Tesla Cybertruck Battery Pack: Our First Impressions Under the Lid

yeah it's very it's all bending down how about we do this good job Andrew wow never mind Andrew smartass grab this chain get that out okay so uh let's let's get it on uh let's get it on the camera goad okay so here we go um that's all different no question about that um looks like we got plenty of foam looks like they've uh basically glued everything in here now these are where the um the screws that were holding it in place were mounted to and this is basically what was holding it back I don't think this blue um adhesive um was our big problem I think it was the ends of these pin nuts this right here um is a RTV and um that's kind of like what we use for sealing and gluing things this looks like an Anor robic which means that when I put it on it'll stay wet Forever Until I put something over the top of it screw it down and then because there's no air that's when it'll cure this this clue this cures in atmosphere so you put that on around the intersections on the top surface I think and then you put this RTV on then you put everything together and when you do that this Center section here is where they start riveting or sorry screwing everything down once everything is screwed down and there's an absence of air then this thing will adhere this is a crash Zone so out here I'm bolted this is being bolted to the uh longitudinals um some people call them the Rockers in the olden days they call them the Rockers but that's really the um strength of the body is going in here and then you've got this Gap and this Gap is to prevent intrusion from a side impact you can see by the outside circles these are 4680 for sure I have no idea how they made it so nice and smooth but I'm guessing that on top here you've got some sort of a micia or something cover and what they've done is they've pressed it down wiped it off and that's where these um that's where these little green spots are coming coming through but it does look like this has been laid and then the whatever that green stuff is has come out and then they've kind of like swiped it and you can see that it looks it looks kind of like uh what you'd see or expect to see if you were having your walls plastered I'm looking at um I'm looking at some things that are similar to what we saw in the past and other things that I am totally um baffled at so that's it for now hey boys and girls welcome back to um R live and I'm here with Tom pret and what we're going to do today is talk a little bit more about the battery um the battery is a little unique but there's some features and functions and one little story that we're going to give you about water Ingress and um and uh I think with that maybe what we'll do is uh Jump Right In and start uh start talking so uh first thing I want to do is I want to tell all those people who are worried about me getting you know dying because I don't have gloves on um if we look up here there's a this green seaone green foam that's over the top of this and then underneath you can see that orange looking uh plate that's a chunk of plastic there's energy contacts underneath there but in order to get a shock I'd have to be able to have all that seafoam taken off those plastic things taken off from there and then I'd have have to have these all removed with the seafoam gone and the bus bar available and then I would have to reach from here all the way over to there in order to get contact and that's the only way you can get a any kind of a major poke if I really wanted to die I suppose if I could reach all the way over to there and that was uncovered and this was uncovered then I could get the full potential of the battery but I'm not going to do that today in fact I'm not going to touch anything Tom's got his gloves on for those people who are still worried and um and uh he'll touch stuff but he won't get a shock either today's video is sponsored by Weagle hey boys and girls welcome back to Monroe live I'm here with Aaron Weagle uh from Weagle Solutions manufactured and believe me I'm sure this is going to be a great tour anyway Aron can you give us a little background little something on you and tell us a little bit about the company sure thanks SNY um Aon Weagle president CEO of Weagle formerly known as Weagle to works and we just recently dropped that acronym because of all the different capabilities that we now offer our customers uh we're a third generation owned business um we're my brother sister and I are the third generation my grandfather started it back in 1941 as a tool and die shop and over the decades and generations we've evolved from a tool and die shop to a metal stamping facility to now just doing a lot of different manufacturing with the man with the stamping emphasis today we do a lot of patented R welding processes uh assembly processes and uh we're into molding now in in some cases so um just a lot going on here because we want to make sure that we are providing everything that the customer is looking for as a One-Stop shop place as we start to grow and add on additional capabilities and and expand our footprint not only in Chicago but now heading into Mexico in 2024 this is a patented welding process that we co-developed with two other partners in the United States to be able to produce the products that we're making for our customer custom machines