Last week, we took scooter to ghats nearby Pune. Around Pune, there are hilly areas. So, regen can be more effective and can reduce load on breaks. I felt that, regen can be more strong/aggressive. I understand that, one setting cannot work normal city slopes and kind of ghat section. Hence, requesting feature of selection level for regen (e.g. current one is low, Medium and high). I don’t know if this can be achieved without material/hardware changes.
Additionally, there was request to indicate “Regen in action” on dashboard. This will be helpful whatever small gain it would be.
While i ride my scooter when charging is below 80% and my speed is above 20 kmph i do not feel the regen done by the vehicle,also 4% regen at a full charge is negligible. @abhishek.balaji can ather tune something to manual control over regen and make it more aggresive…?
Completely agree. Regen level should be selectable - as in Engine Braking level. I should be able to brake using Regen as much as possible - will give tremendous range yet allow me to control my bike much better without ruining my brake pads
Even though if the regen is increased , the battery will not able to harness all the energy that is being produced by the motor , the rate of charging will be similar to the standard dot charging , so if we regen the ather for around 4 hours to the maximum , then we might be able to full charge the battery(to give an understanding)
It seems to me like there is a hard limit on the regen depending on the amount of current flowing through the system. When I had the 450, on some steep and long declines, I could hear the cooling fan near my left knee kick in pretty vigorously.
The 450X on these same stretches doesn’t seem to have anywhere close to that level of retardation when I twist the throttle the other way (SoC < 80%).
I think there’s some current management going on here, but overall, regen seems to be pretty useless at the moment. This absolutely needs to change.
Yes, but there is a high dissipation to handle. The current generated cannot be pushed to battery beyond a limit (that the 4%?) And rest has to be dumped somewhere if the braking has to work. So… that’s where it is.
Braking occurs when the return current passes through a load. The heavier (electrically) the load, the better the braking. This is how coasting is different from regen braking.
So if we have a 1000W halogen lamp to which we can connect to when reverse throttling, we will have a good braking. The load for braking in Ather is the battery. This is also why regen does not work (or avoided) when batt is kinda full. Li batts have a very funky way of charging and has caps on current/voltage that are to be kept .
Check this out. Apparently, the circuit needs an open switch while braking to charge an ultra capacitor through a cheap buck converter instead of the battery.
Yeah, a routing with a bank of supercaps is easily the answer. The next twist to the accelerator drains the cap and switches back to battery when done. Much less engineering to solve than Li chemistry.
Aren’t your statements contradicting each other? The super capacitors would charge up in a jiffy and what would you do with the excessive amount of regen now?(assuming what you say that battery cannot take the current from regen ) in that case a resistor pack would help (even if we want regen to work at SoC >80% ) which is totally waste of energy and space therefore keeping regen off when SoC< 80%. Super Capacitors have really high physical volume compared to the energy they hold. They are especially infeasible in 2W where there’s very little space. Infact the battery at any given time (SoC<80%) is more than capable of taking in the puny amount of regen current I believe. This is supported by the fact that they approximately charge at 3kw while fast charging.
Even if supercaps charge up quickly, they will have a capacity for the amount of charge they can hold (capacitance). The charge generated by regen will be absorbed as quickly as possible by the supercap till the capacity reaches the brim.
