Dropping the VTRUX Battery Revealed SO MANY Hidden Surprises - You Won't Believe The Cooling System

what I didn't expect to see that crap is not going to work broken or crack really cool really terrible this is a VF trucks and this is the owner of it Jason Jason has brought with him some replacement modules for his battery pack because he suspects that he has some weak modules in his battery pack that need replacing 3 point oh my God why do you think what are the symptoms that are causing you to think that the modules are weak and need replacing well it's hard to say because it's an older truck and I know this is borderline experimental but I've noticed um reduced propulsion at times especially if the battery is under 50% it's not doing the range that was advertised or even what I've seen other people getting in these similar trucks uh and and mostly it's just the the weirdness with the behavior of of the gauge slipping uh showing less of a charge if I let it sit overnight uh and so I'm hoping that there's something wrong with it so that replac the models will fix it and we can get some more consistency hi I'm overwhelmed easily I'm easily overwhelmed that's not my name it's my state of being something that helping with this and give me tools to cope is therapy therapy can help with a lot more than that but being easily overwhelmed is one of the things that therapy can help with but you know what's really hard to do when you're easily overwhelmed finding a therapist I find more than one snoozed email difficulty to cope with how am I supposed to deal with hunting down a therapist and what's worse what if the therapist doesn't work out then I got to do it all over again this video is sponsored by betterhelp better help is the least overwhelming way I found to get therapy you just sign up answer a questionnaire get matched with a therapist and have a session over video chat it's easy the therapist you'll be matched with will have tons of experience dealing with whatever you're going through and every single one of their therapists is licensed has a master's or doctorate degree and has spent over 3 years and a th000 hours working with people just like you and if that first therapist isn't a good match which isn't uncommon finding a new therapist is super painless you don't even have to tell your old therapist anything you just move on aside from the ease of it better help has other tools to make therapy better like journaling and direct messaging which allow you to write down your thoughts as they're happening which really helps to process join over 4 million people who have used betterhelp to start living a happier healthier life go to betterhelp.com aging wheels or choose aging wheels at sign up and get a special discount off your first month unfortunately the replacement B battery modules that Jason was able to Source aren't new because that's impossible the battery supplier that VA used went out of business nearly a decade ago so we'll be getting the replacement modules from a battery pack out of a via converted van that someone was parting out this spare pack that we're going to pull replacement modules out of is roughly the same age and usage as the battery pack that's already in his pickup and we don't even know if this battery pack is good but given the total lack of other options for replacement modules when he found this for sale he jumped on it all right uh do we want want to open up this one [Music] first oh it's clean in there so clean wow all right we're both in front of the camera oh yeah it's the wrong space to be okay I'm discovering all of this for the first time so some of this information could be wrong but we have four large modules and then one smaller module here these are A123 lithium iron phosphate battery modules the BMS is also A123 as you can see on the top it says A123 right there we've got high voltage fuses right in here this is the what appears to be the mid pack disconnect but the craziest thing about this is how it handles cooling it I thought it was liquid cooled batteries and there is liquid cooling going into the battery pack there's the ports right here on the side but those ports go to these which go to a radiator these are air cooled batteries later on I took apart this BC M which probably stands for battery climate control module to see how it works and it's so much more interesting than I initially thought but we'll discover that later in the video all right this entire battery pack seems to be sitting on this ridiculously thick aluminum plate here it's like three half inch 3/4 of an inch somewhere in there thick aluminum plate I later found out that aluminum plate has air channels carved into it but you'll see that later we we got we got cells whoa it should be noted I do not know what I'm doing at the moment this is exploratory digging and now I have access to the tops of all the cells which I can probe and see what voltages the cells are at 3.27 that's what you'd expect from lithium iron phosphate 3.27 3.27 3.27 3.27 and then I'm assuming 3.27 yes perfect okay so they're all perfectly balanced that's a good sign for the Curious amongst you the configuration of the short modules is 12 s3p while the configuration of the long modules is 26 s3p the short module only has one BMS satellite while the long modules have two BMS satellites one for each half of the module the capacity of the long modules is just over 5 KW hours while the capacity of the short module is just over 2.3 KW hours with sufficient exploratory digging done in the van pack it's time to drop the pack out of the truck which is the one we actually want to work on but we ran into issues before we could even get it on the lift the problem we're having is this is the frame rail right here and then right next to it is the battery you can see the width of the lift pad right here so when it comes up it's only engaging on the very edge of the lift pad and when we ra when we raised it up raced up the lift it started slipping which made us both super uncomfortable the best solution we could come up with to get this thing on the lift safely was to weld a piece of tube to the side