and we're about to show you a little bit of what this thing does but I as an example here we're Maring two different aluminum materials together to form to produce a a welded component here so here's the a and this is the before so as you can see the parts are being moved from Station 1 to 2 2 to 3 3 to 4 and then the robot will introduce a new piece here and that process will continue as we start the automation process so the robot to your right is locating the the flexible circuit board removes the the backing to suppose adhes use a vision system to check whether or not it's a POS or negative Flex circuit board locates it on the frame applies it so this is empty tray so once this is full it'll come out yeah we put a top on it and that's the final stages where it's it's the operator's responsibility to get the a full skit out and keep always an or empty tray full skid ready to go in Q so anyway what we're looking at is one of the pieces that's coming out of this Minster here this 160 T thing so we're looking at we're looking at I don't know uh some sort of a connector or or contactor and this is like amazingly thin over here this is our 350 ton Minster and what we're stamping out here is a thin gauge I would say medium gauge uh copper based material with tin plating once more and this is a a thinner gauge bus bar where is that done on this front so we have a post operation on this particular part where we're putting insertions into these into these parts some of that can be done off press and some of it can be done in die so we do we have both we have both applications really if you're going to do it in die it really depends on the part design which may or may not allow us to be doing it in D so welcome to our ym department at at Weagle so this is really part of the process of how we make all of our Progressive dieses within our our facility everything is all designed and built at Weagle and as far as the Precision and where the the most important part of the process is when it comes to making our tools starts right here this is a climate controlled room 68 degrees once again year round all these are MZ brand ym machines typically we like to flip our machines every 5 to seven years because the technology on these machines change so quickly and just they so much improve whether it's just um the speed of the machine itself or even the uh the wire consumption all right well um I have never seen one of these yeah and I I'm not uh surprised well this is brilliant Aaron I have had a hell of a good time I got to tell you and I don't get stumped too many times you got me twice so um I'm really impressed with all the stuff you've got going on here um I've just had an amazing afternoon this has been really really wonderful so thank you very much for allowing us come here and uh and and and basically videotape all this stuff thanks for uh educating me on a couple new techniques I've never seen before and uh just in general this has been brilliant thank you so much thank you s I appreciate you coming out I appreciate you coming and seeing what we got going on here I mean our family and our and our staff are really proud of what we've been accomplished and to be able to Showcase that is great so um and especially on on your show it's been uh it's got a lot of notoriety and and we feel proud and that we can even be here so if you want to find more information about Weagle it's uh www.eagle.com and again thank you for everything from my family you know to yours appreciate you so much thank you thank you and ladies and gentlemen boys and girls thanks for watching stay tuned there'll be more coming up in the near future bye so probably one of the easier things to do is to talk about this relative to the model y that we tore down that was very similar in in methodology uh the first thing that's different is that it's somewhat upside down but we'll touch on that later regarding the cooling ports normally we have a single Serpentine cooler that fishes its way through the cells uh like a snake if you will and it would cool the edges of two rows of cells what s's pointing out is that very oddly we have one of those cooling channels on one edge of the cell so this without any other type of intervention would cause this row of cells to be cooled a little bit better than the other ones that all have two groups of cells sharing the same pipe so that said they may have put a flow restrictor in there to equalize it they may have some other way of making it so that it isn't disproportionately cooler or hotter depending on what you're trying to do with the coolant I think it might be a header um in which CA a header is just something one pipe that's a little different than the other pipes it's a little bit bigger and it could be that you know they just need uh flow back or flow forward um and they couldn't achieve it with the with the other pipe so they stuck that in it could very well be and it is common in battery design where you have multiple coolant paths to try to equalize the flow through those paths and often times a flow restrictor is what you do you have a flow monitor that allows you to adjust the restrictors until you get an even flow down every channel the way you want and then of course how much flow you want is a function of a comp computational fluid Dynamic study that we won't get into right now but want to