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welcome nigel to our podcast and thanks for being here today with us so let's talk a little bit about lithium because lithium is definitely probably i would say one of the hottest sort of topics in our field right now especially within the marine industry related to battery systems and you brought up a good point about these concept of these drop-in replacements it comes out of course um people want it to be easy right they want the benefits of you know and i tell people and correct and chime in here but foreign i think melissa has just put up a shot of a uh lithionics lithium ion battery with an external bms and this is one of those batteries that has a very broad ability to communicate outside the battery and which is that little middle cable that you've got there's a communications cable um so uh but this means this battery it's not really a battery it's an energy storage system because now we've got the capability to integrate this battery uh with all the charging devices on the boat for example so that if the battery sees a condition in which it's it's likely to get over charged it can send out a message to shut down the charging devices if it sees a condition in which it's getting close to shutting down because of a lack of charge you can send out a warning message and maybe uh turn on one of the charging devices but so it's got that external communication capability the other thing that i want in my boat with lithium ion which i don't have at the moment i do have lithium-ion batteries i won't discuss which brand they are um but the other thing i want with my lithium-ion batteries is a sticker on the battery that says it's tested to ul 1973. that's the most aggressive abuse testing standard in the marketplace uh in the marine marketplace at least and it means so whatever i do stupid and i do do stupid things like everybody else plus i i push these these systems to their published limits just to see what happens i mean it's part of what i do for a living but with lithium-ion if you get it wrong it's likely to go up in smoke and you lose the boat so with that you will 1973 sticker on the battery you can be pretty certain that there's just about nothing stupid you can do that's going to cause that battery to catch fire and you're going to lose the phone so you wouldn't use the boat yeah that's what i want on my lithium ion battery is that sticker on the side of the battery says it's ul 17 1973 tested there's not many batteries have it because the testing is very expensive yeah i actually went to ul to see how they do that oh yeah oh yeah they do crazy stuff like they put a battery in a with a metal screen around it and they put it in an oven and they heat it up until it explodes when you know which you can get pretty much any lithium-ion battery to explode and it has to have a battery case that's strong enough to make sure there's no projectiles that will come through the screen outside you know stuff like this um they take one cell in the battery and they totally discharge it and then they fully charge all the other cells so the battery is totally unbalanced and then they put it on a full out charge rate to see if they can drive that one cell into thermal runaway um which will in a lithium-ion battery well again it'll start a fire in the cell so they do a lot of really really they take the bms and uh they introduce a fault to it and it has to have a redundant capability so it can handle a single fault within the battery management system so and of course this all drives the cost of the batteries up and it makes them expensive but on the other hand what's peace of mind was yeah that's a challenge you know i see it all the day and you know it's funny people are buying you know some people you know we're very few people are putting lithium in a 10 000 value boat you know you're seeing i see but voters that are buying you know catamarans for you know half a million you know 300 400 750 a million dollars which sounds like an obscene amount number but i mean that's some books are costing that and that's not on the top end that's you know that's a 40 foot 45 foot 50 foot camera right and and yet they've they've spent x on the boat and then they're looking and i have to have some orders and it's it's almost like a misalignment in values and they're like i need to save as much money as humanly possible on a battery bank that will be either underneath my bed or literally behind my head yes i tell them i'm like why would you why would you be a smoker and have a flammable couch right you know i know it's less money to put flammable material on the couch but why would you want that and i think that's the problem is people can't connect the dots they they they're very um they just don't want to go there because the price is that's our job they have to help them connect the dots yeah yes and of course if we do it right they'll listen to us yeah and that's what this you know it goes back to uh it's a little bit the spirit of this conversation right is to try to people have a hard time being told what to do in general that all of us certainly myself but if you tell me why i should do something tell me the reasons you give me an explanation and i'll come to that conclusion then yeah i'm all in you know and i think that's what it comes down to it's not just telling them voters what they should or shouldn't do but educating them that's the reasons why we should do something or the reason we shouldn't and then let most people will come to the same conclusions not everyone because it all we have different values so what are your reasons for doing lithium like what would you if you're talking about yourself performance you know it's the uh the energy density there's there's on a volume or weight basis there's probably uh people say four times as much or energy density or a quarter of the volume but actually by the time you put the bms in and stuff like that you're probably talking two to one but then you know if we call that acid batteries we're normally speaking we're using less than 50 of the capacity at each cycle with lithium we're probably using 