I have a 48 volt, 20 kW motor that I need to supply with power. I am looking at a configuration of 16 LiFePo4 cells each in series, each 200 Ah rated at 1 C. At that rated capacity, it would seem the most power I could draw is half that, or 9.6 kW which means a lot of unused power to the engine.
If that is correct, the 200 Ah cells must be 2 C rated to make use of the 20 kW of power. Is that correct? (Note: the 20 kW is occasional short-duration peak, not the normal range. Normal use would be 10 kW - 15kW.)
Then I thought, what if I had a larger motor than 20 kW, say 40 kW? How do you feed a hungry power draw like that if only 2 C 200 Ah cells were available? If I had 32 cells, divided into two 16 bank 48 V batteries (say, bank 'a' and 'b'), and banks 'a' and 'b' were wired in parallel to each other, would that satisfy the current draw to a 40 kW motor?