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Schwinn Tailwind Battery Pack Teardown

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Syonyk 10 kW
+
Schwinn Tailwind Battery Pack Teardown
Jun 07 2015 6:52pm

Canonical source:

http://syonyk.blogspot.com/2015/06/schw ... rdown.html

Copied here, because <3 you guys.

========================

Schwinn Tailwind Battery Pack Teardown

and Analysis

Schwinn Tailwind. The name rolls off the tongue. The bike...
well, we'll get there. But in 2015, it probably doesn't roll at
all, because it probably has a dead battery pack. An
incredibly built, radically over-engineered, insanely beautiful
battery pack.

It's one of the earliest lithium powered electric bikes out

there, and it was reasonably expensive - $3200, in early 2009!
It was also one of the earliest uses of the Toshiba SCiB (Super
Charge ion Battery) technology - a very fancy Lithium
Titanate battery, capable of some truly impressive recharge
rates - 6C charge rates were well within it's capability (a 10
minute recharge time)!

The battery pack is removable, and slips easily into the back
of the bike. That's what I'm tearing apart today.

Keep going if you want to see inside. After the teardown,

there's more information, including some attempts to revive
it. And some complaints about Schwinn & Toshiba.

Teardown
This pack, as is the usual story, sat without being charged for
some length of time, and now won't charge. It's pretty much
"how production ebike packs die." I do prefer this over some
of the cheap hobby lipo pack deaths, though... "dead and
won't charge" does beat "flaming death" every time.

The end of the pack contains a power meter with a button.

Unsurprisingly, it doesn't show anything when the button is
pressed. I really like packs that show their charge, especially
if they're removable.

The label informs us that we're looking at a Schwinn Tailwind

- it's Advanced Lithium Ion Powered. No, it's not powered by
anything right now, but I suppose it was when it came from
the factory. And, as always, I'm going to "attempt to open,
disassemble, or service the battery." All three, actually.

Nicely, this label tells you how to store it, and that it should
be charged regularly if in storage - which, of course, is never
done.

Also of note is the claim that it's a 24VDC 4.2AH pack - that's
barely 100WH! They can't have released a bike with such a
tiny pack, can they? That has to be some sort of error... I
hope.

The bottom of the pack contains 8 screws. A running theme in

this pack is the number of screws - it's insane. I think I had
nearly 40 screws out when I got all the way in, and there
were plenty left that I didn't remove...

The back of the pack contains the +/- DC power connections,

and the charge port.

The power output plates don't have any significant voltage on

them, and are simply pressed into the power connections on
the bike as the pack slides home. The whole thing is built for
quick removal, and for a low power 24v bike, it's probably
just fine.

The charge port is a bit interesting - there's an inner plug

(that the normal charger plugs into), a few small connections,
and then two very large, high amperage outer plugs. The
large plugs aren't used for at-home charging, but they seem
to be connected straight to the battery - they've got pack
voltage on them, as I verify later.

With the first wave of screws out, the back pops off, and...
there's another case inside. Held in by 8 more screws. That's
14, for those keeping count. This is a very, very well
protected set of cells. The little circuit board that runs the
LEDs is visible as well, on the right.

Looking at the back, the main connection plates are visible -

they're actually fairly large!

Once the inner pack is out, the label is visible, and the
capacity checks out. 100WH of Toshiba Lithium Ion Battery.
The pack is 7 years old and a month. I'd say I was impressed,
but I'd only be impressed if it was still working, which is
entirely possible, had it not been drained.

Of course, this model number doesn't turn up anything in

Google (until now).

The pack:
Toshiba Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Battery Pack
Model: TBPEB001*S
Date: May 5 2008
Capacity: 4.2AH
Voltage: 24V DC

The underside of the inner pack has a very serious looking

metal plate on it, held down with yet more screws (8 - up to
22 screws). Don't worry - I'll pop it open and see what's hiding
in there! You can also see the "Do not throw in the trash"
label.

The other side of the pack is the same thing that was visible
with the outer case separated. There's a black plastic outer
shell, and then the blue plastic that feels like some sort of
cell casing. So far, I see no evidence of any cylindrical cells in
here. If they're in there, I can't feel them.

