The Power Jockey is designed to protect and extend the life of the hybrid vehicle’s main battery. Used in conjunction with battery repair and reconditioning it may enable the original HEV battery to be used for the entire life of the vehicle. This could be the technology that brings hybrid vehicles into the mainstream. Wide acceptance of hybrid technology is still held back by the cost of battery replacement, every 7 to 10 years which can cost up to $10,000.
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Development Of The Power Jockey

As the HEV battery ages the weaker cells will fail as soon as they are stress beyond their ability to maintain the discharge current. Battery reconditioning mainly replaces the weakest cells and equalises the capacity of all the cells in the battery pack. The next weakest cell will still collapse as it fails to  maintain the discharge current. We have come to a point where unless we find a way to protect the cells from failure we had to stop HEV battery reconditioning altogether.
We need to find another way to help these weakened cells. The answer seem to be in our stress test where we subject the battery sub pack to 100 amps of load. We discarded cells that cannot maintain 5.6 volts. The idea was to prevent the cells from being discharged below this voltage. The most important feature was that it had to be working whenever the car is in use. This lead us to the two phase boost augmentation system using the vehicles 12 volt system as power source.
This is counter intuitive as we are using more petrol for the augmentation system which means being less fuel efficient! However we decided tp proceed to prototype development and trials on the hunch that contary to percieved logic, it may work.
How It Works
We called it the Power Jockey because, like a 50kg jockey controlling a 1000kg animal, The Power Jockey only output a mere 1000 watts ( for the prototype) but controls a motor that operates at 33,000 watts.
In a hybrid vehicle the HV battery is most vulnerable when a high discharge load is required everytime you step on the accelerator for more power. This puts a stress on all the cells in the battery. As the battery gets older it is less able to handle this stress and the weakest cell will fail under load.

Changing weak cells and reconditioning the HEV battery is only a temporary solution as the battery is still weak. The next cells stress beyond it’s limit will fail. With the power Jockey installed whenever a power demand is placed on the battery, a charge is also delivered from the Power Jockey to the HEV battery. This cushions the initial stress placed on the HEV battery thus protecting the cells from failure. Our test shows that cell voltages without the Power Jockey can drop as much as 1.5 volts as compared to when the Power Jockey is installed..
An important feature of the Power Jockey is that it derives it’s power from the vehicle’s own (12 volt) charging system. This enable the system to operate independent of any support batteries. The Power Jockey is “always working” whenever the vehicle is in use.

Our test also show that in addition to it’s function of protecting the HEV battery, the Power Jockey improves the power and fuel efficiency of the hybrid vehicle.

This test was conducted on a Prius 1998 with a reconditioned battery pack. Specifications on this vehicle can be viewed here http://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/HV/76.pdf

Warning : Chances are that your 1998 Prius will not be operational if you have not had the battery reconditioned.
However do not attempt to run this test without the Power Jockey installed as it WILL kill your battery.

If you have a new or strong battery you will get results closer to specifications but as the battery ages hard acceleration like the test done above can easily cause the battery to fail. The battery in this vehicle is not particularly strong but it works and survived the test. It is our hope that with the Power Jockey installed it can be used with the vehicle for many more years without drop in vehicle performance.

This battery has also just been reconditioned at time of test. It is our observation that as the battery is being used with the Power Jockey it does improve possibly due to the cell modules getting more equalised.

We will be conducting more trials with different configurations.

Hybrid Vehicles That can Utilize The Power Jockey
Toyota
1) Prius Generation 1 (  1997 – 2000 )
2) Prius Generation 2 (  2000-2003 )
3) Prius Generation 3 (  2003 – 2009 )
4) Prius Generation 4  (  2010 ) ( Not Tested )
5) Estima

Honda
1) Honda Insight  110V  ( Not Tested )
2) Honda Civic    110V   ( Not Tested )

Lexus
1) Lexus 330H             ( Not Tested )

Ford
1) Ford Fusion ( Not Tested )

Mercury
1) Mariner SUV 330 V ( Not Tested