of the frame to act as a lift support while not ideal to have to weld a piece of crap to the side of the frame it seemed preferable to having the truck fall off the lift and you can see here the new welded on frame extension in work digging into the lift pad providing a little more less far away from the edge support to lift up the rear end of the Via with that out of the way and the Via actually up on the lift we were able to drop the battery pack out of the Via there was much cursing at coolant lines and high voltage connectors that were jigsaw puzzles but we did get it out with little bit of fuss okay good news your truck is now 800 lb lighter bad news it's not going to move these two packs are essentially the same same module same component same high voltage connectors but they're obviously very different this one came out of a van this one obviously just came out of this truck here the big difference between them is this one had to work around a drive shaft I don't know where this would have been in the van to completely avoid a drive shaft but I'm sure the people at Via much preferred this battery pack over this one as far as engineering constraints because it's just a box with some batteries in it this is a box with some batteries in it with a huge gaping chasm in the middle also notably different between these two packs this has only two cross members on the side to hold it in place and weirdly the van one has [Music] three perfect forgot to mention this say t474 on the top of it I guess that means this is truck number 474 and here goes the cover we didn't know it but we're unveiling a big hidden surprise right here can you spot what's wrong we didn't immediately nice that's even cleaner than the other one look at the cooling plate or the cooling it's l it's looped it doesn't go to anything are you kidding me there's nothing in here this is literally empty this whole box is empty it's just empty yeah it's just space what what is going on as a reminder here's the van battery pack here is the bccm you have the cooling ports on the outside of the pack and they go into these Cool It lines which go down into what looks like a radiator you have a fan that blows air over the radiator and circulates it around the pack for both Heating and Cooling and here's the pack we just pulled out of his truck it just Loops in and then back out again this black box here is the space where the bccm would go but either it wasn't installed from the factory or someone deleted it this black plug right here is a power connection that powers the fan for the bccm and on the other side of it is nothing either it was deleted or it was never installed we'll never know uh regardless of the whole cooling Loop Insanity here here's the truck pack and the very different configuration from the van pack again this must have been a nightmare for the engineers to package into the pickup look at that under the previous owner this V trucks was sent to Via for service where they replaced module 4 because they said it needed replacing and at the same time they also said modules 1 and two were weak and would need replacing soon the current owner was going to send his truck back to Via to replace those two modules that they said needed replacing he even sourced that spare pack out of the van so he could have a source for the replacement modules and they agreed to do the work but at some point via stopped responding to his emails and his calls he thinks they went out of business I haven't been able to verify whether or not they went out of business but regardless they stopped responding to him so then he sought out my help and now the truck is here in my shop where I'm going to help him swap out those modules so the core of this job is straightforward replace modules one and two of the truck plaque with two good modules from the van pack will it be that simple okay we're starting with probing module one because the V diagnosis from who knows how long ago said that module 1 and two were on their way Out 3 oh my God 3.02 3.02 3.03 3.03 okay apparently module 4 here is new so I'm going to pop the top off of it and see what the voltages of these cells are see how they compare to the Apparently bad module one see if they're more IM balance etc etc we're just getting a point of comparison here really cool looking modules are they I think all right let's find out same voltage more consistent oh my God these are so much higher 3.22 32 three wow I'm glad we checked this okay the shorty module here the one that is apparently bad had roughly all the same voltages in the cells around 3.03 which for lithium iron phosphate that is basically dead dead we took the cover off module number four over there and all the cells are at 3.23 Vols which is sub substantially higher state of charge than this one so either this truly is all bad module or the modules are out of balance like wildly it's the ladder I found out later that module one isn't substantially lower than the rest of modules in the pack module 4 is substantially higher 3.04 crap when via replaced module 4 however long ago they put it in at a substantially higher state of charge than the rest of the modules in the pack and apparently the A123 BMS while it's good at keeping all the cells in a module imbalance it's incapable of balancing the modules together so number four stayed at a higher state of charge forever but anyway vs said modules 1 and two were weak and would need replacing soon I don't see any evidence of that myself everything looks fine nothing looks significantly out of the ordinary but we've got the replacement modules everything's out in the open we might as well swap out the modules while it's easy look at that okay so there was a thermal interface pad on the bottom of this module to increase thermal conductivity between the bottom of the module and the aluminum cooling plate that has air blowing past it what I normally expect to see on the top of a thermal interface pad like this is an aluminum heat sink but on this one it's steel it's painted steel underneath this cover here is I believe a satellite BMS there's one on each module there might be two on