Good score! but... Caution! Ni-Cads don't work like lead-acid, and any habits you may have from experience with FLA's can get you in trouble. The first fact to mull is the origin of your cells. Since they are OUT of the aircraft battery, there must have been a reason to do so. Batteries with bad cells can be taken out and swapped with fresh sets quite easily, and shops that do this for you will keep the other battery set to fix up (when they have time to get to it). Maybe only one cell inside is bad, maybe most of them are. Did you pick up a charger while you were there? Did it come with a temperature sensor? Ni-cads need to be charged with caution, as you already know. These old ones with extra TLC.Maybe electrolyte escaped or has been removed from some/many/all of the cells you have. It's impossible to know until you have found and read the manuals from Saft. You may need special tools. You may not know if they are low on electrolyte until you have attempted to charge them, and undergone a charge routine that constantly monitors their progress, making an electrolyte level measurement at JUST the right time... This is a lot of work and one of the reasons why many aircraft operators abandon Ni-Cad for lead-acid despite the weight penalty. I inherited a bunch of old aircraft ni-cads, once, too. In my case it was only two batteries' worth, so hardly worth all the work to restore them.I also discovered that a number of the cells were dead no matter what I did, so the questionable origin of the rest made me give up on the whole set.I never got to the stage of re-filling/re-charging the ones that I was going to salvage, so I can't honestly recommend what works, but the other commenter is right: you can't act like it's FLA and start adding water before charging. Do your research and get the right equipment first. Since you have so many of them, the chances are high that this will be well worth the effort! Good Luck!
Steven Fahey www.sparweb.ca > Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2013 22:23:47 -0500 > From: [email protected] > To: [email protected] > Subject: [EVDL] Have LOTS of Saft aircraft nicads > > Not quite sure what to do here. Got lots of options. I haven't been on > EVDL for quite some time. > > A local aircraft maintenance closed down here recently and I saw some > flooded-plate Saft nicads come up. Knowing they're famous for > reliability and delivering high currents, I bagged it, sight unseen. > Application unconceived, although I know they're great tech. Bots, EVs, > aircraft customers, well just general energy storage. > > Well there was MORE than I realized. Holy ballz there's a lot here. > What it looks like is ~21x 36V 11AH Saft packs, and ~9x 24v 22AH > stainless-boxed batts. I nearly killed myself loading them, and nearly > killed my van's suspension carrying them. > > And a bunch of loose cells. I pulled out one of the 36v 11AH packs, saw > it was filled but "low", added some distilled water and put it on a lab > power supply and it charged right up! Well, I put ~9AH in it and it was > still charging when I took it off to go home for the night, and hadn't > gotten warm, it's taking the charge. > > I don't know about the entire lot, but that was a good sign! > > I'm a bit baffled by the 22AH boxed batts. They don't have visible > levels. I looked up the maintenance PDF, it said something funky about > adding it with a syringe until pulling back on the syringe sucked out > electrolyte because it had filled to the reach of it, which sounds > "kinda crazy". > > Now the box loose cells are "dry". I don't know why, they don't appear > to have external damage. The valves are in place and intact. Can they > be restored by adding new electrolyte? What mix would I make there to > try? What happens if they "dried out" and the electrolyte turned to > powder, and thus would end up overconcentrated? > > These things ARE old- are there any tricks to dealing with them? They > appear to have been stored ok, caps in place and all. > > Danny > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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) > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20130331/0c4fce4b/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ 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)