put everybody to sleep this early in the video exactly so from there uh there's other similarities um the U orange piece that Sandy alluded to earlier this is a plastic cover that goes over a bus bar so if you look real close here these are bus bar connections to a greater conductor here and it passes through this Channel and connects to this one so on that far end there's an electrical terminal that goes down into the penthouse and again this battery pack is upside down relative to the way it is in the car so the penthouse is usually pointed up but that electrode starts one terminal of the battery it comes down this way connects this way goes that way and then there's another terminal at the other end of this module another terminal at the end of this module that connects this array through this bus bar and then back to there where the last terminal gives you your full Voltage potential so that full Voltage potential would be seen at the far ends of these two modules with the electrode pointed down into the penthouse you know what maybe what we should do because I I've gotten these questions before why don't you describe um the difference between series and parallel uh voltages okay um because that that way people might better understand why it is that this lump um is basically 1/ half of a battery and this is one half of a battery it's also half the voltage so why don't you go in there so to to start up fundamentally the entire array would give you an 800 volt pack which by very definition doesn't mean 800 volts very often it means a range of voltages that's probably 600 to 900 voltages during its operating voltage range so that said how does that break down it breaks down in groups of series cell groups so depending on what your total voltage is you'll have you know a standard pack might be 96 groups in series this one's significantly more we haven't tried to dive in yet to figure out exactly what this electrical configuration is yet um but each cell group is formed by a parallel grouping of cells and by parallel I mean the positive terminals tied to the positive terminal next to the this to the next cell and negative is tied to negative so when I take five six seven eight of those and put them in parallel I can get more power but the voltage Remains the Same within that group but that group is then grouped with other like groups to form the series array that gives you your high voltage so we call that in the biz S's and PS so um you know 96s 9p I think was the configuration for the model y this is a lot more S's and probably quite a few uh fewer P's if you will how many batteries do we have in here did you um out there there's a little bit of mystery in counting I've counted 48 along the length but it's kind of hard to tell whether or not we have a cell underneath these areas back here so once we get dug into this area we'll be able to definitively determine how many there are per row but it looks like 48 if there isn't one hidden under here so that would be 48 times seven rows and four of those collectively would give you the total number of cells so there's your homework assignment boys and girls now if they only knew the cell voltage they could figure out how many there are in series and that's one of the things I'll use to confirm our analysis as an actual cell measurement which we can get to once we dig it down in here we can there should be a battery management module underneath here that has all the connections for all the cell groups because they need to be monitored as individual cell groups and if we can get at that I can measure every cell group voltage from one connection on this end cool cool let's go back to the coolant yeah um the arrangement for the cooling is a little interesting here we have an inlet and an outlet on each of these cooling channels so there's one that's sort of high here and one that's sort of low and that is consistent with what we saw with the model y um but what isn't totally obvious at this point is how they are plumbed again in terms of s's and PS how many of these are plumbed in series and how many of them are plumbed in in parallel I want to believe they're all in parallel but so far visual observation has not confirmed that so we'll dig into that and figure out exactly how it works and then report but the the connectors themselves look really similar to the to the model one it is the the connection and the the entire header at the end of the serpentine cooler looks to be similar to the model y so um that said here's your main coolant Inlet and Outlet to the pack and you know this um pack is organized with the four modules that are electrically modules quite obviously they're glued in place in such a way where you could not remove them as a module at least not in any sort of normal way and let alone replace that module when we think of modules in a battery we think of something you can remove as a subset of the total number of cells and you could even replace that and put a new section of cells back in it this has obviously gone away away from that that design would be what we would call cell to module module to pack this one is cell to pack no module implied however electrically it's still very much a module it it still has to behave that way and there still has to be a battery management system monitor at the end of that to read all the cell voltages cell