Measuring state of health on prius battery

Welcome to Prius Chat .

I have the Prolong equipment and have used it several times.

When the harness is installed and the orange safety plug properly seated, you can plug the charger intonthe harness and turn it on and it will tell you the voltage of the pack as well as the chargin rate in the labeled windows.

Being a chemical engineer, I fully support STEM and your cause.

Let me know how I can help.

 

You can use a multimeter to find out the values.

With what you are undertaking, do you have access to Techstream? Do you know which modules are weaker than others?

Knowing what modules were the problems or knowing all the module voltages will help with the next steps. All the modules may be under 6000 depending on the age and service history of the pack.

The Prolong setup will get the pack up to the same level and balanced once you determine the problem modules.

Good luck with your project .

 

Can you use the Prolong Hybrid charger / discharger in the car with the ignition turned on?
I would think not, but if you can maybe you could use torque pro to monitor the voltages of each pair.
to track the ah per battery, you would need a lead to each battery to record voltage and inline to monitor current.
I tried to figure a way and it became too complicated, with the high voltage and my experience level.
to keep track of the overall current put into the batteries you could use a killawatt meter on the A/C to the Prolong Hybrid charger, but it would include the losses in the charger.
But if you are doing multiple charge discharges, it would give a baseline to compare charge cycles.

I tested my pack and recorded the voltage of each module pair, on my workbench.
If you want to look at it I put notes on this blog
Gen II Prius Individual Battery Module Replacement | Page 106 | PriusChat
If you could wire up like this, you could monitor pairs while using the Prolong Hybrid charger/discharger.
But this only monitors the voltage.
Near the end I have an image of the torque pro app with the battery pack back in the car

 

After going through the process of taking my pack out and replacing 2 modules. It is very time consuming to use an RC charger.
I am not confident that RC chargers really give you accurate measurements as well.
They do give you a measurement to compare one module to the other though.
I spent a bit of time building a rig to monitor voltages of module pairs.
if you want to just check the health of the pack, torque pro will show you if you have a balanced pack in the vehicle.
I have only used it as a screen on my phone.
I did see a process on the internet that would record the readings to a file and you could make graphs of pack health.
It would be a great project in my view, to use torque pro and make a graph of the pack health to start.
Run the prolong Hybrid charger/discharger for a few cycles and then run the torque pro again to see the improvement level of the pack.
It would be even better to have a large group of people run this and record health on a web site to have a reference point from a larger sample.

Enjoy your research. Be very safe though, you are playing with high voltages.

 

Do not use the Prolong equipment when the car is in any other state than off.

 

If I remember correctly, the HiTech 44167 model 4 channel hobby charger has connections and software for monitoring and graphing using a PC or laptop. They stopped making it about a year ago I think, but replaced it with an updated model that has a higher discharge capacity. Maybe you can look into that.