Sunday, January 1, 2023

Re: [electricboats] Li-ion battery designer commentary

Yah! If you're loading your racing boat up with lithium and your wanting to plane, energy to weight ratio is big. However when displacement hulls are the major players weight becomes less of a factor. 

If I consider my sailboat, it had 5000 lbs. Of lead bolted on the underside. Had a 5411 universal diesel originally installed. Battery density becomes a non-issue. 


I of course must take into account recyclable resource when I consider the avenue I take. Why? Well because I got into sail-electric to help the environment. This required my research into the processes used to make my components. 

So what are my components?

Used off grid solar panels, replacing aged sails. Reusing panels keeps those panels out of the landfills, and have a cost benefit. (Roughly 3000w used panels vary from rated values). 

Carbon lead Batteries not only have higher c ratings than lead acid, they have the same ability to be recycled. Recycling of lithium Batteries are a completely different subject.  As well as the strain on the environment during the initial refinement required. 

With the removal of sailing gear, the lead ballast can be replaced by lead Carbon power storage. (3000# ÷ 156#=53 NSB batteries). Not to say that you would need to, but the lead in the keel replaced by blues would be 2000amp hours at the typical 48volt system without changing the water line. 

48 volt 200ah bank was at the time of purchase 1800 usd. In conjunction with 3000 watt solar bank,  and 10kw drive. Keeps the battery bank usable at less than hull speed. 

In summary: if I were talking to a group of car enthusiasts, I would have to consider destroying the environment, but I am not! I am talking to a group of mostly displacement hull enthusiasts  what I am encouraged about is my post was considered. 

Have a wonderful day!!

On Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 8:45 AM twowheelinguy via groups.io <twowheelinguy=yahoo.com@groups.io> wrote:
I've heard good things about NorthStar batteries, and I've used the Trojan "carbon infused" batteries but I wasn't that impressed. Sure, they worked a lot better, but they still don't hold a candle to Lithium chemistry. And carbon infused lead batteries are a lot more expensive so that cancels out any cost advantage they might offer.   

The problem with lead chemistry is not it's capacity to store energy, it actually provides a pretty good value for that. The problem is you lose your ass putting the energy in and taking it out, especially if you want to do it in a hurry. If you have a system where you can charge slowly and only do low current draws with low depth of discharge, you could have argued that lead was a better value than lithium until recently. But now that you can buy a ready to use kWhr of lithium storage capacity for $250, lead has just about lost any price advantage it had and once it hit's $150/kWhr it will pretty much be game over for the lead battery industry. I don't think lead will ever completely be dead but it will soon be relegated to only very specialized applications imo. 

I'm on a cruise right now running my new lithium batteries hard for the first time and I can state UNEQUIVELENTLY they are definitely in another league than ANY lead batteries I've ever used or heard of and I've cruised the Arc over 5000 miles using various lead batteries over the last 12 years. As a long time holdout for using lead acid chemistry, I have to agree with Elon Musk now when he said, "lead sucks". 

You can still debate the cost benefit ratio of lead for some specialty applications but comparing the performance of lead to lithium is like comparing little league baseball to the major league.  Lithium is that much better, imo.

Capt. Carter


On Saturday, December 10, 2022 at 06:57:55 AM EST, F. Neil <fneilss@gmail.com> wrote:


At >60 pounds per kWh, and limited 50% depth of discharge (for maximum lifespan), these Northstar carbon lead batteries are not really in the same class as Lifepo4 batteries for applications where energy density is an issue... 

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