the longer modules the thing that I'm worried about is do the satellite BMS boards have a unique identifier of some sort do they need to be reprogrammed to match with the system we don't know so to play it safe I think the best approach is to swap the BMS satellite board from the old module onto the replacement module so it essentially stays in the same place I say that even though I haven't even seen how this is connected that might be harder than I think oh my God what am I looking at ah it just straight on Clips Perfecto don't know if this is necessary but satellite board swap seems like the safe bet Batman transition I am not going to edit that in uncp it here's the BMS satellite we got from the truck module and we'll put it on the I don't know if it's better module but at least it's a higher voltage module thankfully they Ed just a regular clip on connector we don't have to do something ridiculous like desolder some pins to Swap this BMS satellite thank you A123 okay now this higher voltage and presumably better module with the same BMS satellite that came out of the truck module now gets put back into the truck pack and we is this one better we don't know we have 3.03 I yep cool so module 4 was substantially higher than the rest of them and the rest of them are vaguely inbalance oh I've got the wrong end heavy side no I'm so negative just like I did with module one in this module I'm swapping the BMS satellite boards from the old module to the replacement module just in case the boards have a unique identifier or have to be paired with the master BMS in some way [Applause] along with module 2 we also replaced module 3 because why not we have Replacements make it easy on ourselves patient this is on here the original plan was he drove down from Michigan on Thursday to get here Friday morning and we were going to spend all day Friday and Saturday trying to get this done so that he could drive home in his newly fixed via on Sunday and make it back to work on Monday to that end we decided to swap out every module from the van pack into the truck pack because all the modules in the van pack were roughly in Balance unlike the modules in the truck pack which were wildly out of balance and swapping out already balanced modules would save us the time of having to individually balance each cell which would take forever unfortunately that plan didn't work out because of these two modules here I tested the voltage of each one of the cells in both of these modules and in both modules all the cells are at 3.26 or 3.27 Vols except for one cell group in this module which is at 3.23 volts and one cell group in this module which is at 3.18 volt which indicates each one of these modules has a weak cell and we really shouldn't be using them we already swapped out modules 1 2 and 3 which have cell voltages of 3.25 to 3.27 volts but now because those two modules in the van pack are bad we can't swap out module four or five and module modle 4 is at 3.22 volts on average and module 5 is at 3.05 volts on average which is not going to work so upon discovering we can't use those two modules in the van pack he booked a flight back home and now I have two weeks with the Via to do what needs to be done individually charge each cell group in both modules four and five up to 3.27 volts to match with the rest of the pack it's going to take a very long time I purchased four more more DC power supplies so I can hopefully get this task done within the twoe time frame I have here's the thing about lithium iron phosphate the relationship between voltage and state of charge looks something like this between something like 10 and 90% there's as little as 0.1 of a volt of variation because of this the proper way to top balance lithium iron phosphate is to fully charge each cell to 3.6 Vols but if I were to do that I'd have to do that to all 116 cell groups in the pack which I estimate would take 20 to 30 days and I don't have time for that so I'm only going to be charging up the cells in the two lower modules to bring them closer in line with the rest of the cells in the pack and to do that job as accurately as possible I've bought a new multimeter this thing is substantially more accurate than my old cheap multimeter and is guaranteed down to like 1.5 molts or something ridiculous like that and using this in combination with my DC power supplies I'm charging up all the cell in the two lower modules to within 5 molts of each other that's 5,000 of a volt while this isn't as good as fully charging and top balancing all of the cells in the pack this will work well enough and it's as good as I can do in the time frame I have available while waiting for the cells to charge I took apart the bccm out of the van to see if I could swap it into the truck pack unfortunately I can't Swap this in the truck pack to replace the one that's missing in there we'll get to why in a second but first this thing is so Co cool the way I thought battery cooling worked before taking the Shroud off is you had a blower fan blowing air over a regular radiator with ambiently cooled coolant flowing through it barely cooling off that air before being pushed down into this hole where it's distributed via the channels in the aluminum plate to cool the batteries I was wrong the part I got right is there is a blower fan that blows air over a heat exchanger and then down into a hole in the aluminum plate where the air is then distributed through the pack in the air channels underneath the battery module creating heating or cooling but this is the part I got wrong this isn't the basic radiator that I thought it was this is a solid water block where the coolant flows through and then thermally bonded to that with something special in between is this big aluminum heat sink that the air blows over and transfers heat into the pack the thing in between these two parts is the special thing this is a Peltier module or thermoelectric device if you want to use boring words if you apply a voltage to a Peltier module it creates a temperature difference I.E one side gets hot the other side gets cold and if you reverse the polarity the sides that are cold