other than that, I appear to be getting quite a few cell errors pop up when driving but they're very random as to when they occur. Sometimes I'll get one every minute or so, other times I'll get one or two every 30 minutes. The appear to be messages about individual cells being out of balance, but I can't remember their individual codes right now. Obviously I also get a pack balance error due to the new cells ending up being more than 0.10v out of balance with the rest eventually.

Appendix: LEV50 body
When we were fixing the terminal that had the seized bolt we wanted to double check whether the battery was body positive or body negative before we bent the terminal back into place, just to make sure we weren't going to short anything. It turns out the battery is a little over half way positive. This is the first time I've seen something like this and I'd be interested to see if anyone else has noticed this. We checked it on a couple of cells and the all came back about the same. I don't think it would come up much, but be careful not to short either of the terminals to the body.

Hopefully I've explained things clearly enough and there aren't too many typos. If there's anything that needs clarification let me know.

TL;DR: I swapped some dying cells out with aftermarket replacements from China and things mostly worked. Packs of 18650s can be used, but I wouldn't recommend it.
 
Hi there, fascinating work. I would say that the spray foam will not help with cooling so would be better to pack it with some blocks to hold it in place but allow air around it. Of course time/necessity often doesnt allow perfect repairs and it did the job.

I've done the LTC voltage monitoring chip replacement on an i-miev, most likely you were just unlucky there that this failed on you.

Nice to see someone actually trying 18650s, its been talked about in the past but other than yourself im not aware of anyone else actually doing it. I looked into this extensively but never needed to go ahead with it. What I did find out though is that it is the charge rating that is harder to meet using these cells.

i.e. lets say you use 20x 18650 - you can easily get 20A discharge cells so that is fine, but the charge rating on the batteries is always much less. I found Sony vtc6 cells that were 5A continuous charge or 6A peak, so if you use 20 of those that gives 100A continuous charge rating, 120A peak, or 32Kw continuous charge, 39Kw peak, basically perfect for i-miev rapid charge or max regen. These cells are also 3000mah so if you can get 20 of them together then its a 60Ah cell, so actually an upgrade which meets the required spec.

How did you wire the 18650s? I would have gone with the Tesla method of thin gauge wire on the + side, making fusable links for safety, just to prevent it turning into a grenade inside a box of fireworks !

Cheers.
 
Spray foam is good temperature isolator. My opinion is, that will make battery warmer. Maybe will be better use some soft plastics tape to hold battery in position.

Question. What 18650 you use and how pcs? And how solder?
Because this is bad
https://electricbikereview.com/forum/attachments/18650-battery-pack-jpg.10268/


and this is good
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0221/4487/6644/files/Parallel_Connection_1024x1024.JPG?v=1552575635


From first image will cell near terminal load more like cells on other side, because ohm law.

So I mean notebook cells is not good to apply in car. We need 30A cell and more.

Sorry for my bad english.
 
Gary12345 said:
Hi there, fascinating work. I would say that the spray foam will not help with cooling so would be better to pack it with some blocks to hold it in place but allow air around it. Of course time/necessity often doesnt allow perfect repairs and it did the job.

I've done the LTC voltage monitoring chip replacement on an i-miev, most likely you were just unlucky there that this failed on you.

Nice to see someone actually trying 18650s, its been talked about in the past but other than yourself im not aware of anyone else actually doing it. I looked into this extensively but never needed to go ahead with it. What I did find out though is that it is the charge rating that is harder to meet using these cells.

i.e. lets say you use 20x 18650 - you can easily get 20A discharge cells so that is fine, but the charge rating on the batteries is always much less. I found Sony vtc6 cells that were 5A continuous charge or 6A peak, so if you use 20 of those that gives 100A continuous charge rating, 120A peak, or 32Kw continuous charge, 39Kw peak, basically perfect for i-miev rapid charge or max regen. These cells are also 3000mah so if you can get 20 of them together then its a 60Ah cell, so actually an upgrade which meets the required spec.

How did you wire the 18650s? I would have gone with the Tesla method of thin gauge wire on the + side, making fusable links for safety, just to prevent it turning into a grenade inside a box of fireworks !

