Drone Pack Testing Rack
This rack was designed for testing drone packs. It consists of (2) rows of (5) modular lockers (12”W x 13.5”H x 15”D), back-to-back with a 3” gap in between. We used (2) commercial 36'' 420 CFM range hoods side-by-side for our ventilation. The side supports and the adjoining ducting were fabricated in-house.
Clay flue liners are fantastic. They are a cheap and robust way to isolate your test channels from one another to prevent propagation in the event of a battery fire. They also fit quite snugly inside of a standard 1' x 1' x 1' locker. These are the cut instructions I provided to our contractors for this project.
The customer was so happy with their first rack that they asked me to design a second one for them. This rack consists of another (20) test channels, arranged in (2) rows of ten and installed on a tabletop. Like the other rack, the back of all these lockers is open and enclosed by a sheet-metal box. Ventilation is achieved through ducting connected via the 6" diameter hole on top.
Here's the same rack but with the lockers removed on the (6) channels to the far right, exposing the inner structure of the test channels.
This is an exploded view of one of the lockers. Front-to-back you can see the actual locker itself in Blue, the clay flue-liner in Orange, the clay flue-shelf behind that, a Black micro-controller box that sits under the flue-shelf, and finally at the very end we have the ceramic insulation lining in Grey. All of this might seem like overkill, but when you're testing a novel high-energy battery chemistry, a set-up like this can mean the difference between burning your lab to the ground vs. cleaning up a small mess in the morning.