My handy Radio Shack voltmeter (yes, it's cheap, but it's

accurate and was upstairs) is useful to find out what the pack
voltage is. I previously mentioned that the big charging
sockets were apparently connected to the pack. They're
showing 7.13 volts. On a 24v pack with a ~2.3-2.5v
chemistry... this isn't good. That's very definitely a drained
pack.

The two main power connections don't have pack voltage on

them, but they're not quite zero either - they've got 0.013v
across them, which stays fairly consistent. I'm not sure if
there's some sort of signaling that goes on from the bike or
not, but they definitely have a voltage across them.

I should note at this point that I don't actually have the bike -
only the battery pack. So I can't reverse engineer the
signaling, if there is any. I was hoping it just put out a nice
24v when charged... *sigh*

More screws. Another 7 screws (29) gets the side off. Wow.
This is a fancy battery pack! That's some serious computer-
grade interconnect - though I'm suddenly less optimistic about
getting the cells out. There are definitely 10 cells, though, in
a 10S1P configuration.

A while with my voltmeter clears up what this is (a lot of

0.65-0.8v cells). The exposed metal is the cell terminals, with
the raised loops connecting the two terminals. You can trace
the cells - starting at the left main terminal (which happens
to be the negative terminal), the cell path goes left, down,
all the way over to the right side, up a layer, the diagonal
connect is used to go up another layer, then two left, down,
and two left again to the positive terminal. It's very well
done, and overkill in the best kind of way. I suspect the raised
loops are used to deal with any thermal expansion of the
pack, but whatever it is, the metal is very thick. There's no
question about this pack's current carrying ability.

Checking the voltage on the main terminals of the pack gives

me the same voltage I saw on the charging ports, confirming
that they are directly attached (for high current charging).
This is later confirmed by visual inspection of the BMS.

Two more screws (up to 31) for the main terminals, slide a
ribbon cable out, and the BMS comes out. And... wow. This is
a serious BMS, but annoyingly, the good stuff is potted over.
The center fuse is a 32V/60A fuse, and I don't doubt for a
second that this BMS can take the current.

I'll get back to the BMS. For now, I want to get in and look at
the cells. There are a few screws on each end, and then two
in the middle (so another 6 screws - 37). They come out with
a bit of work.

Under the BMS is an off white sheet of plastic. It's adhesive,

so I pull it off, hoping for some more insight into the pack.
Not so lucky. Just more cells.

At this point, I've got all the screws I can find out. It's time to
split the two plastic halves of the pack, and look at the cells
to see what's in there.

This is my plan. Unfortunately for my plan, Toshiba also used

copious amounts of a very high quality adhesive to stick this
pack together. After about an hour, I gave up - I cannot get
the inner pack apart beyond this point without destroying it,
and I'm not going to do that. So this is as far as I can get.

The pack seems to have 10 prismatic cells, nicely stacked.

The BMS takes another 2 screws to get apart (39), though

there are plenty more to take out if you feel like it (the thing
has screws going through the board into soldered joints - "belt
and suspenders" does not begin to cover the construction
here - it's capable of handling some serious current).

On the backside of the BMS, the heavy conductors are

overlayed on the board, and are genuinely massive. I think
this BMS is capable of handling well beyond the 10A or so the
bike claims to need. I'm fairly confident the 60A fuse is
conservative for this BMS. I'm not sure what the pack can
source, but the BMS is, by far, the most overbuilt unit I've
ever seen.

If you look at the outer charging terminals, you'll see

continuity from the positive lead, through the fuse, to the
pack. While the negative lead doesn't obviously connect to
the negative terminal, I think there's a ground plane in here
somewhere that connects everything together - the grounds
are all tied together.

The metal cover alone is a serious piece of work.

Attempts at Recovery
My end goal here is a functioning pack. As replacing the cells
wasn't going to happen (I literally cannot find anything
resembling those cells for sale), the next best thing is trying
to bring them back up, voltage-wise, to a level that makes
the BMS happy.

Lithium Titanate is supposed to be an incredibly safe,

dimensionally stable, robust chemistry that can handle deep
cycling without problems. The batteries weren't totally dead,
just a bit low - if 1.5v is empty, than 0.8v is not ideal, but
isn't awful. I wouldn't do this with a 4.2v lithium ion cell, but
I feel more comfortable with these cells (after a lot of
reading discussing the deep discharge behavior).