70 if we really push it 80 so then you need less of them so by the time you're done you probably are talking uh a quarter of the batteries for a similar performance so yeah and then uh if you have uh maybe half as many batteries or even a similar amount you've got way more performance and in our case you know we developed that integral system uh alternator that puts out eight kilowatts yes i need a battery bank that will absorb eight kilowatts of charging power but on our boat because we don't have air conditioning uh but we don't have you know fridge and freezer and microwave and all kinds of bits and pieces uh but in uh on half an hour of engine run time when we're pulling up the anchor to get out of an anchorage or we're leaving the dock in the time it takes us to do that we can put enough energy in that battery bank with that integral alternator to run the boat for 24 hours yeah that's the dream yeah yeah and you know we've spent 40 years stressing over the state of charge of our batteries like everybody else you know constantly checking the state of a charge thinking maybe i better do a bit of battery charging and anchor these last few years because i've been wanting to push the system hard for test purposes i've been doing stupid things like boiling water and electric kettle at the same time as i'm boiling it in the microwave and then dumping hot water down the sink so that the hot water heater is running so that i can load the system up just just to see what it'll do at one point we had eight kilowatts of electricity on the boat when we were testing this was in ireland the weather was miserable but there were times when we still helped open every hatch and porthole on the boat to let the heat out because we got eight kilowatts of electric pages running just so i could load the system up to see what it would do but what size inverters do you have on board right now yeah eight kilowatt inverter yeah how much eight kilowatts oh yeah everything maxed out i wanted to see what would break first by the way you know what how big is your boat is it 45 it's 40 well it's they call it a model 46 but it's actually 48 feet it's uh no you're the only one that has any kilowatt converter onboard unless you have air conditioning there's just yeah i mean there's no way we can use all the energy we can generate at the moment um but uh it's uh well that's that's basically one of the things i do is to try to test things for destruction to see what's going to break first and then i'll get a hold of the manufacturer or whatever and say you know this is what happened and then maybe they'll they'll fix it we know yeah sometimes and if not we at least we know where the boundaries are yeah and then we can go ahead and make sure that we design systems that are pretty bulletproof there was one point with that testing where i'm where i discovered a means to create something called a harmonic vibration and i could break a belt in four minutes you know these are these are timing belts rip timing belts off a car that we were using because they're very rugged and i could make this belt go totally crazy and break a belt in four minutes so so then the uh the manufacturer had to spend a ton of money fingering it figuring out how this was happening nobody else could do it it was it was unique to our boat and certain speeds and and resonant features and and they figured it out and got to a point where i couldn't do it anymore yeah that's that that's a i mean breaking things to learn things is a good way i mean we we don't intentionally break things uh our client base do that for us right you know the thousands of voters that we can help out and we learn from we learn from our own mistakes other people's mistakes yeah you know as long as you're learning from the mistakes then tomorrow is a better day yeah yeah so what's your charge rate going into your lithium bank uh well we've got it's a 48 volt bank because otherwise the um the cables would be huge yeah so uh we're putting in what we start out at eight kilowatts so if we do the math that's eight thousand divided by fifty is uh 160 amps i think so it's a lot lower than we might be doing with a you know high output alternator or 12 or 24 volts yeah um but in terms of energy you know it's twice as much as we can get from pretty much any other even the best of the higher output alternators on the market yeah you know the the aps alternators that ocean planet energy cells yeah those have terrific performance characteristics at 12 and 24 volts so what's the output at low rpm on those alternators what makes it terrific like what does it make so awesome well there's two things one is the the maximum output actually the three things the maximum output which is typically speaking for these alternators are radio when they're cold well when you run them hard within five minutes they're uh up to the case is probably up to well over 100 degrees centigrade um so then they they uh the output goes down so then efficiency becomes really important and there's fps alternators are some of the more efficient ones on the market you know the typical automotive alternator is maybe 50 efficient much of the time uh these aps alternators around 70 some of the belmonts are as well and then the other thing that's critical to all of us is that they ramp up their output at low rpms yeah especially if we're battery charging at anchor uh because if you've got to run the engine you know two and three thousand rpm to get the alternator to wide open to a full output you're not going to do it so what you thought was a 200 amp alternator is really 100 amps yeah um so that that is is a really critical feature is getting it to ramp up the output at low rpms and we spent a ton of money with the integral system working on that and we got it to the point where with the engine at a thousand rpm we're getting five kilowatts out of the alternator that's just amazing yeah i mean there's nothing on the market that comes close to it so i can set an anchor i can run my engine at 1200 rpm which is you know not much above idle speed yeah and it's also quite quiet and uh and that thing's putting out um seven kilowatts