i was looking at information regarding the 04-07 prius hv battery and the 01 prius battery, are they basically made up of the same cells? , the new prius has 201.6 volt hv battery vs the 273.6 in the 01-03, are there any improvments on the battery technology itself? it seems all toyota did was take out 10 modules from the 01 battery and used in the 04-06 ( 38 modules in 01-03,28 in 04-07 ) what about if they used the 01's battery, you would have much more range on EV i would think? but the voltage is higher. I think im ranting
The batteries were improved in the 04+ Prius and further improved (cooling) in their SUVs. Basically the newer batteries are more powerfull (lower resistance) so can do more work. It seems that Toyota has also gained more confidence in the newer batteries because they are using more of the SOC (State Of Charge) range in the newer batteries than they did in the older ones. As such we get about the same ammount of useable energy from the new ones as we did from the old ones even though the older ones have more total capacity than the new ones. We get to use a larger percentage of the lower capacity in the new batteries. Here: http://www.eaa-phev.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius_Battery_Specs is an overview of each generation of battery, and links to other resources. Please feel free to add any new links that I haven't run accross yet which you have found. L8r Ryan
The newer design has the cells' pos and neg electrodes repositioned (I forgot how) such that heat is generated much more evenly throughout the cell. This makes the thermal side of battery management easier, and allows more I/O cycles with less battery aging consequences. There is good graphics about the cell heating patterns somewhere on the web.
DAS, there is no change in the electrodes position. The new design added another weld point to connect the cells in series. http://www.nrel.gov/vehiclesandfuels/energ.../pdfs/38164.pdf
The voltage at the motors though is higher in the new Prius than the classic. In the inverter is a high voltage DC-DC converter that converts the 201V to 500V.