and hot flip and to make this more effective if I Wick away the heat from the hot side the cold side becomes colder and vice versa these are used in places where a big refrigerant compressor doesn't really Mak sense like small portable fridges and coolers and things like that that's what's in between this heat sink and this coolant water block pel modules that's how this battery pack is actively heated and cooled with solid state components with pelt modules so if they want to cool down the battery pack the cold side of the Peltier is on this heat sink side so air is blown with this blower fan over this heat sink where the heat energy is removed for the air thereby making it colder air that air is then circulated around the battery pack and the heat energy that was removed is passed by the Peltier modules into this water block where the heat is transferred into the coolant and out of the battery pack and if they want to heat up the battery pack they just reverse the polarity of the Peltier modules so the hot side is on the heat sink side so air is blown with the blower fan over the heat sink where heat energy is transferred into the air therefore making it hotter air and that gets circulated around the battery pack heating it up this is so cool I've never seen pelier modules used in an EV battery cooling or heating scenario before and I'm all about it but despite my excitement the reason you don't see thermoelectric devices in battery heating and cooling systems because they're really inefficient like really really inefficient and to make matters worse they're not bonded directly to the batteries they're bonded to a heat sink which has to heat or cool air this is an incredibly inefficient setup really cool really terrible I pulled the aluminum base plate out of the van pack so we can all have a look at it this is the top side the top side's boring what's really interesting is the underside look at this this is ridiculous this is a 3/4 in thick aluminum plate with all of this miled out of it there is so much cost in this part and wait this is not a lightweight piece and for what so they could carve in these air channels in here that aren't going to do anything this is a ton of expense for a terrible battery heating and cooling system the blower fan pushes heated or cooled air down through this little hole some of it goes up to modules 1 and two and then another amount goes this way over to modules 3 4 and 5 doesn't exactly look like an even distribution of flow but I'm no flow analyst now the reason I can't take the bccm out of the van pack and put it in the truck pack where it's gone missing is threefold for one if the truck pack has a second blower fan right here to distribute air between the two halves of the pack I don't have the harness for that second fan that's small what slightly bigger is the fan shroud between the van and the truck is different and I don't have the one for the truck without the fan shroud the fan isn't going to be sucking air over the heat exchanger and then into the air channels it'll just be sucking air from everywhere so won't be doing anything and probably the most important reason I can't swap it out is because when I took that one apart I found out it's broken all of these pel modules are either broken or cracked I think this was a bad bccm maybe I found another reason we don't use pel modules for battery conditioning and by the way these were not glued together it was just thermal paste holding these on so prying these apart isn't what broke them these look a little burnt in places so I'd be willing to bet they were just pushed beyond their limits and there's only six of them for the whole dang pack so his battery pack will continue to not have heating or cooling the lack of cooling doesn't really bother me it's the lack of heating that's more of a concern because this is lithium iron phosphate lithium iron phosphate gets damaged if you charge it below freezing he lives in Michigan this battery pack has no heat in it I'm not in love with that scenario but I don't know what to do about it there's just a missing piece cell charging is done one of the downsides of getting this fancy new multimeters I found out my power supplies aren't accurate so getting these cells all within 5 molts of each other required a lot of manual baby setting did I mention these modules weigh 100 lb each if I didn't uh these modules weigh 100 lb each annoyingly to get these lined up with the bolt holes I have to use the boroscope yeah that's the right direction and we're [Music] good there's a little resistor in here this is just how it was but there's a little resistor in here that is absolutely burnt on both ends so um but that's how it was so I'm just going to leave it there heavier than it looks oh my God what this fiberglass or on there we go yay [Music] [Music] with it all put back together and hopefully fixed it's time to Chuck this battery pack back into the truck uh I was led to believe that the Via had some sort of fancy dual inverter one inverter for both the motor and the generator it doesn't they're two separate units it would have been much nicer to have a full height battery lift table but you work with what you got and this little Harbor Freight scissor lift table is what I got stand back for coolant this is I'm plugging in the coolant lines that do absolutely nothing oh which one do I plug this into to Inlet or Outlet I've got any choice it doesn't matter they're both the same useless the pack needs to be almost all the way up into the truck to connect most of these connectors which makes it much harder to access them there we go okay yeah I think it's in big giant spider next to my KNE I hit it no spiders aside Beyond this point I only encountered a few minor difficult is getting the pack back in place put the lift table in the exact right place to foul with the lift arm well gosh darn it I got the coolant house in the wrong place let's just skip straight to the good Park batter's in it only took two years off my life three max there only two things left before I can plug in the 12vt battery and fire it up one is I have to put the mid pack disconnect