With the completion of 95 copper bus bars, I was nearly ready to assemble the Really Big Lithium Ion Battery. There is a little process involved though. The Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePo) cells I was using had been in storage for a while and though new, would need a some maintenance. There would be 64 of them, arranged in 16 sets of four cells.
Continue reading →After building a wooden enclosure for the Lithium Ion Solar Battery, it was time to think about copper bus bars to connect all those cells together. This requires a little math, since the bus bars have to be big enough to handle current demand, but not too big — copper is expensive!
Continue reading →Previously, I wrote about Upgrading a Solar Power System and mentioned a cache of new Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePo4) cells. The “ThunderSky Winston” cells had come from a Segway repair operation and were new. A little looking around the ‘net revealed they were still available from GWL Group. With a capacity of 60 Amp Hours (AH) and nominal voltage of 3.3 volts, they looked useful for building a 12-volt Solar Generator.
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