and not only that that seven kilowatts is enough of a load on the engine at that low speed to where i'm almost at the peak fuel efficiency for the engine so i'm actually getting even at anchor generating like that i'm more efficient than a standalone generator yeah and that's what you want it's that sweet spot i saw that i did i saw your video that uh i think it was about last year or maybe 18 months ago that you guessed yeah yeah you were wearing a lap like such a scientist right we're we're about to start the video and they they gave that to me and maybe wear it i felt kind of stupid in it but you were such a scientist i'm like nigel doesn't mean you could you could have come in there and sweat i was like no no it's nigel man he doesn't need to pretend to be a scientist that's the one and only time i've ever won a lab coat i love it i love it i saw you on i'm like no no this guy doesn't need to wear one you can put one you can wear one but he doesn't need one yeah but you know we we spent oh my nose is visiting again we spent three million dollars of of uh some big corporation in the u.s funded that project three million dollars developing now wow yeah yeah that was then and then we had other money that we put in so it was a pretty intense uh development program this stuff is paper it's really easy we know exactly what we want to do but uh but actually making it all work and then building a controller that can handle that kind of power and then one of the tests i i did was to run the thing up to eight kilowatts and open circuit the batteries to see what happened you know with another one did you immediately smoke the alternator you blow all the diodes yeah that's what i heard our controller reacted so fast and it had such a decent dump capability that shut the system down without any damage oh wow that quick yep yeah that's what you want because otherwise you're going to write that all i mean that alternative has got to be but you know i drew up a list of design characteristics that i wanted to see anything i have no technical capability whatsoever to to make it happen but i know what we want because i've been doing this for long enough and dealing with the bitter kit that we have and the failings that they have so i know what i want uh it's a matter of finding the people that can then take that and translate it into a piece of kit that will do that yeah and that's what we were able to do with that project let's talk a fallacy of lithium ion we all know they have a really high cycle life their iron phosphate which is most of the petrus we see have some at least two thousand cycles if it's roughly so if you do the math and you you say i can get 70 out every cycle and i got 2 000 cycles and then you assume that you can do all of that and then you look at the cost of the battery as compared to lead acid and you do the same analysis with lead acid it turns out that in the long run lithium ion is cheaper than lead acid however the fallacy here is to assume that you're going to get those 2000 cycles i have never met a boater yet to cycle the battery 2 000 times so if you only cycle that battery say 300 times because you only use the boat half dozen weekends of the year um then uh it's way more expensive than a lead acid battery for the energy that you you put in and out of that battery so we have to we have to acknowledge the the the single strongest talking point in terms of the cost benefit of lithium ion is probably not one that most boat owners can actually use because we don't have the capability to exploit that height cycle life yeah and and that's where i get always concerned when a product is using some sort of the same thing would be nigel to me is the 3c thing you know a lot of people are advertising like oh you know lithium can charge at three times capacity it's nonsense you look at the lithium batteries we have in the marine marketplace and most of them don't want to be charging more than 0.3 c yeah exactly is substantially less than an agm battery and even where are you gonna find that charger i'm like okay 3c okay that's great awesome perfect all right good no problem congratulations good all right now tell me where you're gonna okay your battery bank is let's call it a 400 amp hour battery bank at 12 volts that's four golf cart batteries that is not a big battery bank you know 400 amp hours is a tiny battery bank for any boat above 30 feet i mean it's it's it's vanilla like there's nothing to it it's like it's just a sedan four doors that's it it's basic i'm like okay 400 amp hours do 3c of that 1200 amps okay start looking online for a 1200 amp charger 600 amp charger 300 amp charger you know where are you going to find a charger that is ever going to give you the benefits of that theoretical charge rating well in any case we don't have that charge rate with the batteries we're using because those are automotive factors where they're built for acceleration and they're also built to handle massive braking regenerative braking spikes so in the boat wall we have energy batteries that are designed to accept and deliver energy much more slowly so most of the boat batteries lithium-ion batteries we have uh looking at 0.3 c not 3c one-tenths of that charge rate many of some of them will go to 0.5 c and a handful of them will go to one seat in my own boat because we've got that integral um alternator that will put out eight kilowatts and we had an eight kilowatt a battery bank a kilowatt hour then i wanted the one c range and in terms of the available lithium-ion batteries in the boat world that's pushing the boundaries of most of those batteries many of them they don't want to do that so whereas actually you can pump 1c and so any agm battery up to about 50 state of charge so ironically there are agm batteries which will accept a higher charge rate than a lot of the lithium-ion batteries we have also if you found this video interesting please subscribe um it honestly does it does help us to know that all this time that we're investing is actually we're reaching a lot of voters and i want to thank all of you for watching thanks for spending some time with me Videolytics    Tools