Leaf / leafmotor / leafbike high efficiency 1500w motor

[youtube]GGYlNlor_Vc[/youtube]

Bumped up the amps today and saw a max of 87A. Looking at the video, i seem to be accelerating about as fast as videos i've seen of crystalyte H4080 motors.

Going on a 10 mile ride tomorrow at 40-45 and will update with results to see if heat accumulates in the motor, etc..

I really want to get this motor hot. I'm not there yet. It probably needs 100A, but we'll see.
 
criiiips! that puppy can cook!
So it can go 40-45 on 48v 80 bat amps!? (your pack is 12s lipo right?)
common talk on this form is you have to go higher voltage to get higher speeds.
seems like higher watts is really the ticket.
I suppose at some point you'd need to do more volts though.
I'm sorry I'm lazy right now, what's 64something no load rpm in mph?

cant wait to see 100amps. that's dang near 5000w :shock:
maybe that motor will get hot tomorrow at 80 though on an extended ride.

It'd be great to see this motor on the simulator!
It'd be nice if we could convince leaf to at least ship it to him on the house.
Then 17 or 18 peeps could throw down 10 bones and we could really see how long it could handle these higher wattages before it melted. :mrgreen:
 
It's all about watts, not amps. You can do high speeds with either. I've ran high amp motors forever and love em. 38mph on 36v with my 8T mac.. lol.

I can hit 45mph peak on a 65A current limit in 120% mode, don't need more amps for anything other than strong launches or climbing. I could do this with volts, i just do it with controller settings and a high speed winding. Hey, i like 12S Lipo.. it's easy to charge and can give amps for days.. why not?

For a semi-accurate simulation of speed, enter a crystalyte HS3548 into the ebikes.ca simulator.. even though the efficiency is totally different, it'll give you an impression of speed vs. voltage vs. wheel size.

Don't be lazy, i mentioned the kv :lol:

diggler said:
criiiips! that puppy can cook!
So it can go 40-45 on 48v 80 bat amps!? (your pack is 12s lipo right?)
common talk on this form is you have to go higher voltage to get higher speeds.
seems like higher watts is really the ticket.
I suppose at some point you'd need to do more volts though.
I'm sorry I'm lazy right now, what's 64something no load rpm in mph?

cant wait to see 100amps. that's dang near 5000w :shock:
maybe that motor will get hot tomorrow at 80 though on an extended ride.

It'd be great to see this motor on the simulator!
It'd be nice if we could convince leaf to at least ship it to him on the house.
Then 17 or 18 peeps could throw down 10 bones and we could really see how long it could handle these higher wattages before it melted. :mrgreen:
 
Update.. i didn't get video because the damn camera was misaligned.. Will get some tomorrow.

But i rode 40-47mph for about 10 miles today and managed to get the motor up to 100f at the case ( after 5 mins of resting and allowing the stator heat to hit the case. ). Let it cool off and blasted it home at the same speed. Didn't get as hot that time around.

It was 60 degrees out and i had a minor headwind.

This is definitely a 2000W continuous motor. I ran it at an avg. 2500w continuous and it handled the torture with grace, even though the dyno graph shows me that efficiency drops to 82%.

I am going to tune down my 120% throttle setting to 115%, which should give me about 43mph top speed on the flat. That speed produces a ~2,300W draw, going off what i saw on the CA, and at which point, the motor is still 85% efficient, so that should be my top continuous speed from now on. This will give me just enough headroom

I also set my speed #1 to 29mph, which is an approximate 900W draw, where the motor is 90.5% efficient.. that is my efficiency switch from now on for going long distance.. :)
 
okay sorry for being lazy lol
so you got a 26 inch wheel right
26 x 3.14159 = 81.68inch per rev.
81.68 / 12 = 6.8 feet per rev.
In you vid I saw about ~46.5v at max speed.
46.5 x 13.16kv = 611.94rpm.
611.94 x 6.8 = 4,161 feet per min.
x 60 = 249,671 feet per hour.
/ 5280 feet in a mile = 47 mph

Dang so your getting 45 mph out of a possible 47 because your running so many amps.
I think that's pretty dang cool.
So no matter how you do it this motor is a 45mph motor 43 to be safe.

Also at 29 mph it's 900w so that's 31 w/hr's per mile right?
If so that's really efficient for 30mph :shock:
I think I've seen a lot of people getting that at 20mph.
 
