This blog documents the restoration, and conversion, of a 1965 Humber (Singer) Vogue to a fully electric vehicle. The Vogue will be powered by an 11kW(modified), 3 phase industrial AC motor, controlled by an industry standard Variable Speed Drive (VSD) or Inverter. To be able to produce the 400 volts phase to phase the VSD will need about 600 VDC of batteries. A big thanks to the contributors on the AEVA forum: http://forums.aeva.asn.au/forums/

Thursday, March 18, 2010

More Heater Work

It's been a while coming as I have been doing some work on the battery packs and restoring the heater blower (at least a new paint job) and other seemingly trivial stuff but here is the ceramic heater core "glued" into the Vogue heater box.
I had to get a big cartridge of the red high temperature RTV silicon and it's a pain. It doesn't come with a replacable tip (unlike cheap silicons and gap filler cartridges). I can't leave it for more than a week before the nozzle blocks up and I want to use it for other stuff (grizzle, grizzle).
You can see a new hole on the left side of the box that now takes a cable gland. That's where the 600 VDC power cable will enter the box. I have also added a terminal block and re-terminated the blower low-fan speed resistor - it was pretty rough the way Lord Rootes had his guys do it 43 years ago. They just tied a knot in the wires and crimped them to the resistor wires. You can see the power resistor peeking out in the foreground on the right.

The red arrows point to one side and the green arrows the other side of the 600VDC connections. The blue arrow lets me test it with 240VAC. To test it I join the red and green indication connections  together and apply power between the red/green and blue indicated connections.

I put some temporary wiring in and placed the top on the box, strapped the blower to the side and it works beautifully. Lots of airflow which I was a bit concerned about. It draw 7 Amps from 240 VAC which is about 1700W. It puts out at least as much heat as the fan heater that supplied the parts.
There was a slight puff of smoke when I first applied power (before putting the lid on) but it was just some thin silicon burning off the actual ceramic section of an element. Ceramic elements are strange things. If I apply 240 VAC across the sides (red to green) as I will do for 600VDC, it only draw 0.5 Amps - about 120 Watts. The elements appear to be quite non-linear with voltage. It will be interesting to see how it copes with the 600 Volt PWM (Pulse Width Modulated) power.
(Pulse Width Modulation is basically like a switch turning on and off repetitively at a really fast rate. If you have it off for the same amount of time you have it on, then you get half the effective voltage. If you  have it on for more time than it is off, then you get more voltage. It's kind of how light dimmers work.)