My approach was simple: Bring the cells back up, individually,

to a balanced state. The BMS had been disconnected for over
a week, and my hope was that it would see the cells as
"within range," and start doing it's BMS-thing again.

The first step, since the cells were a bit unbalanced, involved
bringing the cells up to 2.0v per cell. This, after a bit of rest,
led to a voltage of 1.95-1.97v per cell. No luck with the BMS.

I bulk charged the pack for a while longer, and after getting
the pack up to around 23.2v (2.32+/- 0.01v/cell), the BMS
still wanted nothing to do with the pack other than throwing
errors on the LEDs.

After around 3 hours of playing with a variable voltage power

supply, the pack, and the BMS, I gave up. Even with the cells
obviously in the middle of their charge range, the BMS
wanted nothing to do with the pack. Plugging in charging
power would trigger the status LEDs to flash (a "full down to
empty" walk, then all the LEDs flashing), so the BMS was
online, but I could not get the BMS to take a charge from the
"normal" charge ports, nor could I get it to put any voltage on
the output plates.

There are some solutions to this problem, but they involve

fully bypassing the BMS for output, and bulk charging with the
high amperage ports. I'm not sure if the BMS will still balance
the cells or not if things are done this way, and I'm not going
willing to do that on someone else's pack. So, sadly, I was not
able to restore this pack to functionality.

However, there are some interface ports on the BMS (two

small 4-pin ports on the side). If I can get some information
about how to talk to the BMS, I might be able to figure out
what's going on and how to make it happy again. The
chemistry should be just fine after a minor discharge, and it's
just a problem with the BMS.

Another possibility is to replace the BMS with a more generic

unit that handles the voltages involved. This would be more
work, but if I can get the charge/discharge curves for these
cells, it's entirely possible. Right now, though, I don't have
enough time or information for either. And I can't strip the
BMS potting off, as it's not actually my pack. Yet.

Analysis
I don't really understand this bike, or this battery pack.

As near as I can tell, the bike was released in early 2009 for
Schwinn & Toshiba press coverage. There's a lot of glowing
press coverage about this Amazing Schwinn Electric Bicycle
with an Incredible Toshiba SCiB Battery Pack, and not much
else. It apparently sold very poorly, as a year or two later,
there were some insane closeout sales on the bike.

After that? Not much except people trying to replace or

repair broken battery packs.

There's a lot about this bike that doesn't make much sense to
me.

The first is the battery capacity. People are claiming an

honest 10-15 mile range with some assist. The battery pack is
only 100Wh, though, and most pedal assists involve
15+WH/mi - so the bike shouldn't go beyond 7 miles on a
charge, if that. Unless the pedal assist is seriously weak, or
the pack is actually more than 4.2AH, I can't figure out the
disconnect between rated pack capacity and range.

On the other hand, the Schwinn page claims it's a 29.4v 10Ah
pack. This makes for a 300Wh pack, which makes a lot more
sense for the observed range. Except... the inner pack label
claims it's a 4AH pack as well. So I really have no idea what
the actual capacity is, and I don't have a load bank to test it.
Nor do I know what the fully charged voltage is. *sigh*

The second is the battery pack chemistry. Schwinn is using a

somewhat exotic chemistry in a pack, and the only real
advantage over other available chemistries seems to be the
fast charging capability. I'm not sure why you need to charge
a pack at a 6C rate (10 minute recharge), but this pack can
do it without breathing hard. If it's actually a 4AH pack, it can
fast charge at almost 15C - the internal fuse is 60A, which is
sort of nuts for a pack like this. The pack can, in theory,
source 1.5kW on a 250W bike. I have no idea why. It's
radically, radically overbuilt for what it's being asked to do,
and the BMS seems to be very sophisticated.

The stock home charger is a 29.4v, 8.4A charger - so a 2C

rate, with a charged voltage of over 29v.

The only thing that makes any sense is that Schwinn wanted
this bike to be used for delivery services or something, in
which having a selection of packs charged would be useful.
This isn't mentioned in any of the press releases, but it's the
only thing so far that makes sense of the pack design and
chemistry.