Yeah, go refer to the speed per watt tests. The results were impressive.
Remember that i am running 120% mode on my controller to get that top speed. On 100%, the flat speed is more like 38-39.

Even though i have 25ah of 15C lipo ( which is overrated, it's really more like 7C ), i'm still getting 2-3v of voltage drop at full current.. sucks. I could go faster on 120%. But i don't really NEED to go faster.. the proper way to do that would be to use more volts.. :)
 
yah I read a little about the 120% throttle on that 99% or 100% thread.
I don't fully get it yet though.
Does it basically advance the timing?

Interesting that it go's from pulse to flat at 100% then back to pulse over 100%.
 
Sorry if this sounds completely noobish but I'm just curious. 8)

Concerning efficiency. I know that if throw enough into a motor well beyond its limits that the excessive heat will fry things. But are there other factors that would permanently reduce efficiency?

This motor @48v & 80ish amps on the flats this motor still shines in continuous efficiency. Let's say in a perfect flat windless world, with indestructably smooth bearings & tires, a motors efficiency would never take a permanent hit in years and years of service? That 10 years of service in the same perfect environment, the motors efficiency would be the same as on day one? What factors (besides the obvious ones) would cause permanent hits in efficiency? Efficiency ages over time?

Edit: I'm thinking that the magnets &/or what holds the magnets to the stator degrade?
 
The power consumption is so optimistic I decided to check "theoretical" consumption at 29mph on the most efficient motor available in ebike.ca:
Screenshot%202015-03-11%2001.53.56.png


At 29mph, it's still close to 1100W and it's at 84.5% efficiency. So what you are saying is that there is a massive 200W difference at the same speed between this motor and the Leafbike motor.

Somehow, I'm questioning the validity of the numbers, and I wonder if your CA is calibrated properly? The best way to check that is to plug the CA on another setup or motor, and see power consumption at the same speed.


I also have a leafbike motor at 90% efficiency, but my power consumption is similar to my BPM (with 79% efficiency).
 
You do have a different motor than i though.
My CA is dialed in according to manufacturer specs. I'll double check though; i have a standalone shunt model and a turnigy watt meter. If i count the amp hours based on the batteryvoltage, the range is still excellent so far. The speed is correct too, it's been verified with speed traps and also my neighbor finding me and chasing me on the road to see how quick i was doing, lol.

'dude, you were doing 45!!'

And to the other question, motors do not degrade with use ( unless you overheat them extremely ).. the biggest enemy of hub motors would actually be rust from water ingress.
 
Guys, you made me doubt myself. You gave me enough of a twinge of doubt and curiosity to do these tests. After all, I don't want to be the guy who blows hot air about some product from some relatively unknown Chinese seller. There's enough of that on this forum. So i did the appropriate science and put my standalone cycle analyst on the handlebars and filmed some video of the two CA's side by side. Went on 2 6 mile mile rides at 40+ continuous.

Unfortunately, the video is a wash because the camera was not angled correctly, the standalone CA's screen is kind of a matte, and it was cloudy outside. I've always had a problem filming the standalone CA because of this. It will be cloudy again in the next few days, so this is as good as it gets from me though.

So here is what i was able to recover from the video, stepping through it frame by frame to find the most legible shots from the CA. I am accelerating to 40 here from a stoplight. The standalone CA reads in the high 3400 range, whereas the direct plugin one reads in the 3500-3600 range. The direct plugin CA is reading about 4% higher watts.

leafmotor-efficiency.jpg


The standalone cycle analyst read up to 200 watts less! i was shocked!! and that's even with a ~0.2A constant phantom current that this standalone CA may be adding to the readings.

I generally saw 2300w cruising at 42-43 while in a half-tucked position. Many motors i've played with draw this amount of power at 39 or 40mph.

ps, in my 'watts per speed' test video on previous pages, i ran the bike in both directions and held the throttle as steady as i could, in order to not skew the results. You can clearly see the direct plugin CA in those videos. If the standalone cycle analyst is 'balls on accurate', subtract about 3-4% from the wattage count then.

p.p.s. unfortunately, even with the 115% setting on the infineon controller, maintaining around 2400w of constant load in general ( some stop and go, some 5% hill grade climbing etc ) at around 38-43mph, this does result in a notable amount of heat buildup in the motor over that period of time at an ambient temperature of around 60F. It was hot, but not too hot to hold your hand on the motor. That being said.. on a 26 inch wheel, i think that your constant maintainable speed is indeed 40mph. Maybe you can maintain ~41-42 indefinitely if you did not have hills like i have though, if you get into a tucked or semi-tucked position. A 24" wheeled bike on a bit of a higher voltage ( 13S or maybe 14S ) would yield more continuous power and more torque with this exact winding, taking it from 'holy crap, that's fast!!' to 'you're insane!' territory. There is also room to hit the motor with 100A batt and more phase amps instead of my 80A batt, if you want to bang on the motor for short distances, or have long roads with no stop and go and it's not too hot out. I will keep my 80A setting in order to give me some motor headroom when the temps climb.