group voltages and provide the balancing function and ultimately report their information back to a supervisory battery management system that would manage contactor control pre-charge and other features like that that the battery so this is truly um a structural module th that's why we're calling it uh that's why we're skipping the other two aspects because we're basically looking at modules and one gigantic uh piece of sheet metal and these things are all glued down Solid Rock Solid there's very little reason or very little hope for replacing anything unless you just take this out and put another one in so um about the rock hardness of that it is really hard yeah and it's structural accordingly um it provides a number of different functions um everything from thermal runaway risk mitigation all the way to the structural component where you do have to mount the seats and other passenger passenger compartment components on what is the top side of the battery down below so between that and vibration damping um managing the otherwise rather frail uh welded connections between the current collectors on the far sides of these cells by the way it may not be obvious but we're looking at the bottoms of the cells here the tops or where you would make the electrical connections to the cell is on the far side that you can't see so the idea would be the bottom of the cell is the vent if a cell were to let loose in a thermal runaway situation the bottom of the cell would push out it would poke through this Micah top you can see that it's Micah um and it's very brittle the bottom of that cell will push right through it like it's nothing and that being the case that turns this whole area into a vent trough if you will and in the model y we had these little plastic ABS pieces that provided that same functionality that's gone and the capacity is much bigger it's is this yeah talk about this is really let me put it back together yeah let me let me give the story leading up to that so ventilation capacity is a big thing in battery design um when a battery starts to go into thermal runaway it's like you know hundreds of Roman candles that go off in a in a sequence so that being the case um where do the gases go they have quite a lot of volume and you have to get them out of the vehicle so they have a number of different ways they've done it in this design we can talk about flood Port second but this is the most interesting piece of the design I've encountered so far these pieces were mounted here in what we would call the lid but actually the bottom of the battery and they sit sandwiched like this I won't try to fit it together but you get the idea where they sit so what's interesting is on this side you have a gortex tile vent which is a moisture membrane it's meant for low volume pressure Equalization this battery has to be able to go to different altitudes and you have to equalize the pressure and you don't want to bring moisture in when you do equalize the pressure so this little membrane that you can see inside there provides that sort of filtered functionality to keep the moisture out that being the case that is nowhere near enough ventilation capacity for this entire group of cells to let loose through so what did these smart guys do they created this thing when we went to take these off there was no obvious way to remove it without breaking it and they snapped these little tangs all four of them broke when it came apart why would you do that if you look at this surface area and you calculate how much it is and the pressure that you would want it to release at you can design these little tangs so that they break at a precise point at which point this piece pops right off the bottom of the car and what's left is this fancy little device without without a better name for it I'll call it a spark arrester when a battery goes into thermal runaway one of the conditions that people are most worried about you know it's bad enough you've got a flamable gas and eventually it might catch on fire and now it's bad worse yet you have Flames the only thing worse than that is a projectile that comes with the flames and that can happen in certain battery chemistries where there's particles that come out that can blind people start fires in adjacent areas and such so this as a spark arrester would capture those particles and give you a tremendous amount of ventilation capacity once this Cap's removed so an Innovative thing that we normally see done with an elastomer sort of mushroom valve a check valve device that opens under pressure and then closes after that pressure is relieved this is a rather oneway valve that's you know only one way once but but here's the thing um even though uh we're looking we should talk about this as well so this is the bottom sorry that's the bottom of the um of the battery pack and it is facing the uh the the dirt as it were this and this are kind of unique because here we've got this standoff and this is an off-road vehicle so in off-roading anybody that's done that knows that sooner or later you're going to run over u a log or a big rock and it's going to bang into the bottom of your uh uh your floor and when that happens um you're going to have a dent you're never going to pierce it but you'll definitely get a dent this has got this looks like about 25 mm plus another I don't know six six or S