Extremely Chinese Brushless Power System Dyno-ing

I did some data-gathering for Dane on a generic looking 48V 1800W brushless electric scooter motor widely available on ebay and aliexpress, paired with a 1500W E-bike controller. 

Check out the full data here.

The motor had basically no shaft to speak of - it has a left-hand threaded stud on the end, and 2 flats which engage with a stamped #25 chain sprocket.  Since there wasn't enough shaft to grab onto with a collet, I made a "terrorist coupling", with three steel pins that engage with the sprocket teeth:

I plugged the analog output of the talk-to-everything board  into the throttle connector so I could sweep throttle commands in an automated way.  It was a little tricky to tune the throttle ranges, because of how the e-bike controller works.  As far as I can tell, the throttle commands voltage, not current, until you hit the DC bus current limit.  That means that at low-speed, the torque vs. throttle position curve is really steep: very small changes in throttle position mean huge changes in torque, thanks to the voltage-mode control.  The motor is also capable of slightly more than the ~10 N-m the dyno is good for, so I had to carefully tune the throttle range so that the dyno could regulate speed.

Dyno-ing in progress:

Initially I put the dyno in inertia-simulation mode, and did a spin-up using a hand held twist throttle to see what the full-throttle performance was like.  Data below ~1200 RPM was cropped because it was pretty noisy.  This whole spin-up only lasted a few seconds so the plot is little rough.  The motor is legitimately good for almost 2000 mechanical watts.  Surprising given the 1500 watt rating on the motor controller.  Efficiency is rather poor, topping out at around 80%.

The high-speed end of the torque curve is a little bit strange looking, and I don't have a good explanation as to why.  Probably something to do with the internal hall sensors and commutation scheme of the controller.

After figuring out what throttle ranges worked at a range of speeds, I did a full automated sweep of speeds and throttle setpoints to get the full operating maps.  Again, the full data is in the database.  The e-bike controller wasn't set up for regen, so all the maps are 1st quadrant only.