In other words, buy the motor already if you are interested. This seems to be the most efficient hub motor we can buy right now. If you want more power than this, and still want great efficiency you'll need to get a MXUS 3000W v2 or the ~4000w continuous Cromotor v3+ ( 0.35-0.33 lams ). Maybe they land in the 88% peak efficiency land rather than 90% peak efficiency land. That's still pretty good, compared to the 78-84% peak efficient hub motors we've been dealing with for ages.

Oh, and the wheel build quality is pretty good, considering that i've ridden this bike along at such high speeds through bumpy and potholed streets. I've only got maybe 200 miles on the motor, but so far, so good.

Anyway, i'm done playing unpaid salesman for this company. Any future posts will be about any problems i have with the motor, as the power handling stuff is sorted now. I will update more info about this bike in my bike thread.

http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=62939
 
leafmotor_time2vent.jpg


Did a 22 mile ride with the leafmotor at 35-43mph with lots of stop and go and hilly action.. it was 67f outside with minimal wind.. by justin's math i would have hit around 110C at the stator on the way back ( steady 1% grade going home, and was averaging 40mph all the way home. ).

I think it's time to vent this motor. 90% of the road into Salt Lake City is 40-45mph.. i need just a bit more thermal headroom, because if i hit a headwind on the way back or whatever, i'm screwed.

Did not smell varnish coming out of the motor when it was at 127F thankfully. 127f was the peak temp after letting the motor sit.
 
So you tested with another CA and you definitely have better result? And from all the motor you tested, this one has highest efficiency (I suppose on straight road) but not the best torque?

My comparison MAC vs DD was that the mac was way more efficient in city riding because of the number of start and stop, in which DD motor use loads of power before reaching peak efficiency.
 
Not the best torque, no, but i am not giving it all that it can take.

Oh yeah.. you remember when i ran my mac on 4kW and melted the gears in a few minutes? I can run this motor at the same speed and it uses 500-1000 watts less to maintain the same speed and it will do that on the flats for 15 minutes or more.

I even fully heated up a MAC doing 30mph for 1 hour once, on totally flat land. It took an hour of 30-40mph with hill climbs and stop & go to get this to that temp. These motors are not comparable at all.

This motor beats the piss out of the mac. I demagnetized that motor once climbing a lesser hill than i've shown in the videos, doing 19mph at 1600w. I don't worry about blowing up the same kind of hills and seeing 3000w constant on the CA.. :)

At lower speeds, this motor is still more efficient than the mac, for sure.
 
cwah said:
So you tested with another CA and you definitely have better result? And from all the motor you tested, this one has highest efficiency (I suppose on straight road) but not the best torque?

My comparison MAC vs DD was that the mac was way more efficient in city riding because of the number of start and stop, in which DD motor use loads of power before reaching peak efficiency.
Nep was first mack defender before this motor. :D
 
Lol, you have a good memory. Yeah, i remember spending an entire year both defending the MAC motor and cell_man, who was a relatively new vendor at the time. A lot of people thought he was a random China seller.. a lot of people thought that the MAC was a shitty copy of the BMC.. now people practically don't know what a BMC is, or where to get one.. and the motors are 1:1 in build quality except for maybe some higher quality part like a bearing or whatever.

I honestly wish there was another vendor for this motor. Leafmotor is very bad at communication. If you are looking for a motor of this size, it is absolutely worth the hassle; it's just that the vendor experience turns so many off. I've tried to get a few other companies to resell this motor, but for some reason they are completely uninterested. A ~2000w cont. motor at the size/weight of a 1250w continuous motor? naaahh.. nobody wants that, right? :lol:

Otherwise, the MXUS V2 is going to come in at an estimated 88% peak efficiency or higher.. the new cromotor v3 peaks at an eye popping 91%.. it's time for you guys to start adopting higher efficiency motors and reap the benefits of longer range and more abuse tolerance.. just stop buying these crap 82% efficient hubs, for god's sake.. :lol:
 
Mxus has a 9C style (27mm) V2 motor that might be as efficient. Getting one to test soon. SamD is already using them for 2WD bikes.
If Leaf would give me a quantity discount or bulk shipping rate, I might be interested in reselling them, but so far they tell me to order from their website, and no discount on shipping multiple motors.
 