Cheers.

In hindsight, the spray foam was probably not the best choice but I won't be subjecting the car to any heavy driving in the near future. Just my 30 minute drives to and from work.

I'm not quite sure whether it was just bad timing on part of the LTC chip to fail when it did, or whether the extra jostling around from the forgotten bolts meant it was subjected to odd voltage fluctuations. Either way, at least I'm sure everything is properly tied held in place now.

I'm definitely sure it's possible to do a complete pack swap with 18650s, but you're right the limiting factor is the charge speed. It's not issue charging from the wall, but quick charging and regen braking would probably push things to their limits. I think it's better to stick with prismatic cells, they seem to be able to handle charging better.

All the 18650s were soldered directly onto the welding cable that served as the busbar. I would have liked to have put some proper fuse wire to stop one bad cell taking out the whole pack, but I was really pushed for time and wasn't supposed to be more than a temporary solution. By the time I replaced the initial cell I was down to about 45km range on a good day and I was losing about 5km a week.

dracekvo said:
Spray foam is good temperature isolator. My opinion is, that will make battery warmer. Maybe will be better use some soft plastics tape to hold battery in position.

Question. What 18650 you use and how pcs? And how solder?
Because this is bad
https://electricbikereview.com/forum/attachments/18650-battery-pack-jpg.10268/


and this is good
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0221/4487/6644/files/Parallel_Connection_1024x1024.JPG?v=1552575635


From first image will cell near terminal load more like cells on other side, because ohm law.

So I mean notebook cells is not good to apply in car. We need 30A cell and more.

Sorry for my bad english.

Yes, the spray foam wasn't a smart option. Unfortunately I didn't have any soft plastic tape and I was worried that if I used cardboard it would come loose.

I used 18650s from laptop batteries. I checked the capacity of each battery and tried to build a pack that matched my other cells.

I think I wired it more like the first picture than the second,. In this picture you can maybe see how it was connected.

YjSQThp.jpg


On the bottom the 18650s were connected in the opposite direction to the top and there is also very good connection with the welding cable as well. After that photo was taken we added another two cells laying on top to add more capacity.

You're definitely right, I don't think 18650s are the right choice. That's part of the reason I ended up swapping to the prismatic cells.
 
Thanks for sharing your notes and pictures of doing cell swaps, this is some great work which will help others in the future for sure.

The new replacement cells are marked as 42Ah, but it appears that was just a sales and marketing gimmick. They are definitely lesser capacity than the old cells in your pack as shown by reaching the upper 4.1 voltage limit first.

There is a pack capacity reset procedure for the EV-ECU found in the FSM that must be done after a pack is replaced. If this is not done, then it continues to use the previous capacity and will limit your range, going into turtle mode even though the pack has plenty. This is done by a dealer with the MUT, or someone with access to one. i don't think the clones have this capability.

i think the BMS and CMUs work together to protect the cells from OV, UV, and OT, but the EV-ECU uses current as sensed inside the pack to count coulombs (A-Hr) in/out to protect the pack as a whole.

Keep us posted on how this works out for you.
 
kiev said:
Thanks for sharing your notes and pictures of doing cell swaps, this is some great work which will help others in the future for sure.

The new replacement cells are marked as 42Ah, but it appears that was just a sales and marketing gimmick. They are definitely lesser capacity than the old cells in your pack as shown by reaching the upper 4.1 voltage limit first.

There is a pack capacity reset procedure for the EV-ECU found in the FSM that must be done after a pack is replaced. If this is not done, then it continues to use the previous capacity and will limit your range, going into turtle mode even though the pack has plenty. This is done by a dealer with the MUT, or someone with access to one. i don't think the clones have this capability.

i think the BMS and CMUs work together to protect the cells from OV, UV, and OT, but the EV-ECU uses current as sensed inside the pack to count coulombs (A-Hr) in/out to protect the pack as a whole.

Keep us posted on how this works out for you.

I'll look into resetting the capacity, but it might be a bit of a challenge finding a dealer or someone with an MUT with the EV options. I don't think the iMiev was ever really well supported in Australia and the minicab I've got is only ever a grey import.

