WATTsUP

[Old Koreelah]

... Remember, the definition of a pessimist is - an optimist with experience.

Dafydd that goes straight to the poolroom (my Condensed Wisdom thread).

 

 

[turboplanner]

Cynic - how can you be so cynical after the experience with fuel cells? They were "just around the corner" in the '80s as I recall. Remember, the definition of a pessimist is - an optimist with experience.

I was responding to FT's famous line" "There are billions going into developing a battery that can get a 4 passenger car 300 miles and recharge within an hour. Its almost there"

 

to which I responded "as it was in 1969".

 

At that time electric fork lift trucks were common in Australia as an indoor alternative to Holden powered petrol and LPG units, fleets of electric milk trucks were used to replace horse drawn carts, and there were quite a few electric buses drawing power from overhead lines.

 

Both Ford and GMC had designed and built trial gas turbine trucks.

 

It was an exciting time, with brilliant new ideas, but petrol was cheap and when the business models were produced these bright ideas couldn't cut it. At that time battery life was the biggest cost factor for the slow moving electric vehicle of the day and they died out, in some cases being continued on as hybrids as in diesel/electric rail cars and locomotives.

 

Improvements were made in battery life, but with faster vehicles like cars, then weight became the big issue.

 

Improvements were made in weight, then range became the big issue.

 

When range is resolved then charging infrastructure will become the big issue.

 

I'm an optimist and I still see a future for the electric vehicle; someone somehow will eventually make the breakthrough.

 

However the goalposts are continually changing. What would have been reasonable targets for electric cars in 1969 have been blown away by the stunning improvements in the internal combustion engine, improvements which are showing no signs of slowing down.

 

For example, in the truck industry - tucks which achieved 1.59 km/litre fuel consumption hailing 32 tonnes GVM are today achieving 8 km/litre hauling 68 tonnes.

 

When you look at the task of overcoming rolling resistance, any gearing resistence, wind resistance, grade resistence and so on, and you then set a target range which today's Y generation will tolerate between idle charging time, the performance standards for an electric system are daunting, and you can't just tweak the known technology of today and get a 200% increase.

 

I'm a strong advocate of fuel cell - Perth MTT trialled Mercedes Benz public transport buses about fifteen years ago with great success, the only drawback being from memory the $3 million cost, which was expected to be reduced to competitive level with diesels withing 20 years, and we are getting close to that but the press releases seem to have gone quiet.

 

I was impressed about three years ago by the lease package for a fuel cell version for a well known world standard car model which had a reasonable commuter range. The lease included a home hydrogen generator, and you handed the car back at the end of the lease and picked up a new one. This resolved the key question of how long the batteries would last, which was what killed an earlier effort to market electric local delivery trucks (The batteries lasted the same time as your car battery, but the total cost was $3000 every three years or so).

 

The company was offering this lease in California and announced it was bringing one to Australia. I was just finishing a multi-model truck development project and wrote to the Director of Marketing offering to develop a marketing policy and strategy for it here. Never heard a word back and never saw anything more on it since that time, or any expansion of the California operation.

 

 

[Geoff13]

Trucks getting 8klm/ltr hauling 68 tonnes. If you believe that then I have a Bridge down in Sydney you may want to by. Oh and I will take about 300 of those trucks.

 

 

[turboplanner]

Trucks getting 8klm/ltr hauling 68 tonnes. If you believe that then I have a Bridge down in Sydney you may want to by. Oh and I will take about 300 of those trucks.

Yes, don't know where the 8 came from out of my head. The first one was for a Cummins 210, will see if I can get a fully current linehaul figure today.

 

 

[turboplanner]

Thought I'd look some current figures up, but nothing is easy, with the following coming out of magazine tests:

 

Kw T409/Quad dog at 50.5 tonnes GCM - 2 km/litre

 

Cummins Signature 550 in Road Train - 1.45 km/litre

 

Kw T409 with Cummins ISX e5 1.94 < 2.1 km/litre 62 tonne B Doubles up to Road Trains.

 

 

[fly_tornado]

Do yourself a favour ggl "battery breakthrough" click on the news tab and see how many different companies are working on new technology. It really is one of the areas where business is investing big money based on the possibility of decent returns. There are 1.200.000.000 mobile phones sold every year.

 

 

[Guest ozzie]

I didn't know electric aircraft ran on steam!

Well in most of the displays by the big names at Airventure '11 it seemed the had trouble keeping the smoke in. They took a lot of pride in row upon row of fried components.

sorta proves electricity is a myth and it really is expensive smoke. Smoke escapes and it stops working.

 

 

[Guest ozzie]

Try and find a DVD called "Who Killed The Electric Car" on the Sony label. Great look at GM's electric car that they least out in the 70's and what eventually knocked it and others on the head.

 

edit

 

i just googled it plenty of links to it and video available.

 

 

[eightyknots]

Do yourself a favour ggl "battery breakthrough" click on the news tab and see how many different companies are working on new technology. It really is one of the areas where business is investing big money based on the possibility of decent returns. There are 1.200.000.000 mobile phones sold every year.

I agree FT:

 

The battery technology in mobile phones has improved markedly. This year marks the year that I have owned and carried a mobile phone continuously for twenty years. Then, my heavy "micro-TAC" Motorola phone had a "slimline 12 hour battery" that I never got more than eight hours out of so I had to carry an extra battery. They were nickel cadmium with a relatively limited life. The screen size of my Motorola phone was only big enough to display a few lines of alpha-numeric characters.