That's cool if the weight is significantly lower than this. I bet it would be nice up to 30mph usage, which is totally respectable for an ebike. If 90% of my main roads didn't have speed limits of 40-45, i would probably run a motor like that.

When i go long distances, i tend to stick to 30, just because the battery limitation + the fact that i'd prefer less people to see a bicycle zipping along that fast and get concerned or whatever. Also, 30mph corresponds to that 90.5% peak efficiency on this motor, so that's sweet. I bet the 27mm stator version does okay at that speed. 30mm is more desirable though in order to maintain that speed up slight hills etc without the motor dropping in efficiency too much.

I'm all for that little 27mm motor. Open a separate thread and let's see the results of your testing.. :)
 
Nep,

Per previous notes you have the Kv at 13.16, which puts the Kt at 0.726 Nm/A

Have you measured the Phase resistance of the Leaf Motor yet?

I am trying to calculate the Km of this motor. :D
 
nice if you would clean up the thread

nice, if you could measure motor resistance :) All you need is:

2x 10 Ohm resistor that does 3 Watts+ each (more is better, i chose 10W )
1x Old USB cable
2x alligator clips
4x 4mm male bullet connectors

1x 5V USB powersupply, capable of 1000mA+
2x Multimeters

I hope i find the time to post a pic about this. here a how-to: http://www.instructables.com/id/Simple-Low-Resistance-Tester-Milliohmmeter/
Instead of 220 Ohm resistor, i would prefer a 5 Ohm resistor (2x 10 Ohms parallel) for a test-current of 1amp. Makes the calculation easier
 
Your research is vitally important to the community. You have discussed at length the behavior of this motor and especially the difference the thinner LAMS make. All I can think is how important the LEAFMOTOR could be to ebike performance events like a Pike's Peak hillclimb or what kind of possibilities it could hold for high-efficiency XC's!!!

neptronix has found an amazing hubmotor that represents a true step forward for ebike hubmotor technology in several key points: performance (incredible), heat-handling capacity (incredible), and even zero-power cogging resistance (lower than others!) and he has clearly demonstrated it's superiority with expert measurements, video and reporting.
 
crossbreak said:
nice if you would clean up the thread

nice, if you could measure motor resistance :) All you need is:

2x 10 Ohm resistor that does 3 Watts+ each (more is better, i chose 10W )
1x Old USB cable
2x alligator clips
4x 4mm male bullet connectors

1x 5V USB powersupply, capable of 1000mA+
2x Multimeters

I hope i find the time to post a pic about this. here a how-to: http://www.instructables.com/id/Simple-Low-Resistance-Tester-Milliohmmeter/
Instead of 220 Ohm resistor, i would prefer a 5 Ohm resistor (2x 10 Ohms parallel) for a test-current of 1amp. Makes the calculation easier

I made a video...

[youtube]0cLtTDuRCKo[/youtube]
 
Okay, cleaned up the thread. You can find the arguing over my 60mph ride video if you REALLY want to here..

http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=68061
Anyway, i will get you guys phase info later on. I'm just knee deep in projects and have to get more stuff off my table before i try that experiment.

As for the motor, i pulled it apart today.. enamel and copper are in perfect condition, so signs of damage from my hardcore abuse, yay!
I have cut venting holes onto both sides of the motor cover now, and am in the process of building an upgraded torque arm for the side that was water-clamp tied on. Luckily, the water clamped side and bolted side have held up just fine; the bike's dropouts have not taken any damage, amazingly enough.

The axle doesn't really have room to fit any additional wire in it.. tight fit.. i wanted to put a temp sensor in, but that ain't happening without possibly hurting the stock wire cables etc.

I sent an email to leafmotor to try to encourage them to make a 40mm version of this motor... they don't seem interested in doing that. But there is talk of upgrading the stock phase wires, etc in the future ( my 12ga out of the axle upgrade does just fine for me though, and i recommend doing it ).

I will refilm the very high speed attempt in a day or two from now and post it on my YT channel instead of here. Easier and less morally ambiguous to just delete nasty comments on there. Go hate me there if you're gonna hate.. :lol:
 
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