I thought that too about the battery tracking the Ah remaining capacity, but I've definitely noticed that the car suddenly loses a chunk of Ah remaining when I turn it on some times. I've also definitely caught it giving me wrong readings in terms of how much current went into the battery compared to what the charger tells me, so I'm still a little suspicious. It might be part of the calibration that goes on, but having it happen after being driven down to half charge seems a little odd to me.

I might end up swapping out the "40Ah" cells for some "80Ah" cells at some point, at least the "80Ah" cells match the dimensions of the originals much better.
 
It is difficult to know whether these new cells are good or not, whether they are well made. I am always suspicious of the capacity rating, i've seen too many 18650 cells with "9800mah" which is impossible.

These cells are within the size of the originals,
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000105803688.html

the bad thing is the charge rating of 60Ah max, which is 19.5 Kwh. Regen or rapid charge could be double that so even if it is what it says in the specs, it will have a short life.

This is why I think a well made 18650 brick using high charge rate cells would last much better, you could be sure of the capacity and quality of the cells if bought from a reputable source and the charge rating would be double that of the above.

Cheers.
 
These look familiar !!!!!

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32888613944.html
Unfortunately the reviews say they are 40Ah version (LEV40).... damn it !

These are a good size and rating, unfortunately fairly expensive.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32906459897.html

Cheers all, keep up the good work.
 
Does anyone have the dimensions of the LEV50 cell? I have the dimensions of the exterior casing (171mm x 44mm x 115mm) but I could not find the distance between the terminals (center to center). The terminals are M8 but does anyone know the thread pitch? (That is the distance between two adjacent threads in mm). Often, M8 has a pitch of 1.25 (4 threads in 5mm). Is this the case?
This way, if we order a replacement cell, there are better chances it will fit...
 
The stud or bolt-thread terminals are standard pitch M8 threads. The studs are lightly held and somewhat loose in position (i.e. rattle around when not connected) but they only have to make a connection when bolted. Don't overtighten the flange nut since the bolts are only held by plastic underneath.

The center-center spacing is 130 mm.

The holes for the connection to the CMU board is threaded for M3 philips head screw and the center-center spacing is 55 mm.
 
Capacity increase considerations:

From what I understand about batteries, the monitoring board will track voltage to determine if each cell is charged enough or not.
Since the cells are connected in series, the same current flows through each of them. The only way to charge one cell slower than another one is for the BMS to divert some of the current so it does not flow in the cell with the higher voltage across the terminals.

Reading the description a commercially available battery management system (BMS), I would think that the important point is that all cells under a BMS must charge and discharge at the same rate give or take a few amps (maximum of 2.5 amps or 110W for the Manzanita Micro's PFC). If one cell has a smaller Ah capacity and would require diverted current to exceed 2.5 amps, it will continue to charge faster than the other cells because the BMS cannot divert the excess current. Charging will continue until any cell reaches 4.1 volts, at which point charging will stop for all cells. This would mean that any cell for which the diverted current would be higher than what the BMS allows will finish charging before the other ones. The result will be that most cells under that BMS will be undercharged.

Because there are not active electronic components in the Miev battery pack to bypass a group of cells would have finished charging faster, I suppose that all 88 cells in the pack are connected in series and that as soon as any of the 88 cells reaches 4.1 volts, all charging stops.

I doubt very much that the system actually calculates the total energy that was stored or used because it looks like it is sensing only voltage and temperature. If this is the case, as long as all cells under any BMS in the battery pack are charging at a similar rate for a same current (plus or minus 2.5 amps or 110W per BMS) it should be possible to install higher capacity batteries to increase range. Essentially, this means that one needs to upgrade all the cells at the same time.

Do these assumptions make sense? Does anyone have relevant information to confirm/infirm?
Does this explain the problems that have been encountered with the attempts at replacements?
Does anyone have the manufacturer and model of the battery management system installed in the Miev battery packs? And the specs?

Compatible battery:

The next step would be to select a compatible battery. Newer batteries have improved energy density in the last 10 years so it would make sense that a 100Ah battery would fit in the same volume as the original 50Ah LEV50 or LEV50N.