The pack is insanely overbuilt physically as well, and I'm not

sure why.

The whole thing feels like it was built, not to be a useful

electric bike, but as a show-off project, by a company
(Schwinn) that then got cold feet about the whole ebike
thing. Toshiba also seems to have contributed an exotic
battery and a fancy BMS, with no documentation. Schwinn
don't seem to have any electric bikes for sale currently,
despite the increasing popularity, legality, and the fact that
they were one of the first with an electric bike for sale.0

Schwinn Scrap
Currently, there are an awful lot of Schwinn Tailwind bikes
that are basically scrap. Nobody sells a replacement battery
pack for them, and the stock battery pack is not easily
convinced to operate again. They're a very heavy bike
without a motor.

This is unacceptable.

Request for Information

Schwinn. Toshiba. Your complete lack of information on this
battery pack is turning what should be perfectly functional
electric bikes into scrap. You've picked an incredibly safe,
high cycle life chemistry that, if drained slightly below what
the BMS likes, is then unrecoverable due to the BMS. Please
publish some information on the packs and the BMS such that
people can get the bikes running again.

Or don't. Keep the Schwinn Tailwinds with dead batteries in

garages, collecting dust, until they get scrapped as bad
purchases by people who paid up to $3200 for one of them.
They carry the Schwinn name.

If you have information on these bikes, especially on the

battery management system and how to communicate with
it/reset it, I would genuinely like to hear from you. Please,
comment below.

Or if you've got a dead Tailwind, feel free to chime in and let

me know how much you paid for it so you can join the voices
saying, "This is absurd."

Battery packs, Sunkko Welders, and more.

http://syonyk.blogspot.com/ ,

ambroseliao 100 kW
+

Re: Schwinn Tailwind Battery Pack Teardown

Jun 07 2015 11:44pm

Syonyk,

Excellent write-up. I agree with you on this bike. I saw them

in the stores and thought they looked like an over-engineered
design (my favorite kind ). When they went on sale for a
song, my neighbor asked about buying one since they were so
cheap and I recommended against it since (as you describe),
the parts are going to be difficult to fix/replace once it
dies...

Where is the rest of the bike?

http://www.ebikes.ca/ is the best!

TidalForce M-750X, Tidalforce S-750 with Crystalyte HS3540, 1x

TF iO-X Cruiser. E+ 1000W hybrid bike. ebikes.ca DrainBrain &
Cycle Analyst meters. GoPro HD Hero2 camera. Bosch Fat
Packs, 37V 10Ah LiPO pack. Turnigy Multistar batteries
My blog: http://ebikerider.blogspot.com
Remember LiFEPo4 HVC is 3.65V and LVC is 2.7V ,

Syonyk 10 kW
+
Re: Schwinn Tailwind Battery Pack Teardown
Jun 08 2015 12:00am

ambroseliao wrote:
Where is the rest of the bike?

Owned by someone else. He contacted me to look into

rebuilding/restoring the pack, which, unfortunately, I'm not
able to do.

I'm currently negotiating to see if he'll give me the bike

cheap, as I can then work on either bypassing the BMS or
building a new pack design for it into the existing pack, but
I'm not sure he wants to get rid of it for what I'm willing to
pay (and I don't really want it, because my garage is already
full of two wheeled vehicles).

Battery packs, Sunkko Welders, and more.

http://syonyk.blogspot.com/ ,

harrypowers 1 µW
+
Re: Schwinn Tailwind Battery Pack Teardown
Aug 01 2015 2:02pm

Hi, Dead Tailwind owner here who read and enjoyed your tear
down about a month ago while searching for a replacement. I
found and successfully road tested that battery today. So, I
came back and created an account to tell others from where I
purchased it. So, I hope this plug is alright.

I bought it from Crazy Lenny's E Bikes in Madison WI. I read

about them having a bunch of Tailwind bikes in stock, so I
ordered a Tailwind Battery from them. When you checkout
their website, you'll realize it's better just to call them with
your order. Anyway, boom, it works great. Be prepared for
some sticker shock, and they do not accept American
Express. They do, however, have batteries to sell, which is
rare with this bike.