This is the story of how we extracted the battery modules from the full battery pack of our Tesla Model S.
After we took the battery pack off the car – or more accurately, after we took the car off the battery pack – it stood for a few days whilst we did some other things. Very quickly, it proved yet again Winterton’s Law of Horizontal Surfaces – any flat surface will attack all sorts of junk by some kind of strange magnetism.
Health and Safety
This is the first time anyone attempting a Tesla strip down will be working directly with HIGH VOLTAGES. If you haven’t read our earlier blog on not frying yourself, now would be a good time to do it. Click here!
Water Cooling
Tesla set the trend for water cooling of batteries. This is important. Batteries at temperatures over 100 deg C are prone to self-combustion. This is very bad. As you know from your phone, batteries under charge can start to warm up. The faster the charging, the more heat produced. Normal home-charging is slow enough for this not to be a problem. It is fast charging where water cooling is necessary – and for times when very high current is drawn from the battery. As mentioned before, letting the battery suffer a runaway “thermal event” is not going to make your day. Tesla batteries have water cooling, and so the battery pack cooling tubes are full of water.
We decided that during the period when we would be working on live battery modules, we would rather have the cooing water removed first. So we blew it out with compressed air. It worked a treat.
Incidentally, the cooling system for the whole car was a plumber’s wet dream. We’ll cover that another time.
Top Cover Removal
This was the best bit! The tray itself is a super-strong aluminium construction, with a cover glued and screwed down. After removing a thick sheet of insulation, it was just a case of rolling the top back like a sardine tin lid.
Once the cover was off, we lifted off the protection sheets from each module…. And there they were…. TA-DA!
We disconnected the coolant feeds for each module and lifted the module out
And that’s how to strip down a Tesla Battery Pack. Join us soon for an eulogy over the quality of Tesla Engineering Design.