The LEV50 specs are:

Nominal voltage 3.75V
Operating voltage range: 2.75 to 4.1V
Charge voltage limit: 4.1V
Continuous current: 300A
maximum charge voltage (10-40 deg C): 125A
171mm x 111mm x 44mm

I found a battery with these specs:

Descriptions :

Rated voltage: 3.7V
Rated capacity: 100Ah
Pumping capacity: 100AH
Internal resistance: 0.4 m Omega
Discharge cut-off voltage: 2.5V
Charge limiting voltage: 4.2V
Charging rate: 1C
Continuous discharge current: 150A
Max Continuous discharge current:300A
Charging method: CC/CV (constant current and constant voltage)
Weight: 1.45KG
173mm x 91mm x 42mm (2 mm too long!)


I will ask the manufacturer to provide the charging amps and if they can package it with the same size and terminals as the LEV50.
Is there anything that would make this battery not work?
Is there anything else I should ask the manufacturer?
 
i think there is a current sensor in the pack, and the EV-ECU uses only the current to determine capacity. There is a memory register that stores the capacity, and the car will not let you exceed this value even if you put in new or larger cells unless the register is changed.

If you put all 100 Ahr cells into the pack, but the register says 42.2 Ahr, then you will get a power warning and turtle after driving for an hour drawing 42.2 Amps, even if your voltage is still high e.g 3.8Vpc


Balancing is done by bleeding down the higher cells thru a 46 Ohm resistor on the CMU boards, so the bleed current is less than 100 mA per cell.
 
Too bad there is a limit. But maybe there is a way to benefit from higher capacity cells...

When the battery is old or when it is very cold, I suppose it will reach the cut-off voltage (and the turtle) before it has delivered the 42.2Ah. With 100Ah cells, the battery will probably be able to supply 42.2Ah even in cold weather or when the battery capacity is down by 50% because of aging. Though you would not benefit from an increased range, you would be able to get the maximum range in winter (if you are not using the heater) and after years of use.
My 2012 Miev (165000km) has a range of 75km (at 90 kph, less in winter) while my 2016 Miev (35000km) has a range of 95-105km (at 90kph).
I would be happy to have the 95 to 105 km range in winter at -30C and maintain it when the car has reached 200000+km. I would fell better knowing that I can replace the cells when the range starts degrading.

Do this make sense? Do you think that is what would happen?

If modifying the the 42.2 limit in the memory is too difficult, maybe it is possible the fool the sensor. If it is measured through a voltage drop across a shunt resistor, maybe is is possible the add a second identical shunt in parallel when the car is not charging (it will allow 84.4Ah while reading only half). If it is a clamp meter (like a current transformer (CT)), it might be more complicated. From the controls systems's point of view, it will look like the battery is not able to provide more current because it is old or cold so I guess that it should work.

Another way to read current would be to know the internal resistance of cells and to measure the voltage across them (which is already done by the BMS). This would make it impossible to fool all 88 measurements. But I don't think the internal resistance of a battery is something that is reliable or even stable across various temperatures of aging conditions. A shunt or a clamp (CT) is more likely.
 
This is a very interesting thread.I remember thinking about this back in 2014 and starting the "Future battery replacement" Thread. It's really nice to see that ThisNonesense has spent time getting creative to look at replacing cells.

I remember posting this idea https://imgur.com/a/SOIo4 although it seems to have worked (for a few months) I think it would be difficult to manually build 88 cells out of 18650's but possible.

Following up on the last posts,

In terms of replacing all the cells in a pack with a larger capacity like 100 AH cells. I don't know if anyone
really knows how the car would react to that.

As kiev mentioned the car seems to start out with an initial value (42AH) for a new pack and adjusting that number down
over time as the cells loose capacity by amp hour counting on charge/discharge cycles.

I can see two problems with putting in a higher capacity cells:

1) The car would not charge it to full capacity because of some limit

2) The car would not discharge it fully again because of some limit.

Let't look at each case.

Let's say the charge algorithm tries to charge the battery until all cells are 4.1 volts and then stop charging.
If that's the case then you should be able to charge the battery with 100 AH cells fully.
If that is not the case then the only limit function I can think of is that the car is AMP hour counting on the charge cycle and when you hit a magic number of what it thinks is the capacity then the charging stops regardless of battery voltage. We don't have any evidence that this is true.

