I think if you live on the western side of CA, OR, or WA air cooling is fine for normal ev use such as driving less than 100 miles per day and charging at level 2 EVSEs. If you live in a very hot place such as AZ then liquid cooling may significantly improve pack life. If you own a manufactured ev then as far as cost goes the warranty is what matters as stated, but there is of course no warranty on diy conversions. Also, 16 kW is not "fast charging", that is a fairly low C rate for a Tesla pack. Fast charging is around 2C or greater permitting charging from around 20% SOC to 90% SOC in less than 30 minutes. My concern would be using fast charging on a long highway trip in high ambient temperature. The pack gets heated due to higher discharge rates at highway speeds, then gets heated further during fast charging, then more driving, more fast charging...I think to do this in 100 F ambient would require a liquid cooled pack to prevent overheating - as well as liquid cooled motor controller. I think the small minority of Leaf's that have had battery issues were subjected to treatment something like this.
Whenever you manufacture something you make choices on cost and performance. Nissan clearly did this by choosing to lower cost using air cooling of batteries. That is fine, but they should have clearly warned owners of the resulting limitations. They should also have assumed some warranty costs due to expected number of users who would operate under excessive conditions, and just planned on replacing the packs as a cost of business. If this percentage of users is relatively high resulting in excessive warranty costs, well then that is a bad business model and liquid cooling would have to be used. It is common practice in a number of industries to do reliability testing in order to estimate expected lifetimes of components and calculate resulting expected warranty costs. -- View this message in context: http://electric-vehicle-discussion-list.413529.n4.nabble.com/Air-cooled-vs-liquid-cooled-batteries-and-charging-standards-tp4663777p4663797.html Sent from the Electric Vehicle Discussion List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
