High Voltage Charging

BIG FAT WARNING!
These MAINS and HIGH VOLTAGE experiments can kill you!

In order to charge this car's battery it will need a high voltage charger.
Or we attempt to charge the 60 x 12v batteries in parallel.

Fortunately this is quite easy and cheap.

Mains power in the UK is 240vAC.
The packs in the Mass-EV are going to be arranged as 3 x 20 batteries.
Each battery is, of course 12vDC thus giving a pack voltage of 240vDC.
Total voltage of 3 x 240 = 720vDC.

This is, of course, the design to make charging from domestic mains easy and cheap.
When charging, the packs will be charged in parallel so we only need to charge a 240vDC pack.

If this gets sold in America I guess it will have to have 6 x 120vDC.

Rectified mains peaks at 240vAC x 1.414 (squareroot of 2) = 339.4vDC.
Or about 340vDC so has plenty of voltage difference to charge the battery.

We obviously need to control this as we don't what to overcharge the battery.
We can do this by controlling the AC input to the rectifier using a simple circuit
which normally is incorporated into a dimmer unit for domestic lights.


Original gschem schematic