For the discharge side of thing's Normally the CAR amp hour counts down and then give you the turtle at 10% SOC and then continues to count down until a cell reaches 2.75 volts ( I think) and then the car stops moving.
If you have a larger 100 AH capacity cell and it is initially charged fully then during discharge you would hit turtle by amp hour counting at about 65% of the real Battery capacity. The RR would show 0 but my guess is you could keep going until a cell hit 2.75 volts again. You would be driving on the turtle for about another 100 KM or so.(in Summer)
If for some other reason the car does not "freak out" because the SOC is at 0.0 but there is still plenty in the cells then I think you would be fine. You could just use canion to look at battery voltage and watch your KM's travelled and motor on...

Any thoughts on this ?


Nico,

I think you are right on about fooling the current sensor. If you could cut the reading it reports in half then you should be good to go. The only side effect I can see is the dash amp meter would cut in half and all canion reported currents would also cut in half.

I don't know if there are multiple current sensors in the system. There must be some current sensors in the charger. If so maybe they would need to all be rigged to
read half values. If not the car's software could compare the sensor's and throw a fault if there is a big mismatch.


Don....
 
i like the idea of bypassing the current sensor also. Unfortunately the one guy who has opened and dismantled a pack, and then installed it and got it working in another miev--who would know all the details of the guts of a pack such as the current sensor...is no longer on the forum.

http://www.myimiev.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=3074&start=10#p27408
 
Kiev, about the cell sizes, would you have the cell height from:
-bottom to top of case
-bottom to top of connector plate
-bottom to top fo M8 bolt
How confident are you with your measurements? +- 1mm, better?
Some manufacturers can make the cases with custom dimensions but I need to have them right.
Do you have some cells with you (even dead cells)?
 
i have a LEV50-8 module, 1440 W-hr is stamped into the plastic cover. i will take it apart to extract a cell and measure. The module separates in 2 groups of 4 cells, and there is a welded plastic frame that holds the CMU boards on top and provides a spacer between the top edge of the cell and the terminal top plate with threads for the CMU screws. There is a flat washer welded on the (+) terminal plate used as locator for the frame and to prevent accidental polarity mistakes. i used a tape measure and these should be good measurements +/- 0.5mm.

oVIv1Sr.jpg
 
Thank you very much. I thought the 111mm height measurement was exclusive of the bolt. Your picture show it is inclusive...
Does the pack come with a battery management system? Would you have some pictures? I am wondering if current is measured on the BMS or elsewhere...

Have you read the article that GS Yuasa was to begin production in 2020 of a battery that would double the range of the Miev? The news was published in August 2017. I don’t know it they followed up...
 
Using search i found this link for CMU and schematic info,
http://www.myimiev.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=4302&p=39002&hilit=CMU+board#p39002

Here's a picture as i was dismantling the module today,

gdMza6t.jpg
 
As someone who has the official dealer diagnostic tool and has spent some time analysing the workings of the battery management system in these cars, has 3 fairly rapidly failing cells and some second hand replacement cells to fit quite soon, this thread is very interesting. :)

Your use of 18650 cells makes me a little nervous to be honest, and one question I didn't see addressed in your description is how did you deal with getting a thermal bond from the cells to the temperature sensor on the board ? Without correct temperature information from the monitored cells (only 3 out of every 4 cells is monitored) the rapid charge rate may be severely limited as charge rate will be limited by both low and high temperatures, and with no sensor on the bodged cells they could potentially overheat without the BMS being aware, which in extreme cases could lead to a fire.

Even with an attached temperature sensor, the BMS is programmed with knowledge of the thermal stability of the original cells used - which are a chemistry which is quite tolerant of heat, at least from a not catching fire perspective. More modern higher density cells are often less thermally stable and not suitable for high output without thermal management so the BMS might allow them to be pushed outside their safe operating range which again could result in a fire.

