Has anyone played with these on a hybrid vehicle? They are supposed to trickle power back to a 16 volt battery while you are plugging away at that computer at work from 9-5.

I'm just curious what they would do on a hybrid car? Would I come out to a fully charged IMA? (Wishful thinking)

You would be trickle charging a 144 volt battery so you would need to make up a solar array that produces at least that much voltage or come up with some sort of custom DC/DC converter to go from 16V to 144V. There may be kits already available to do this. Or you could just use the 16V charger to top off the 12V lead/acid under the hood. Or better yet, install and extra battery pack that uses solar to charge while you're flying the desk all day at the salt mines.

Does the cigarette plug feed into the 144 volt IMA batteries or the 12V battery under the hood or both?

It should feed into the 12 battery only, otherwise there would be a lot of dead Ipods out there....

Ok, so in order to charge the IMA, we'd have to hard wire into the 144 volt batteries (which I understand is accessible under the hood?)
And then the 16volt windscreen solar chargers would have to be converted to 144 volt.

Complicated.

Yes. In theory that's what would have to happen. You may have to insert some protection circuitry between the DC/DC converter and the solar array. There would be losses as well when you convert 16V to 144V + but since the battery pack is only about 6 amp/hr, you may be ok. I would not attempt this unless I had the full shop manual that shows exact charging voltages and currents and help from an expert BSEE or higher. Most importantly, you wouldnt want to cause a fire or damage the pack and void the warranty, which may happen anyway. The battery packs are VERY expensive to replace when out of warranty.

It might be better to wait for a "plug-in" hybrid.

Uhh, guys? You do realize that all the stickers on our HCH2's show a 158VDC bus, not 144VDC, right? Anyways, in order to do this, you'd need a reasonably well sized solar panel dishing out the correct voltage (which in itself could present a challenge... most arrays are designed for 12VDC or 48VDC, which means you'd need to series multiple arrays), then find a way to tap into the NiMH pack's endpoints. Likely need a blocking diode in there as well so that when the sun's not shining, the pack doesn't backfeed into the array and burn out your silicon. There's likely more I'm missing (like a pulse charging circuit, and something to keep you from going over 85% SoC, but I'm used to dealing with VRLA batteries).

Someday I might even beat that wascally kenny!

No whammies... no whammies... no whammies...

1. I would NOT attempt this if you are not extremely knowledgable about electronics, high voltages and automotive mechanics.
2. You would need a step-up transformer to take the Solar power to the batteries safely so that the voltage would be stepped up properly although at 6 Ah you are looking at a reduction to 500 mAH or 0.5 AH at 144 VDC assuming no loss in conversion (which is impossible)...I have a feeling that a charge at that rate would be pretty miniscule (esp. without knowing the Amperage of the battery circuit...)

Just to get 12 Amperes would take 24 of those solar grids....

What's a transformer have to do with anything? If you're trying to step a 12V or 48V panel up to 158V using unswitched DC, you're nuts. It's probably a lot cheaper (and certainly a *LOT* lighter) to just use a couple of panels in series. Also, the amperage available from solar arrays depends on two things... intensity of incident light, and number of cells connected in parallel. Taking any random number of grids does not guarantee a certain amperage, since 1x24 will be different than 2x12, 3x8, 4x6, 6x4, 8x3, 12x2, and 24x1 (Yes, the numbers are repeated, because 2 parallel strings of 12 cells in series results in a different voltage/current combination than 12 parallel strings of 2 cells in series).

Someday I might even beat that wascally kenny!

No whammies... no whammies... no whammies...

I agree. By just inspecting the section about the IMA power control module I realize that we would have to successfully patch into it. The likelyhood of achieving success is very low unless someone can access the internal schematics for the power control unit. The interface points while sensibly named do not shed much detail to even enable proper reverse engineering.


Perhaps, an alternate solid state method would be more effective if not more efficient than an "old school" approach. Realistically, we could achieve the "step-up" with cell densification.
I agree, the charge rate would be to small - unless the IMA is battery pack is gradually/slowly subjected to a prolonged managed charge (managed trickle charging while parked in the sun?). Hummm... nah

Cheers;

MSantos