I recently bought a 2018 Leaf SL. I have already had a couple of instances where the battery got hot and would not DCFC very fast. I'm hoping in the future to take some long distances trips in my Leaf so I'm thinking of ways to mitigate the hot battery and slow charging issues.
I made some long distance trips in my 1st generation Ford Focus Electric. One thing I found out driving an EV without fast charging is that the faster you drive the longer it takes to get where you want to go. It makes sense that the same principle could be applied to battery heating and slow charging.
Battery heating is caused by amperage to and from the battery. The Leaf thermal management system controls the amperage to the battery when charging but we control the amount of amperage from the battery with the speed we travel. We know that the battery has the ability to cool itself but the cooling system gets overloaded over long distances and with multiple fast charges.
There must be some speed at which the battery cools enough to allow full amperage during fast charging. But what is that speed? There are of course other factors such as accessory use and ambient temperature that would enfluence this threshold speed but when need to establish a baseline then work on the other stuff.
We can't changed the way the Leaf was designed but we can control the way we use it. Reading through this forum there appear to be some pretty knowledgble people that frequent here. I have found a lot of threads on the battery over heating issue but very little on how to manage the over heating.
I plan to perform some tests to see at what speed does the battery not get too hot to accept full amperage on fast charging. This is going to take some time, driving around in a loop at different speeds and stoping to fast charge when needed. Texas in summer would be a good place to perform these tests.
If anyone has performed these kinds of tests or knows of any good ways to manage battery temperature on long trips I would like to hear about it. Please don't just regergitate the infromation on battery temperature in the owners manual. I'm looking forward to hearing about your experiences, thoughts and ideas on this issue.
I made some long distance trips in my 1st generation Ford Focus Electric. One thing I found out driving an EV without fast charging is that the faster you drive the longer it takes to get where you want to go. It makes sense that the same principle could be applied to battery heating and slow charging.
Battery heating is caused by amperage to and from the battery. The Leaf thermal management system controls the amperage to the battery when charging but we control the amount of amperage from the battery with the speed we travel. We know that the battery has the ability to cool itself but the cooling system gets overloaded over long distances and with multiple fast charges.
There must be some speed at which the battery cools enough to allow full amperage during fast charging. But what is that speed? There are of course other factors such as accessory use and ambient temperature that would enfluence this threshold speed but when need to establish a baseline then work on the other stuff.
We can't changed the way the Leaf was designed but we can control the way we use it. Reading through this forum there appear to be some pretty knowledgble people that frequent here. I have found a lot of threads on the battery over heating issue but very little on how to manage the over heating.
I plan to perform some tests to see at what speed does the battery not get too hot to accept full amperage on fast charging. This is going to take some time, driving around in a loop at different speeds and stoping to fast charge when needed. Texas in summer would be a good place to perform these tests.
If anyone has performed these kinds of tests or knows of any good ways to manage battery temperature on long trips I would like to hear about it. Please don't just regergitate the infromation on battery temperature in the owners manual. I'm looking forward to hearing about your experiences, thoughts and ideas on this issue.