Not trying to poke holes, just warning you of some of the potential risks of your bodged 18650 cells, or the other prismatic cell you used for that matter, especially in Australian heat, where these cars are not well suited in the first place due to lack of active temperature management of the cells when Level 2 charging or driving. (Only during DC rapid charging is the battery pack cooled)

ThisNonsense said:
Issues encountered along the way
I spoke a little earlier about having an issue with the balancing. Basically, one of the new cells is not being correctly balanced. It's not out by much, but the cell is consistently 0.035v higher than the other replaced cell, and is always the first cell to reach 4.10v (full charge as far as the BMU is concerned). This is mainly an issue because the two new 40Ah cells aren't really giving me that capacity (more on this later too). I think maybe the balance lead has come loose (it wouldn't surprise me if I hadn't tightened it properly when we first assembled the pack) however I haven't had a chance to drop the pack again since I've started getting suspicious about how this cell is out of balance.
I think you'll find the "balance lead" and the voltage sensing lead are one and the same. So the balance lead can't become detached without the LTC chip then being unable to read the cell voltage, and you'd soon know about that as it would put an error on the dashboard and refuse to let you charge...

What's more likely happening is that you just have too much capacity difference between the best and worst cells. These cars do top balancing but we think they also do a little bit of bottom balancing sometimes as well. If you start charging below about 3 bars you will sometimes get a "pause" where the charge power drops down to near nothing for 15-30 minutes.

Although I haven't seen conclusive evidence, we think that there is bleed only balancing occurring at that point. The problem with this is that if there is a large variation in capacity between cells any sort of bottom balancing (attempting to equalise cell voltages at a low SoC) will cause the balance state at a high SoC to get even further out. If the cell capacity variation is too great then it will be impossible to reach 100% SoC with balanced cell voltages.

One way you could test this theory is to put the car through several discharge/recharge cycles while only going down to about 50% SoC - this is high enough that bottom balancing will not occur, and if the reason it is having difficulty balancing is due to a very low capacity cell after a few half cycles like this it should reach balance at full charge. (However it will start going out again if you discharge it low)
Results
The first thing I'll mention is that so far everything has been going well (since I replaced the bolts and the balance boards we killed). The cells have held up fine and there doesn't appear to be any degradation going on with the new cells from their treatment. Unfortunately, they're also not giving me anything near 40Ah. In fact I seem to be getting something close to 20Ah, but the BMU is taking a while to adjust down. I think there are a couple of reasons this might be happening.
Firstly, I'm a little suspicious of the rating given on the Taobao listing. I wouldn't be surprised if I've bought cells that are 30Ah at 1C discharge and 40Ah at 1 amp or something like that.
Secondly, since the iMiev BMUs only work from 3.60v to 4.10v and the capacities listed for the battery seems to be measured from 2.75v to 4.20v I'm pretty sure there's going to be about 10% to 20% loss in "usable capacity" as measured by the car.
Correct - you'll lose around 20% of the usable capacity by reducing the operating range from 4.2-2.75 to 4.1 to approx 3.6 which is used in the car. So your replacement cell would only be 40Ah over that full voltage range so perhaps 32Ah at most in use in the car, even if it lived up to its claims.

I went through a similar thought process when I obtained four second hand cells and wanted to test their usable capacity - what mattered to me is the usable Ah capacity over the voltage range the car use them, so that I could compare their performance to the other cells in the car to ensure the ones I was fitting were actually better than the ones I was replacing...

So I did a discharge test from 4.1 volts down to 3.63 volts (which seems to be 0% SoC on my car - it varies slightly with the SoH of the battery) and then also down to 3.0 volts, which is the lowest my discharger will let me take the cells.

And on all four I got 40-41Ah for the 4.1v to 3.63v test, and about 43-44Ah for the 4.1v to 3.0v test. With a full 4.2v to 2.75v test I'd say they'd probably have got 48Ah.

I think the reason why the car will only take the cells down to about 3.6 volts open circuit is simple - at that SoC the cells can still put out the full 150 amps needed for full acceleration without dipping below 3.0 volts. If you were to discharge them down to say 3.2 volts then acceleration would have to be severely limited to prevent the cells going below 3.0 volts under load, so I think the chosen cutoff voltage is actually based on >3.0 volts under a 150 amp load.

