Live Aboard Sailboat Powerwall 14s200p

The buildwill be along process. I have maybe half the cells I need and only 2 Opus BT-C3100s.

But I won't buy the sailboat till next yearand whatever boat is purchased itwill need somerefitting. There isplenty of time.

The plan is to convert the boat to a 48v DC motor for motoring around marinas, etc. I have no clue if this powerwall and power generation system will supply enough for all the electrical needs of living aboard and occasionally motoring.Hopefully it's enough but more can always be added.

Basic Plan

• Don't die in a lithium fueledball of fire on the high seas.
• Fifteen 200p packs. One for spare. 3000 cells total
• Each pack enclosed in a plastic or stainless steelcontainer
• Packs terminate toAnderson plugs or stainless terminal/lugs
• All cables and busbars will be tinned
• Batrium BMS with longmons and shunt
• Power generation from solar panels and wind turbine
• Power regeneration fromthe sailboat's DC motor
• CO2 fire suppression in battery compartment
• A very tinybackup dieselgenset
• Majority of the boat will run off of a 220v inverter.
• Some will be native 48v and the rest will be bucked to 12v

I don't have any photos of the very early stages but here is a photo of 125 fully tested and cleaned cells. Glue, gunk, and tabs removed. All heaters and leakers winnowed. And any cell tested to under 1800mAh set aside for later experiments.






Just 2875 more cells to go.






All my cells have come from lenovo laptops backs,from a single company, and from 2012 to 2018.And there is still a huge variety of cells types. One type of pack is guaranteed tough to open and a few cell wrappers get damaged in each pack. Here is my first cell resleeving.

"Don't die in a lithium fueled ball of fire on the high seas. "

GOOOD PLAN! lol

Good luck with your project!

In the battery compartment, you might think about putting Halon fire suppression. It'll help pull the O2 out of the air and make the sparks less explosive. It won't "stop" them if they go bad, but it'll definitely put a damper on them.
FYI, lithium cells carry oxygen in their electrolyte. So once they start burning, they are kinda hard to stop as they supply their own O2.

That's a lot of orange cells. Is that the majority of your haul? That's interesting if so. I've not actually had that large of a bias of 1 color over another (yet).

Awesome plan. Looking forward to progress updates.

Since it's in a moving vehicle, I think Terminal lugs would maintain a more solid connection under stress. Slightly more effort for. Maintenance though.

Good luck!

Any suggestions on fire suppression are welcomed. My only experience with it has been in data centers on a huge scale. The idea I'm currentlyponderingcame from a previous question thread I posted.

The idea:
Tank(s)+hose filled with some form of fire suppressant and the hose will go through each 200p pack. Ifa situation occurswhere neither the cell level fuses nor the longmon prevent a runaway temperature issue the hose melts releasing suppressant as needed.





I was just modeling up a pack today andthinking about the suppressant hose and longmon placement.





A 21 x 10 cell holder system with the center 10 left empty for hose and longmon.

Or maybe a 20 x 11 cell holder with the center 20 left empty. A bit weaker structurally and creates a larger pack. But allows for more hose in the pack and easier hose routing. I plan to have the bus bars along one of the long sides with the bus bar pair being the top of the pack.

I've put very little thought into how the hoses will pierce the packs.

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Korishan said:

That's a lot of orange cells. Is that the majority of your haul? That's interesting if so. I've not actually had that large of a bias of 1 color over another (yet).

Click to expand...

There is indeed heaps of orange cells. Maybe 60% have been orange. But it's two types of cells, one being a slightly darker orange.

Truth said:

There is indeed heaps of orange cells. Maybe 60% have been orange. But it's two types of cells, one being a slightly darker orange.

Click to expand...

Well, orange you glad they aren't all orange?

Nice idea for running the hose through the packs. Pretty slick. The path may be an issue, as you're find out. But I'm you'll figure something out. I like the hose idea. A very simple setup that is almost failsafe and doesn't require any external power, sensors, or processing that might go nuts.

