A Tesla powered Sailboat?
So we pulled the trigger and decided to get rid of the old and oily Perkins engine Guten Prank came with,
You see we got a relatively good deal with Guten because the engine wasn’t operational and mos people will think “ who buys a boat with no running engine ? “ well us! Haha.
After investing a few hundreds in parts and many man hours we found out that half of the engine was seized by a thick build up, looks like sea water got into the engine and sat there for a while, it wasn’t worth it anymore, it was taking too long and still not working...
So it was time for this 200+kg engine to get out the boat and open space for a brand new electric engine
Malcolm Inspecting the engine bay
After a few months of research and looking for parts all over the internet we found out that our best and most affordable option was to go with a kit provided by thunderstruck-ev , the Motenergy ME1616 Liquid-Cooled Brushless Motor. running at 96 volts becomes a powerful 23KW system that in theory should be able to move our Mason at hull speed and still has some redundant power in case of emergency.
ThunderStruck ME-1616 Installed on the engine bay.
Getting a brushless motor was a must for us since this means that the motor does not have any brushes that will wear out over time, nor will it be a dangerous source of ignition for on-board gas appliances, With the Curtis controller we’ll have features like reverse on the fly without the need of dedicated contactor and the option to Regenerate current to be put back into the batteries from the spinning prop while under sail.
To power our electric motor we salvaged 4 modules from a crashed Tesla Model S that we found in a junkyard around Sacramento , the power density of the Tesla cells gave us the option to build a 22KW bank in a very compact (30”x12”x14”) enclosure weighting less than 250 pounds total , thats only 25% of the weight and the space needed compared to regular batteries .
For the battery bank I designed an aluminum case where the modules slide in , the 4 modules are connected in series with heavy duty copper plates for max voltage of 98.4 volts and 230 amp hours capacity. The original electronics founded in the Tesla modules were replaced by a modified circuit boards that will serve as a bridge to connect to the BMS (Battery Managment System) to keep the charging and discharging cicles safe , the BMS not only will protect every cell from being overcharged or discharged we’ll also be able to monitor the voltage, temperature and state of charge of each cell from on my laptop.
To Charge our system we went for the CAN controlled TSM-2500 Charger , accepting AC voltages ranging from 110 to 240 Volts we’ll be able to recharge out boat at any marina in the world, a 800Watts solar panel array is being installed in a stern arch to harvest sun power when we are underway or anchored, the interface from our solar panels into our batteries is a smart High voltage Solar controller