If any cell dips below 3.0 volts at any time the turtle light will come on and acceleration will be severely restricted. (Ask me how I know... :roll: )
Thirdly, I'm being held back a little by one of the cells hitting full charge first and this meaning the other cell reaches empty first. Once I get a chance to check the balancing lead I'll have to see if that makes any sort of noticeable difference.
Are you seeing this on 3kW Level 2 charging as well, or only on DC rapid charging ? If you're referring to rapid charging this is a sure sign that you have a cell with high internal resistance, especially if the cell goes from being lower voltage than the others before the charge to higher than the others very soon after starting charging.

My three faulty cells all have high internal resistance, one is particularly bad - as a result during rapid charging they hit 4.105 volts a long time before the others and cause premature throttling of the rapid charging speeds. Even if I plug in in summer as low as 20% SoC the weak cells will reach 4.105 volts within about a minute and start tapering the charge rate despite the car still only being at about 25% SoC! It used to charge at a full 43kW up to nearly 50% SoC. I find this just as annoying as the range loss I've had.

Rapid charging times from 20% to 80% have gone up from around 17 minutes to nearly 30 minutes just due to this high cell resistance. In summer. Winter is even slower as cell internal resistance goes up in cold cells.
Finally, I think there's a calibration issue either caused by trying to voltage match the cells before they were installed (so the BMU isn't sure how much capacity it actually has any more) or by a difference in voltage curves for different lithium battery chemistries. The calibration issue makes some sense to me because when I took the old cells out, they were very nearly dead and nearly a third of a volt lower than the rest of the cells. When I installed the new cells I had to put about 10-15Ah into them to bring them as close to being in balance with the rest of the cells as I could. This might mean that the BMU doesn't know about those extra Ah at the bottom.
If you replace faulty cells in the pack and thus increase their usable capacity then unfortunately the BMS will not immediately be aware of the change and will refuse to let you use the additional capacity that is now there. It has a record of the usable Ah capacity of the pack (the figure reported by Canion/Hobdrive) and will start counting that Ah capacity down from 100% as you discharge the battery and when it reaches what it believes is about 10% SoC you will go into turtle mode regardless of how much capacity is really left. And when it reaches what it believes is 0% the car will shut off, even if the cell voltages are still quite high.

If you drive the car many hundreds of miles over many many full charge discharge cycles it will eventually start to make incremental upwards revisions to the usable capacity figure - see jray3's battery swap thread for an example of this. It will only increase by approx 1Ah per thousand miles, so if you're replacing a really sick cell with a good one it could take a very long time and you may never get the full usable capacity.

The dealer diagnostic tool has two routines that can be run when cell/pack swaps are performed - one is just a factory reset of the ECU which goes back to an assumed new 45.8Ah usable capacity - this is used if the dealer fits a brand new (less than 6 month old) replacement pack, so not usable for old packs.

The other routine is a battery calibration. This basically tells you to discharge the battery down to about 3.75 volts per cell then fully charges the battery while under supervision of the diagnostic tool. At the end of that a new Ah figure based on an actual measurement is made and recorded in the BMS memory, and it also records a figure for the best and worst cells in the pack. This method "instantly" updates the Ah figure to the actual true state of the battery.

I have tried this battery calibration routine a couple of times on my car in the last year and unfortunately both times it caused the reported capacity to go DOWN because the faulty cells were degrading faster than the BMS estimated so it's most recent figure was always behind the true capacity of the cells... after I replace the faulty cells I will do a calibration again and the figure should go UP this time... :twisted:

You really want to try to get your hands on a diagnostic tool that can do the battery calibration for you if you want to have the full usable capacity of the repaired battery available. I would have thought there were plenty of Mitsubishi's in Australia - any authorised dealer should have a MUT3 diagnostic tool as it does all models of Mitsubishi.
I've noticed my car seem to go into turtle mode when the last cell hits about 3.67v under no load (maybe around ~3.5v under full load) and thinks it has about 2.5Ah remaining, both of those seem a little wrong to me.
No, that sounds about right to me, or at least very close to how my car behaves - both before I had cell degradation and after. If anything mine hits turtle at a slightly higher voltage. Last time I did a test the lowest cell being 3.63 volts corresponded to 0% SoC, and turtle mode kicks in with a SoC of around 10-12% so slightly higher voltage than this, probably around 3.7 volts.

