R/C Tech Forums - View Single Post - LIPO rating system. Time for xtreme rc to do a lipo shoot out.
Old 12-11-2008, 10:33 AM
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SWTour
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I kind of agree with Francis.

I'm not so much interested in the OUTPUT numbers from a particular brand, but moreso interested in seeing the comparitive data from one type to another on the same test equipment under the same test conditions.

We all know SMC's and probably now Thunder Power will show the best performance, but seeing the numbers from a dozen or so of the different brands under simulated race conditions may show how much, or how little the difference is in usable terms.

For the testing you guys want to do, a Carbon Pile tester would NOT be the ticket. NOT because it's not heavy duty enough, it's TOO heavy duty to give fine details for this small of a capacity battery.

Testing Automotive type batteries you are looking for bad or weak cells at fairly high amp loads, generally it becomes quite obvious if a cell is BAD, but weak cells sometimes are a little trickier (they don't always show up on the first couple tests)

In general a Automotive Carbon Pile tester just has a DIAL and a digital display, YOU crank the knob until you get the desired amp load, read the on screen voltage and watch what it does during a 15 second load (as the MACHINE starts smoking and getting really warm)

This is also used to load a charging system on a car to see the output ability of the Alternator/Generator.

The issue of using a "CONSTANT" Amp Load (self correcting) I never understood when testing batteries, but there's a lot of things in this industry I don't understand why or how they became the "STANDARDS"

When you are racing, you're voltage drops, and as your voltage drops, so does your amp load, which is how I prefer to test stuff...

The Numbers on labels may be TRUE and CORRECT information, but IMHO too often the numbers aren't relevant to useful information.
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