Is there a way to charge a leaf while it's being driven?

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LMF5000

Active member
Joined
Oct 20, 2017
Messages
41
Has anyone figured out a way to bypass the limitation where the leaf's onboard charger is disabled when in "ready to drive" mode?

I know there are workarounds to adding external power on the move, like tapping into the 400V cabling between the battery and drive inverter, or using an engine-propelled trailer that physically pushes the car (making it recharge indirectly via regen), but I was wondering what it would take to enable an ordinary generator to inject power via the onboard charger.
 
Does anyone know how it's handled internally? There must be some communication between the charger and the rest of the car to send the "disable charger" command when "ready to drive" is active. Perhaps there's a way to interrupt that flow of information so the charger never gets the message.
 
LMF5000 said:
Has anyone figured out a way to bypass the limitation where the leaf's onboard charger is disabled when in "ready to drive" mode?

I know there are workarounds to adding external power on the move, like tapping into the 400V cabling between the battery and drive inverter, or using an engine-propelled trailer that physically pushes the car (making it recharge indirectly via regen), but I was wondering what it would take to enable an ordinary generator to inject power via the onboard charger.
I suspect that even if you could, it wouldn't function the way you think it would since acceleration and regen braking would all go out of wack.
 
The way I imagine it functioning would be that a generator (in a trailer behind the car, or in the car with suitable ventilation measures) would inject a constant power into the battery, at a maximum rate of 6.6kW (limited by onboard charger) - or less with a smaller generator. Battery charge level would hence decline more slowly while cruising, or would increase slowly if driving at slow speeds. Similar to how I imagine the REx works on the BMW i3.

Considering that regen injects up to 20kW of power and acceleration consumes up to 100kW, and with the battery being good for up to 40kW recharging on DC, the 6.6kW of onboard charging seems like it would only have a minor impact.
 
You may find this interesting:
https://mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?p=156699#p156699

Ingineer’s project using a turbine generator on a trailer.
 
91040 said:
You may find this interesting:
https://mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?p=156699#p156699

Ingineer’s project using a turbine generator on a trailer.

Thanks for the link. It seems he did it by injecting power into the cable coming out of the battery using an adapter. Very physically neat solution because you can return the car to stock in minutes by simply removing the adapter and restoring the direct connection between the battery and the inverter.

Electrically, it requires a high-power 400V lithium battery charger to safely supply the correct voltage required by the battery. Not cheap. Using the car's onboard charger would avoid the cost of an external unit.
 
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