Update on Batteries

The 404 group meet with Dr. Lozowski yesterday to talk about the direction we should take with the battery pack and made great progress. Here’s some bullets that will also be covered in our 404 presentation Monday @ 12 (for those who wish to come watch it, not sure if you can but I don’t see why not)

• Instead of building multiple “packs”  we will now make a modular design where rows of batteries can be removed from the “pack”,  this is good for several reasons: 1. makes it easy to remove and store the batteries during the race.  2. if we find a dead battery the module can be removed from the pack and replaced quickly and the bad module can be fixed when time allows.  3. Allows us to make a pack utilizing all 30kg of batteries allowed by NASC.
• The solar cells will be arranged in a 3 x 2 arrangement, 2 parallel combination of 3 in series.  This gives us ~ 60 volts of power which is close to the 71 volts lowest voltage the pack will provide, this gives us the best efficiency with the dc to dc converter.
• We have a direction to go in monitoring the pack as well as balancing the charge across the batteries, more info will be provided when we are finished designing/researching it.

Everything seems to be moving along quite well, hopefully the body will be ready for the pack when we finish it *wink wink nudge nudge*

Also, talked to Steve Muren yesterday, he told me that we have a guy that will make a mold for the carbon fiber, we just have to provide the design.  If anyone wants to get the dimensions of the car and start tinkering with designs maybe something with some aerodynamics (jake???)  that’d be awesome.