millimeters over there so what you're looking at is over 32 uh I I think 32 33 millim of crush Zone that I never seen anybody do before but I I think it's brilliant and it does two functions one it gives you as Tom just said a big area for the gases to uh to uh vacate to and um and two uh this this allows me the comfort of going off-road and not having to worry about if I hit a big rock or um a tree stump or something like that so this is a really clever bunch of ideas is but even cleverer cleverer is there a word like that I don't think so there is now yeah I just invented it let's talk or let's have Tom talk about these babies because I'm really impressed with this so this one comes out of the um uh the um U control module and this one is parked right in in vakia somewhere all right so let's talk about this one here because it's familiar anyone who's uh anyone who's actually um watched our videos has probably seen this thing it has an official name it's called a flood Port if you look inside and it's really hard to see there's a stack of wafer discs that are inside there that would absorb moisture should it come in contact with moisture and once it absorbs the moisture it gets thicker and they collectively get thick enough where a valve opens up and it's an exit for coolant to leave the penthouse so these sit in here like this and if the coolant leaks in the battery Penthouse up here this is the upper side then it'll find its way to the flood Port expand those discs open it up and hey you'll see uh a cool leak on the floor of your garage and you'll know to get it fixed so that's the most probable reason you would have this um they did the similar thing out here at the edges and you can see the holes where they were at so this is a new type of valve that we've not seen before but it is also a stack of Wafers with a little mechanical coil spring and this little centerpiece is a the place where the the gases can exit you have fingernails available I don't so you can see the disc here we go here's the discs here and these things expand like uh Tom just said with uh with fluid and um that would allow that top to come out and because really and truly everything here is this so when you're when the water comes gravity will just let it drip out and the same with this one here it's pointing downward same sort of a deal so it would go out through this hole so if you had a flood situation where the water was accumulating underneath at the bottom of the pack if it got high enough to hit the flood Port it would let the moisture out through that hole so it also gives a little bit of additional ventilation capacity because pressure on this side will open this little thing and it will allow some of those uh flammable gases to exit out here but obviously this is not enough capacity for such a huge battery and hence the importance of the other one that you saw so what's always interesting about these is the talk about uh will they close back up again but uh we'll save that for another time uh yeah interesting flood Port addition uh this is very obviously designed for offer roading applications where it's going to get wet um I don't know if anyone has heard of this before but the vehicle has a so-called scuba mode where it's designed to be able to go water foring and to facilitate that the air compressor that operates the uh air suspension on the vehicle has an airline that feeds into the battery pack that pressurizes this as a cavity so that if it has any minute leaks such as what could be a breach in one of these seals or a valve that's cocked or whatever that can become an outlet for that pressurized air that was put into the pack so that it doesn't become an inlet for moisture so it's a really brilliant idea that I would argue should be on every car um every electric car anyways yeah so at the end of the day these are all great things uh that I think Tesla's put in place but um we we do some work for other agencies and we did some work on um flooded vehicles and one of the things that Tom found out was that there was a um a lady or someone anyways in Florida and they backed up their jet skis using uh a model X or yeah jet SK was and um uh they went in a little too far and it submerged the car and that's happened before but what I've never heard of is what Tom's going to tell you about right now yeah so I went down to a look at this car and you know a little background on it there is uh YouTube videos of this car burning underwater where it spent 4 and a half hours out gassing and if you just look at the volume of gas that's coming out of that battery you get an idea of the importance of the vent capacity of the battery now what was interesting is that the flammable gas exiting that vehicle underwater um the the gases caught fire on the surface of the water and they sat there and burned for that same four and a half hours they needed an ignition source and it's very likely that it was a 12volt sort of uh arcing that caused the ignition to create the fire so the vehicle after having burned for 4 and a half hours you could barely tell that it had any damage at all from the fire you had to actually open up the bottom of the battery pack where you have access to the pyrro fuses to see that it was all charred on the inside so it was very easy confirmed that it had caught fire how extensive the fire damage was throughout