Have you considered using a Tesla module? It's built quite solid and they are built with a thermal cooling that when used will minimize the thermal damage. The most important thing is that a cell like Korishan said self oxidixes so there's no way to put the fire out other than let it run its course. The danger is setting off a chain reaction if you don't have a way to mitigate the thermal runaway situation.

I could have sworn there was a youtube video of the Tesla Powerpack, but here's an article describing the test they did with a Powerpack.

https://electrek.co/2016/12/19/tesla-fire-powerpack-test-safety/

The CO2 venting near the hot spot will also provide a lot of cold air at the same time. Some of the separate pipes are setup so that they contain the liquid CO2 (cylinder is mounted upside down) and then they vent liquid CO2 out very quick for a very fast freeze and CO2 dispersal. Depends on the model.

not2bme said:

Have you considered using a Tesla module?

Click to expand...

I would love to use Tesla packs. Or any EV pack at all, but they arenot easy to acquire in Australia.







Making slow progress. I've fully tested slightly over 400 cells. Once I have 1400 Iplan todistribute them evenly and build an initial 24v setup.

But before that I plan to practice design, spot welding, etc with the subpar cells.I've estimated my failurerate to be about 15% of the cells don't pass the full testing.

Finally unboxed the spot welder and practiced building a small pack. They're all junk sells, 1100 - 1400mAh in1sp20.The design didn't matter I just wanted to trydifferent variations of spot welding and soldering nickel strip and fuse wire. Lots of sparks and holes blown into stuff as I dialed in the settings. The side shown below is the better side and I'll continue practicing with junk cells as they gather.

I picked up some0.21mm diameter wirefor the fuses. I've can't test the wirethoroughly as seen in some videos but after building the small pack I used it to blow various lengths of wire soldered and welded in various configurations. The results seemed decent.





A little side hobby has arose since I have plentiful pure nickel floating around. I've started nickel plating small parts of other projects. The first platings went poorly but I recently picked up some evapo-rust and acid to better clean the parts and I hopefuture platings will go better. Below is thenickel acetate solution made with vinegar.

Sounds like a nice idea mate. Don't think you will have any problem powering a motor, a smaller one.

Looking forward for more details

I would not use stainless steel as lugs. I understand the desire to use corrosion-resistant materials, but stainless has low conductivity. Use nickel-plated copper, and then after a solid connection is made (crimped, and possibly hermetically sealed with solder), coat the connection with some type of di-electric silicone-based goop.

Even using vaseline is better than nothing. Salty air is the worst corrosive agent.

spinningmagnets said:

I would not use stainless steel as lugs. I understand the desire to use corrosion-resistant materials, but stainless has low conductivity. Use nickel-plated copper, and then after a solid connection is made (crimped, and possibly hermetically sealed with solder), coat the connection with some type of di-electric silicone-based goop.

Even using vaseline is better than nothing. Salty air is the worst corrosive agent.

Click to expand...

Sounds very logical. And the packs will have nickel strips, nickel plated copper busbars, and nickel plated copper wire. There's no good reason to introduce a dissimilar metal to the system when I can just use nickel plated copper lugs.

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Not much to update, I shut down the whole project for December as I was out of country. And most of the progress in January has been the regular cracking packs and testing the cells.

I did go back and check the voltage of the first 600 cells I tested. They have been sitting around for a few months now and had time to discharge if they were slow leakers. I found only 5 below 4.10v. And those 5 were all above 3.9v. They are probably fine but they were all the questionable red sanyos so I pulled them from the good stock. I want as few sub-optimal cells in the system as possible cause I do not want to be doing monthly repairs on this system.

Another minor update. Unsurprisingly the garage was quite hot during the summer and I did not have the motivation to do much work on the project. I continued to gather laptop battery packs from work though. Probably enough to finish the powerwall.

My old cellphone finally died. While searching for a new one I found the Cat S61. It has a built in thermal imaging camera, which I could not resist.





Now I can properly test for heaters.


There weather is cooling which convinced me to clean up the workbenchandcrackabout 40 packs today. Every cell was in good shape and above 3v. A nice restart, hopefully I can have everything done before next summer.

Please, keep us updated.