New Battery Tech

[swatdoc]

Mark - have you ever researched thermal-dispersant coatings? "supposedly" when a part is painted with one, it actually sheds heat better than the bare aluminum. Might not be a huge difference, but maybe every little bit helps. The added benefit is that you could have a black frame and "motor". Would look nice with some color/graphic schemes.

TLTD Thermal Dispersant | Tech Line Coatings

 

[bluefxstc]

I know Tesla uses wire that is also the fuse for each cell in their battery packs. The wire is the fuse, so if an over current situation occurs, the wire will break to isolate the problem and prevent a chain reaction failure in the pack. No idea if Alta uses a similar structure, but I would check before I started changing cells.

 

[Mark911]

Mark - have you ever researched thermal-dispersant coatings? "supposedly" when a part is painted with one, it actually sheds heat better than the bare aluminum. Might not be a huge difference, but maybe every little bit helps. The added benefit is that you could have a black frame and "motor". Would look nice with some color/graphic schemes.

TLTD Thermal Dispersant | Tech Line Coatings

swatdoc. Yes, coatings, paints and other surface treatments have a role to play for sure. However, I suspect that the battery pack thermal bottlenecks are not radiator surface area related for now. Thinking about the thermal load path I'd guess the two biggest problems are getting heat from the individual module cells to the modules heatsink and then from the heatsink to the outside housing where it can be rejected. You got some 120 plus cells fighting each other to get their heat energy into a relatively thin plate which in turn is trying to dump heat into a relatively thin cross section of the housing. Typically, the best "thermal interface" is a set of smooth/matching surfaces making intimate contact. If the coatings help in this case than it'll help overall. Obviously, any coating that can lower the external housing temp a few degrees increases to delta T which helps pull heat out. Heck, that's why we painted our aircooled bikes cylinders and heads black!