Anybody using Lithium Titanate batteries for car audio?

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hispls
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Cells are pretty reasonably priced for what they are.

Nominal 2.4V may be a challenge with most having max charge voltage of 2.8V.

Cells that are usable for us are 40-55AH. Not super high C rate but enormous reserve at at 20,000 charge cycles we could expect these to last 20 years!

Figure a 14V 800AH bank, 100 cells, you could probably run a 10K amp pretty handily at 1C for

Anybody have any thoughts? I'm getting ready to pull the trigger on some LiFeP04 but the titanate is looking incredibly tempting mainly for the life expectancy.

 
I checked into it a bit. I say go for it. Looks like they can handle the amperage demands considering they use them in some electric vehicles. Is this with or without a bank of ultracaps?

I wonder how they recover, though. Since they can dump current so fast but only charge at a limited rate, is this going to be any harder on the alt than usual? Say you play a full song or two with constant tones and you've pulled them down quite a bit, how long before you could do it again? I'm still not very well versed in the SPL type electrical setups.

 
I checked into it a bit. I say go for it. Looks like they can handle the amperage demands considering they use them in some electric vehicles. Is this with or without a bank of ultracaps?
I wonder how they recover, though. Since they can dump current so fast but only charge at a limited rate, is this going to be any harder on the alt than usual? Say you play a full song or two with constant tones and you've pulled them down quite a bit, how long before you could do it again? I'm still not very well versed in the SPL type electrical setups.
Definitely not caps. Cost prohibitive to hold even 3 seconds worth of energy for me.

LiTe cells actually have higher C rate charging than the LiFePO4 but not as much on the continuous discharge rating. For example the 30,000 cycle rating is at .2 C which would leave you sizing pretty big to be really safe. I'd like to be at 1-3 C ideally on those if I were to do it. The LiFePO4 cells I'm considering are rated over 40C discharge so I'd be looking at 160AH bank for the two big amps. The LiTe bank would be 800-1000AH for around the same money, the catch being not so great on the discharge rate (possibly?), more mass/space, and the issue of oddball voltage. Big upside is 10X life expectancy and superior performance in very cold conditions.

I think with what I'm doing anything is rough on the alternator (including playing music as it sits now). LiFePO4 would take a fair bit longer to recharge though after hard discharge. That said, either way I'm going pretty big on a bank and the limiting factor will be how much heat my coils can hold for how long not so much how much reserve I have in the batteries, though I'd like to drop each amp to .35 and potentially do 18-20K burps so I need a pretty chunky bank to hang with that without dropping voltage too hard.

Sort of a big gamble at this point since these LiFePO4 cells are pretty well tested and I don't think anybody has used the titanate for car audio yet. We're talking 16$ per cell + shipping (on the LiTe), 100-125 cell bank + a fair chunk of change for some copper bar to bus it all together. I have no real way to test on a smaller scale and shipping breaks huge as you buy quantity so small batch of anything from China is pretty dead.

 
Okay, so a trade-off in discharge versus life expectancy if I'm following you correctly. All that sounds good to me, man. The math checks out and it's hard to argue with 800+ AH to 160AH for the same money.

20k just seems insane to me but I realize it's necessary with the way things scale up almost exponentially with very little gains to be had as you reach diminishing returns. Still, when your main concern is the thermal compression or thermal runaway of your coils, you're sitting pretty.

 
Ummm yeah, I'm a Mi solar dealer

I have 115ah of 16v LTO and 16ah of 13v LTO in my car right meow.

I don't know what cells your looking at but they sound subpar, Toshiba lto period, and 10,000 cycles is more realalistic if your hitting reserve alot. And recharge is way faster than phospate, and better temp ratings for crazy weather.

And my 115ah takes 1800 amp draws like a champ sooooo if you had legit cells and 800ah you could power your neighborhood.

I've owned lto for about 8 months now so where the hell have you guys been?

I think people who buy jy or limitless from this point on are just dumb, unless its a going out of business sale and sh*ts half price.

 
Ummm yeah, I'm a Mi solar dealerI have 115ah of 16v LTO and 16ah of 13v LTO in my car right meow.

I don't know what cells your looking at but they sound subpar, Toshiba lto period, and 10,000 cycles is more realalistic if your hitting reserve alot. And recharge is way faster than phospate, and better temp ratings for crazy weather.

And my 115ah takes 1800 amp draws like a champ sooooo if you had legit cells and 800ah you could power your neighborhood.

I've owned lto for about 8 months now so where the hell have you guys been?

I think people who buy jy or limitless from this point on are just dumb, unless its a going out of business sale and sh*ts half price.
Nice.
Any special approach to charging these? Wouldn't you need to balance the cells?

 
Okay, so a trade-off in discharge versus life expectancy if I'm following you correctly. All that sounds good to me, man. The math checks out and it's hard to argue with 800+ AH to 160AH for the same money.
20k just seems insane to me but I realize it's necessary with the way things scale up almost exponentially with very little gains to be had as you reach diminishing returns. Still, when your main concern is the thermal compression or thermal runaway of your coils, you're sitting pretty.
You pretty much "need" 20K if you want to top 160dB so there's that. You can buy prismatic LiFePO4 for low cost per amp hour but again the trick is what multiple (or fraction) of that amp hour rating you can actually get for a burst or 3-5 minutes of hard play.

Ummm yeah, I'm a Mi solar dealerI have 115ah of 16v LTO and 16ah of 13v LTO in my car right meow.

I don't know what cells your looking at but they sound subpar, Toshiba lto period, and 10,000 cycles is more realalistic if your hitting reserve alot. And recharge is way faster than phospate, and better temp ratings for crazy weather.

And my 115ah takes 1800 amp draws like a champ sooooo if you had legit cells and 800ah you could power your neighborhood.

I've owned lto for about 8 months now so where the hell have you guys been?

I think people who buy jy or limitless from this point on are just dumb, unless its a going out of business sale and sh*ts half price.
I've looked briefly at cylindrical cells, though admittedly I only just started looking at titanate and I have no idea what "good" specs are. Are you using those rectangular shaped ones? Where can I order in bulk? Nobody is really spilling the beans on what they're using for batteries or cells these days apart from a few brand huggers on the tailor made LiFePO4 solutions.

 
Ebay, 44 bucks per, Toshiba rectagular 23ah scib cells, you can even buy them pre tapped. Just gotta insulate them.
So the only ones on ebay are 20AH version both coming from Russia (which is somewhat dubious). Looking at Toshiba website it looks like the 10AH "high power" cells would be far better for high discharge rate as opposed to the 20 and 23AH models.

I'm ready to pull the trigger on some batteries next week, somebody has to actually sell those, right?

 
So it's looking like Toshiba does not just sell these cells except to people they specially train and allow to use them for manufacturing... pretty much if you're not an electric car/bus factory you aren't getting them and anybody who got them legitimately isn't going to be allowed to sell loose cells retail.

Which leads me to believe those ones from Russia were salvaged out of an electric car or bus, so who knows how much use/abuse they have on them, or are they just Chinese knockoffs?

I'm actually about to go out on a limb and just buy some of the Chinese cylindrical Titanate cells and give them a whirl. Life expectancy and cold weather performance is looking really good and worth the tradeoff of more mass and lower C rate on the discharge.

 
We havent tried these yet. Weve tried tenergy and headway. Someone out here did just make a large bank tho. I'll let you know how it holds. I believe he has it on 2 dc 5k

 
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hispls

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