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Toyota is recycling old EV batteries to help power Mazda's production line

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Re: Toyota is recycling old EV batteries to help power Mazda's production line

#91
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you do. As long as someone else pays for cleaning up after you. There have always been leeches in the world.

your comment reminds me of a rant by a severely clueless person who insisted that we must conserve water despite living on an island in a middle of a second largest european reservoir. which is utterly pointless.

Of course it does. When you apply zero thought to anything you can always find false equivalence.

Re: Toyota is recycling old EV batteries to help power Mazda's production line

#92
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much distance does one pack realistically need to not cascade? Honestly I can't imagine any more than half a meter since air is an extremely good insulator. Just make sure the fire can't crawl across though cable insulation? I've personally set RC lipo on fire with the wood-nail-hammer technique and while the fire out of the pack is intense I can't imagine it igniting another pack.

Precautionary principle. There’s not good ways to extinguish these fires once they start. So you kinda have to let them go. Maybe you could use some sort of deluge system or aggressive liquid cooling on the surrounding cells however. Overbuilding the delivery system but then running the pumps at their most efficient cfm except when the smoke alarms go off.

Do we use the precautionary principle when we run nuclear, build dams and burn coal as well or is this an extra thing because it's a potentially good way to reuse EV batteries? I don't think we should build these hand-me-down EV batteries near population centers, but my understanding is that the worst case scenario would be the plant burning down and releasing bad things (hello coal & natgas) into the atmosphere?

If we could develop some basic standards for packs (which voltage steps per row and some kind of connector interface standard like for charging) I think we have a really good way to maximize the lifetime and use of EV batteries to help the environment.

I paraphrase Bill Gates: There's no one energy source which will save us, many will complement eachother.

Re: Toyota is recycling old EV batteries to help power Mazda's production line

#93
post #47
post #28

Those who TL;DRd - it's for the factory, not the cars! Old EV batteries are great for energy storage. A worse weight-to-capacity ratio doesn't matter for batteries sitting on the ground. A battery that holds only 70% of its original capacity is considered worn-out for EVs (and even replaced under warranty), but grid storage isn't driving anywhere, so any capacity left is still useful.

Battery banks are worse than degraded raid arrays in some important respects. The bad cells tend to try to bring the rest of the pack with them. It’s one of the reasons people keep toying with partitioning cells and putting controllers onto individual cells or small groups of them. Parting out two or three dead battery packs to cull the best of the survivors can improve things quite a bit. And as you say, on a statio…

>The bad cells tend to try to bring the rest of the pack with them.

This is true (and in some cases potentially dangerous) when you have a several cells of varying voltages in parallel but it's fairly trivial (by EE standards at least) to overcome this with something similar to a charge pump.

Re: Toyota is recycling old EV batteries to help power Mazda's production line

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like EV batteries don't last long...

Turns out they're lasting much longer than expected: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/12/existing-ev-batter...

Nope. Why would Toyota even have an abundance of "old" EV batteries to begin with if they "lasted much longer than expected".

I have a Toyota Landcruiser from 1990.

Re: Toyota is recycling old EV batteries to help power Mazda's production line

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out they're lasting much longer than expected: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/12/existing-ev-batter...

Nope. Why would Toyota even have an abundance of "old" EV batteries to begin with if they "lasted much longer than expected". I have a Toyota Landcruiser from 1990.

Which most likely wouldn't pass Japanese vehicle inspection performed, IIRC, every two years. Also this means that it was never totalled.

Plenty of cars suffer the latter and with safety systems as they are now, it's more likely than in the past.

Re: Toyota is recycling old EV batteries to help power Mazda's production line

#96
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn’t need to charge them all at the same rate. Put in some cells that charge slower, fast charge the rest and continue charging the slower cells until unplugged. Consider for instance fast charging the array to 70% instead of 80%, where 1/3 of the cells are charged to 50% and the rest to 80%.

When all of your cells are connected in a pack of 400-800V connected to a DC fast charger, how do you stop charging the fast cells and continue charging the slower cells?

I would expect you could only do it with the onboard charger and only if it has one charger per module or the ability to connect the singular charger to each module.

Re: Toyota is recycling old EV batteries to help power Mazda's production line

#97
post #47
post #28

Those who TL;DRd - it's for the factory, not the cars! Old EV batteries are great for energy storage. A worse weight-to-capacity ratio doesn't matter for batteries sitting on the ground. A battery that holds only 70% of its original capacity is considered worn-out for EVs (and even replaced under warranty), but grid storage isn't driving anywhere, so any capacity left is still useful.

Battery banks are worse than degraded raid arrays in some important respects. The bad cells tend to try to bring the rest of the pack with them. It’s one of the reasons people keep toying with partitioning cells and putting controllers onto individual cells or small groups of them. Parting out two or three dead battery packs to cull the best of the survivors can improve things quite a bit. And as you say, on a statio…

[deleted]

Re: Toyota is recycling old EV batteries to help power Mazda's production line

#98
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precautionary principle. There’s not good ways to extinguish these fires once they start. So you kinda have to let them go. Maybe you could use some sort of deluge system or aggressive liquid cooling on the surrounding cells however. Overbuilding the delivery system but then running the pumps at their most efficient cfm except when the smoke alarms go off.

Do we use the precautionary principle when we run nuclear, build dams and burn coal as well or is this an extra thing because it's a potentially good way to reuse EV batteries? I don't think we should build these hand-me-down EV batteries near population centers, but my understanding is that the worst case scenario would be the plant burning down and releasing bad things (hello coal & natgas) into the atmosphere? If…

"Do we use the precautionary principle when we run nuclear, build dams and burn coal as well" ayfkm?

Re: Toyota is recycling old EV batteries to help power Mazda's production line

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you achieve this with cells in series? Do you kill an entire row and put it on "maintenance voltage"? I know how balance charging RC batteries work but they're smaller scale and "single row". Also in RC car world it's generally preferred to have one cell per voltage step, I've had way more dual-cell(per series) packs fail than single ones. Though my experience is only 6s/~22v but it's "the same shit on a bigge…

No EV that I'm aware of has the ability to bypass a single cell in a series string. I have often wondered if it would be worth designing an EV battery that can permanently short out a bad cell in a string, perhaps by deliberately disabling balancing, letting the bad cells voltage fall to zero, and then perhaps having a single use 'bypass' that latches on. It wouldn't be a seamless user experience, because if you disc…

Why can you not bypass until the voltage falls to zero? I'm with you aside from that.

Re: Toyota is recycling old EV batteries to help power Mazda's production line

#100
post #47
post #28

Those who TL;DRd - it's for the factory, not the cars! Old EV batteries are great for energy storage. A worse weight-to-capacity ratio doesn't matter for batteries sitting on the ground. A battery that holds only 70% of its original capacity is considered worn-out for EVs (and even replaced under warranty), but grid storage isn't driving anywhere, so any capacity left is still useful.

Battery banks are worse than degraded raid arrays in some important respects. The bad cells tend to try to bring the rest of the pack with them. It’s one of the reasons people keep toying with partitioning cells and putting controllers onto individual cells or small groups of them. Parting out two or three dead battery packs to cull the best of the survivors can improve things quite a bit. And as you say, on a statio…

You are talking about cells going bad and they are talking about cells that have less capacity from being cycled, not the same thing at all.
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