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by Toutouxc 95 days ago
I believe you meant to write “10S” instead of 10p. I’m not 100% sure, but you were talking about e-bike batteries, which are often 36V, made out of 10 cells (or banks of cells) in series. The nominal voltage of most lithium chemistries is 3.6-3.7V.

EV batteries have many more cells in series, for example my car is 104S, and 800V cars have (obviously) more than 200 cells in series.

And the longevity of car batteries isn’t about wear being distributed “evenly” (a healthy battery can’t really wear “unevenly”, you always load all cells at once). EVs take care of their batteries, they cool them, heat them, balance them periodically, and they don’t actually pull that much power from them. They also keep the cells within pretty conservative voltage limits.

1 comments

Indeed, I meant 10S. And what I meant by load being distributed along more cells, is that since you have many more cells, current drawn from each is lower. Which greatly prolongs the lifetime.

And hence the question I had with charging too fast. Since discharging faster clearly wears them more quickly, surely charging faster has a similar effect, since it's mostly the reversed process? A question probably easily answered with a query to a LLM.

“Number of cells” doesn’t really tell you anything about current and how it will affect the battery. The number of cells in series gives you the nominal voltage of the entire battery, and the P number (number of cells in parallel) rarely tells you anything useful — three 2000 mAh cells in parallel are equivalent to one 6000 mah cell, and both approaches are valid and used.

What you care about is actually the mass of the cells, basically the total weight of the active material. More material means higher capacity and can withstand more current.

For example, my car is 104S and that’s it, no parallel connections, but the individual cells are huge (~170 Ah each).