Drive Testing

With the car at my house, I felt comfortable doing some more testing. My first priority was eliminating the arcing. Fortunately, the car makes a very distinctive sound when this happens. It always happens when the car is near the top of the RPM range in first or second gear.

Here’s how it looks under the car:

I would drive in first gear as fast as I could until I heard the arcing (about 20mph). Then, I pulled over and reduced the controller output voltage. I started with an output voltage of 144. I reduced it to 120, 108 and finally to 96. At 96 volts, I couldn’t get the arcing to happen in first or second, so I’m going to leave it at this setting for now.

The next priority is getting the performance up to the point where I can drive on major streets. I found that when I first pulled out of my driveway, I could pull 120-130 battery amps. After a couple blocks, it was down to 80 or 90. After a rest, it would go back up to a little over 100. I don’t have data logging set up yet, but I’m assuming this behavior is a result of the controller going into thermal derating. I don’t have any liquid cooling at all connected to the Soliton Jr. I ordered up the biggest PC water-cooling pump and radiator I could find.

Also, while driving the controller shut down 3 times. When this happens, the car coasts. Pulling over and cycling the ignition switch gets it started up again. There were log messages that indicated the 12V supply was too low. I have a charger for my 12V battery on order. I suspect that the 12V battery was pulling too much current and dropping the output voltage of my DC/DC converter. Hopefully getting a good charge into the battery will take care of it.

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