the packet remains unknown so very interesting to note that the flood ports on that vehicle uh again there were Penthouse mounted flood ports they were all open as you would expect them to and they were dried out and they did not close so the question is is that a cause or an effect when you have a vehicle that catches fire from being inundated with salt water it appears to be a function of a number of variables not the least of which would be how uh sailing is the water how much conductivity does it have pure water doesn't have much conductivity at all and then how much of that water did you get what was the state of charge of the battery uh Etc so this whole notion of will it catch fire or not remains sort of a a dark area of the science that's still in Discovery if you will so this whole point about the flood port and somebody who had a vehicle that regularly launched into a a boat ramp situation could it be that at one point the flood Port opened up from a previous Excursion and then remained open and then once it was open it became a source for an inundation in you know a huge flood of Ingress and that could be the difference between the first time when it went in and it got a couple of tablespoons or few cups of water and the second time where it was completely inundated yeah because they lost control of the car and the car basically was submerged but the story I want you to say is what happened when it was submerged the screen the doors everything oh yes so the uh the the users of the vehicle reported that the vehicle notified them of the impending doom of their situation there wasn't a clean description of what the screen said but it notified the driver that she should leave immediately three doors opened up automatically the windows went down and uh her husband had to get off the jet ski to retrieve her from the vehicle because she couldn't get the door open so uh a very interesting story that the vehicle was aware of the problem that was about to occur and uh she was given the due notice that she needed to get out of there at the end of the day um we're very impressed with many of the features all the features actually that we've located so far in this vehicle um like I say the the way this thing is has been put together and the way that it's been treated differently than all the other Teslas that we've seen because this is an off-road car or an off-road truck I should say so I'm I'm pretty impressed I I think that uh I think so far we haven't seen anything that went horribly wrong or something that needs to be brought to the attention of Tesla people but so far this has been a one little Adventure after another I think I know why now they they it took so long to get this truck out uh I think that I think that a lot of people put a lot of thought into everything that they did and um I don't know I'm I'm just really impressed so far um by the way um we have figured out how to get this stuff off uh so um uh so we'll be we'll be showing you a little bit underneath the foam here uh I don't know whether we're going to we have a big debate as to whether we're going to sell batteries or not last time we lost we lost a lot of money um on selling batteries at an outrageously high price so it's a lot to get these things to Pieces but anyhow um what I'd like to do is did you have anything else that you want you know another similarity and difference from the model y might be worth noting this large area here the sort of trough um you may note that there is some ventilation path through here there's a little rectangular opening so this is some ventilation capacity through these little floor blood ports we talked about however in the model y this was filled with a black foam that was um rather compressible and absorbed energy and when you look at this sort of buffer zone you can't help but think that this is for crash protection from side impact yet it's you know apparently able to absorb the energy without that additional foam another interesting similarity is what looks like a piece of wood yeah know and yeah when they see ours on display they always wonder if we added that piece of wood but no it's not wood it's a an extruded fiber device of some sort that is one of the structural members it's the way you can put Force here into the battery without letting the battery cells be the device that absorbs the force so kind of a unique feature and and uh very carefully designed by its appearance yep and there you have it boys and girls AB absolutely everything you need to know so far about the uh the Tesla cybertruck battery and almost everything we know almost we're keeping a couple of Secrets but at the end of the day thanks very much for watching stay tuned to Monroe live for more cybertruck Adventures thank you bye [Music] he

Channel: Munro Live

Views: 991,628

Keywords: EV, BEV, Sandy Munro, Munro, Electric Vehicle, Benchmarking, Electric, Insight, Lean Design, MunroLive, ElectricCars, Review, Car Review, Automotive, Automotive Review, Teardown Titan, Tesla, video review, Elon Musk, Munro Live, Ask Munro, Technology, Electric Car, Automotive Engineering, Automotive Technology, Innovation, cybertruck, Tesla Cybertruck, 4680, Battery Pack, Cybertruck Battery, Tesla Batteries, Battery, Cyber Battery

Id: ipe5A4ZN3Gc

Length: 36min 10sec (2170 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2024