We’ve had a lot of development in the past two weeks and we now have a driving vehicle running on 4 igbts. We got the car up to 500 amps in testing. Our work today outlines our need for dyno testing as we start to exceed the load we can apply at our shop. A video of the testing today can be seen here:
Video here
We have spinning wheels! The first chain is connected and the drivetrain is working well. We’re looking forward to hooking up the second chain and doing some load testing of our custom motor controller next week!
Daniel Hall and Chris Hii have ordered the PCBs for our custom DC motor controller! Here’s a shot of how it might fit with the bussbars and fuses we’ll be using. We’re excited to be ordering the final motor controller circuitboard for diagnostics and fault detection in two weeks!
Daniel Hall, our motor controller lead, successfully got the motors running again today using our custom motor controller. The setup we had today was:
4 batteries, in paralell banks of 2 for 24 volts
1 igbt mounted on cooling plate, capable of 200 A continuous
protoboard driver circuit running on hand potentiometer
~50 A peak DC current
The test allowed us to take the measurements required to select snubber circuits to further improve the system. We’re looking forward to higher voltage/higher current testing and a finalized PCB design in the next few weeks!
Way to go Daniel!
here’s a shot of the completed chain drive for the driver’s side motor. due to the offset of the chains a hub is being manufactured to connect the passenger side chain
We made three cast aluminum clutch covers yesterday at Kwalikum Secondary School on Vancouver Island. The parts came out very well and we’re looking forward to having them machined and installed on the car.
The busbars for the motor controller are almost ready to be cut. Here’s a shot of the layout plan through our 14 igbts. some busbar thicknesses are still up in the air. We will need to make sure that they are adequate to handle the massive current that we will eventually be running through our controller
The motors are in the vehicle! due to an overly snug fit on our transaxle alignment pins the final weld up has been postponed until next weekend. 