Turtle mode is triggered by two different things - estimated SoC being below about 10-12%, or instantaneous cell voltages going below 3.0 volts. Normally the SoC trigger always happens first, unless you have a faulty cell or a wildly inaccurate Ah estimate in the BMS.
The other option is the difference in voltage curves, this one is based on the idea that the "Amp hours remaining" value given out by the BMU is calculated based on the voltage of the pack each time the car starts up and then is tracked based on current draw during driving until the car is started again, and then the process starts again. I might sound a bit odd, but I've noticed that if I charge the car to full from turtle mode (~2Ah remaining) I'll put in about 6kWh. This works out to be ~17Ah, but the readings from the BMU will say ~25Ah total capacity and ~22Ah remaining (meaning the car thinks I've put in an extra 3Ah). If I drive home and end up with ~15Ah remaining and everything seems fine, then I'll come back to my van the next day and suddenly find I'm down to ~9Ah remaining. There doesn't appear to be any self discharge occurring, all the cell voltages are still the same and it doesn't appear to drop in capacity if I drive around for a bit and then come back a day later. This change also shows up as a mysterious drop in range despite the car sitting stationary. (There's also a possibility that the program I'm using, HOBDrive, calculates the remaining capacity itself but that wouldn't explain the drop in range.)
I see these strange jumps in reported SoC a bit on my car too - but only since some cells have developed faults, and not as bad as you see it. For example I'll drive to work and arrive with 8 bars remaining, when I get into the car to drive home 8 hours later I actually have 9 bars remaining!

Or another one that happens a lot in winter is I'll drive down to about 40% SoC as reported by Canion, stop to rapid charge, the instant that I start rapid charging the reported SoC will drop to say 20%, and I'll lose two bars on the dashboard, and it will take 5 minutes of charging just to (supposedly) get back to where I was.

Then the rapid charge will end at say 75% reported instead of the usual 82%, but when I unplug the car and turn it on suddenly the SoC is reported as 82%.

I think the cause of this is large discrepancies in the capacity of cells between best and worst cells confusing the voltage estimation the BMS uses. As you say, while you are driving the car coloumb counting is used to keep track of SoC based on Ah in/out, however when you turn the car on (or start rapid charging it seems) and the car is near full or near empty and the voltage estimated SoC is significantly different than the columb counted figure it makes an "adjustment", however I think this adjustment process is confused when there is too much voltage spread between individual cells.

I certainly did not notice this curious behaviour back when all my cells were good, and I'm hoping it goes away after the cell swap.

So I would say this symptom is also caused by too much variation in cell capacity between your best and worst cells.
Other than that, I appear to be getting quite a few cell errors pop up when driving but they're very random as to when they occur. Sometimes I'll get one every minute or so, other times I'll get one or two every 30 minutes. The appear to be messages about individual cells being out of balance, but I can't remember their individual codes right now. Obviously I also get a pack balance error due to the new cells ending up being more than 0.10v out of balance with the rest eventually.
I can't remember it off hand but there is one particular error code that is set if the cell voltage variation between cells is greater than a certain amount and SoC is >50%. You're probably hitting this condition due to your cell balancing issues and again it will be down to too much variation in characteristics between your best and worst cells.

By the way, I don't know whether these guys would be willing to ship all the way to Australia from the UK or whether it would be prohibitively expensive, but if you're wanting to keep this car on the road for a while yet it might be worth investing in some genuine replacement cells:

https://www.secondlife-evbatteries.com/ev-batteries.html

I bought four cells from them and as mentioned earlier while second hand they are tested before sale and at least for the four I bought, their capacity was good, exceeding the performance of even the best cells in my pack let alone the bad ones I'm going to swap out.

It would sure solve a lot of problems compared to trying to bodge unknown quality mismatched cells into the car. It's always going to be a tough challenge to fit one odd cell that doesn't match the others in characteristics without upsetting the BMS and causing the array of side effects that you're seeing...
 
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