A123 Fusion 50 FBL

[broken flyer]

Hey guys, I saw this A123 forum and thought I'd see if anyone's flying an Outrage RC Fusion 50 FBL on A123. I recently bout one used, and that batteries that came with it are very shady(very puffed, high internal resistance, crunched corners, so and so forth). Anyway, I've been trying to find an alternative, and thought I'd give A123 a try. We've been using 10S A123 packs as an alternate to 6S lipo on our 70" aerobatic airplanes and they perform beautifully, and last forever(they must be over 5 years old now with no power loss), and we'd been using 4S A123 packs as 3S lipo alternatives as well, also works great. I even use a 3S A123 pack in my HPI E-Firestorm Flux rc car, and its perfect for that considering they're hard cells.

Anyhow back to the main topic at hand. My Fusion 50 is currently setup for 12S Lipo with stock gearing, and a CC Phoenix Ice HV 80AMP esc. What I tried was, I took one of the 4S packs I had and one of the 10S and wired it in series, giving me 14S A123(just a bit higher voltage than 12S lipo). I flew one flight on it and I was bitterly disappointed. I really had wanted it to work well and was planning on making 14S split packs with brand new A123 cells, but the power just wasn't there like it should have been. It was rather interesting actually, what we found after looking at the data logging on the esc. 1500 watts appears to be the power wall with these batteries. That's about all we ever got on airplanes(which is plenty for that), but unfortunately even when we tried 14S on the heli, we still only got 1500 watts, so it was about 1000 watts less than I needed, 300RPM less on the head speed, and just in general very boggy. A123 appear to compensate for whatever load you put on them by dropping voltage and amp's and it just wasn't enough for my heli. When i flew 12S lipo i was getting 2500 watts, bursts of 54 amps, 2200RPM, but with the 14S A123 I only got 1500 watts, bursts of 43 amps, and 1900RPM.

Anybody have a different experience with A123's on this size heli? And I am flying 3D so the performance drop was enough to rule out using them, but if you just like to cruise around I can see how it'd be plausible. I flew for 3 min and only used 800MAH out of it, so for flying around slow it'd be pretty decent.

[tmodelli]

I havent used a123 yes, but what was the connector and wires used on those batteries"

If the smaller one had a thin enough wire, it could create enough resistance to have a limitation on the max wattage you would be able to get. At your wattage and voltage, I think a 12 awg on EC5 type of connectors would be require to no lose any power in the transmission.

Also did you check the packs temperature right after the flight?

One last thought, what is the amperage that those batteries can hold, and what is their discharge rate?

[muley]

I still use a set of 12s a123 (2x6s) on my 600. They are really old, 100's of flights, and I often run them forced landing flat, since they only last around 3 mins if I'm cranking. I still find them very flyable and really don't notice any less power over the cheap lipos I also run. The headspeed is noticeably less and I make up for it with a idle 2 setting for the life packs. The graph from my cc 80hv does show a difference, but not as much as you are seeing; I regularly get over 2kw, just not sustained. Your flying must be much more aggressive.

My old ship had a Scorpion 4025, the one I have now has a Neu 1910 1.5y, I fly around 2000 +/- hs