back onto the battery pack to make it live and also I need to get my flashlight cuz I left it under there mid pack disconnect going in now no that's not it What's your deal won this go in what am I doing wrong each one of these stupid high voltage connectors is its own jigsaw puzzle and you got to figure out each one individually cuz they're all different it no is this why do these all have to be jigsaw puzzles oh it was way too hard and I got my flashlight as you might be able to imagine the anxiety is peeking right now so let's plug in 12vt and try to turn it on before I have a heart attack 12vt is plug it in key in these take a minute to go we have it has no idea what the battery's at I don't know why it's trying to start the engine it does not matter yes the Hood's open just put it in reverse it moves it moves okay well I'm going to let it charge overnight and then we'll take it for a test drive in the morning let's be clear about this I don't know if I fixed anything I took out two three modules out of the battery pack that I don't know were bad and replaced them with three modules from a different pack that I don't know were good the only thing that I know I improved for sure is the balance of the pack the balance of the voltages between the modules in the pack that's the only thing that I know for sure I improved everything else is just huh maybe it's better hopefully it's not worse but my opinion hardly matters it's not my truck what did Jason think after he flew back and test drove his truck for a bit what was his opinion on it we've driven it from full charge to the engine is about to kick on is it better worse about the same or something else it's a little bit worse to be clear the reason he said it was worse was because it was suddenly having thermal issues dropping the battery pack introduced air into the Power Electronics cooling Loop which was probably why that needle was reading high on occasion we just kept repeatedly topping up that coolant reservoir and thankfully he didn't have any overheating issues on his 8h hour drive back home he's now been back home and living with the vaa for a little over a week now and after some driving and charging Cycles he's reported back to me that it's now mostly the same as it was before but there are some improvements he did a range test and with some 0 to 60 runs in highway driving he got 28 mil out of the battery before the engine kicked on which is seven more miles than I was able to achieve and better than he was able to achieve before the issue he was having where he would leave the truck parked at 50% or below state of charge and then come back to it and be reading at a new lower value appears to have been fixed the issue was probably caused by that one module being out of balance so that's improved and that's about it the performance seems to be about the same which is upsetting because that really needed some help but he also said one big Improvement is not with the truck but with his knowledge now now the battery pack in his truck isn't some mysterious black box he has an understanding of what's going on inside and he thanked me for that while he was experimenting with his via I was here experimenting with the two battery modules that he left behind he left behind the two battery modules out of the van pack that I said might have a weak cell group in them I capacity tested two of the cell groups out of this module one on the end and then the one cell group that had a lower voltage reading than the rest of them that I thought might be weak the first upsetting Discovery was that I found out full charging these cells took way less time than partially charging them so I absolutely would have had time to fully top balance all of the cells in the battery pack I think it would have only taken 10 days the second upsetting Discovery was the capacity test of that cell group on the end I expected these cells to be shot have like 60% capacity or something like that well the name plate capacity is 58.8 amp hours and what I got out of that cell group on the end was 51.3 which is 87% capacity and way higher than I expected and the third upsetting discovery was the capacity test of the selling group that I thought might be weak I got 52 amp hours out of it which is more than I got out of the other cell which just goes to prove that using voltage readings to determine cell health is a total shot in the dark I learned a lot from this project the whole thing was one big exploratory surgery session and the end result of the project was a marginally improved truck not hugely improved but marginally improved so the project was overall a success but easily the biggest gain from the project wasn't the trucks and improvements it was knowledge gained I learned a lot more about batteries like perhaps to maybe not use voltage readings so heavily to gauge battery health and I learned that um fully charging the cell takes less time than partially charging it the Via owner learned a lot more about his truck the battery is not a big black mysterious box now I got to play around with a via which I've been wanting to do for a long time and not only did I get to experience a via I got to tear into the battery pack which was much more interesting that I was expecting especially with that whole bccm situation and the fact that his was missing for some reason and now I've got two spare via modules that I can do anything I want to with and apparently at least the one is at 87% capacity so it's still good what should I use it for anything or should I just have it around as an ornament anyway oh and by the way I almost forgot to mention the Via introduction video that you've hopefully already seen that was filmed after I swaped out the three modules in the battery pack so the performance demonstrated in that video is the improved version anyway thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed this exploratory look inside of AA I'll see you next time

Channel: Aging Wheels

Views: 155,920

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Id: AtZcDqhVBpg

Length: 31min 11sec (1871 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 09 2024