 

Today, I own a Samsung Galaxy Note 3. This phone has a vastly larger screen and a much longer battery life, currently runs around 200 apps has a very fast processor and is lighter to boot and uses a nickel metal hydride battery. It is very evident that battery technology has come a long way. Along the lines of the Moore's Law principle, with all of the research being thrown at battery improvements, it is very likely that battery capacity will rise while the weight and probably the volume of the battery decreases.

 

Perhaps by AD 2020 this technology is so well advanced a light aircraft with a two, three of four hour range may be a distinct possibility.

 

 

[fly_tornado]

Consider that you probably started off with an 8 bit processor running at 16mhz, 32kb of ram and 256Kb of memory and now your note three has a quadcore processor running at 1.2 Ghz and a gig of ram as well as an 5.5" screen. 2020 is only 5 years away

 

 

[eightyknots]

Consider that you probably started off with an 8 bit processor running at 16mhz, 32kb of ram and 256Kb of memory and now your note three has a quadcore processor running at 1.2 Ghz and a gig of ram as well as an 5.5" screen. 2020 is only 5 years away

I think that a viable, light electric aircraft is a real possibility by 2020. A Rotax equivalent 100 hp electric motor is considerably lighter. With incrementally improving battery technology this may all work out by the end of the decade.

 

I suppose it is a matter of "watch this space"!

 

 

[Guest ozzie]

It's here already, just no one has been able to break into the real world mass production of a viable product.

 

The big name companies like GE, Boeing, Airbus etc will not produce a marketable product before 2018/20. The only thing that will speed that up will be if Russia decide to take on Europe by stopping oil and gas supplies and that looks like a real possibility add those Middle East nutters ready to fire up and oil prices will skyrocket.

 

 

[turboplanner]

There are two distinct phases with developing a product:

 

Concept and Testing

 

where you can spend squillions of hours working on a great idea before you finally get something which looks as if it will work reliably and can be manufactured at a profit.

 

Production and Marketing

 

Every product has a selling trigger point where huge orders will flow - with fashion items this can be quite high as in mobile phones, in other products it needs to be very low, as in recreational aircraft, so in this phase materials and methods of production absorb a lot of hours, then tooling absorbs a lot of hours then factory production has to be set up. The marketing alone can take months to set up.

 

In the automotive industry, even with a repeat of an existing car layout and an internal combustion engine - just a facelift model, from the time a new model is started to the time it hits the showroom is three to four years as you move forward, then strike an obstacle which puts you back, then redesign, then repeat etc.

 

So I think to go from something which doesn't exist today to something which you can buy off the shelf and fly in 2020 might be optimistic.

 

I said 2050, but that was a guess too.

 

Ozzie pointed out that the world political situation could bottleneck oil supplies and that will get us focused on oil alternatives.

 

In addition, if the stories are true, and we are now buying all our petrol from Asia at questionable quality with a maximum tank life for four weeks if we want to avoid maintenance problems on our engines, then in my opinion we no longer have a viable petrol supply.

 

For example, I have ten petrol engines, from low mileage vehicles, tractor, chain saw, stationary engines to lawn mowers and boat. Setting up a regime to empty all these fuel tanks within four weeks of filling will mean throwing out fuel, because it can't be burnt enough, and mixing large volumes of two stroke fuel with straight petrol would just mean more maintenance cost. So there is a big wastage of fuel cost, and a big hit in time cost to do ridiculous things like draining the tractor tank unless I know it will be needed within four weeks, then filling an implement with fuel every time it will be used. Even to developing a policy where fuel for a farm ute will not be held more than four weeks in drums tanks etc.

 

So:

 

Either that rumour is BS, or

 

1 I will religiously follow a plan of filling the tank with fuel, using the engine, draining the fuel, putting it in something which will burn it off within four weeks

 

2 I will be like 98% people and will not have the time or will not want to tip fuel on to the ground and I will incur thousands of dollars per year costs in engone repairs, which has already started to happen.

 

That in turn will give electric a substantial discount in viable cost.

 

 

[dutchroll]

Yeah right, give me 1 cent for everytime I have heard that one and I would be a billionaire.Yup, nah, plenty of Government funding but no results, plenty of refinements but nothing new - REGARDLESS of what ******** you hear spun, the ******** that keeps the grant money coming in.

The argument that people only keep researching stuff because the grant money flows in is generally a fallacy (albeit a popular one). The reality is a bit different. There is no fame or money for doing dead-end research. The big $$$$ and the worldwide recognition is if the research is actually successful and therefore marketable. There's no long-term incentive to keep doing it if it becomes obvious there won't be results, even if the Government is paying for it.

 

Heck I have a battery bank that'll run my whole household for several days, using only 50% of its charge. Yeah it's a couple of square metres in size and the batteries are 80kg each, but 20 years ago it would've occupied a large shed and the batteries probably would've been half a tonne each. I have an iPhone in my pocket which has far more computing power than the Mercury-program launch computer at Cape Canaveral which occupied almost a whole building in the 1960s.

 

The increase in power and the reduction in weight and size will get there, and it's progressing faster than you actually think. It's just that in the modern age we've become impatient and want everything to come to fruition tomorrow, not next week.

 

 

[Guest Andys@coffs]

Dutch

 

You probably know this but try to not use as much as 50% of battery life, if you can limit discharge to 20% then the battery life (in terms of cycles) extends heaps.... Use 100% and life in terms of cycles becomes very short.....

 

Andy

 

 

[bexrbetter]

and it's progressing faster than you actually think. .

We are talking about batteries or energy cells that will power a vehicle economically and environmentally, not your application. I am acutely aware of what's available because I spent 2 years chasing around the world with a budget to find them and simply wasted our time. That was 5 -7 years ago and none of the "coming soon, around the corner, just over the horizon, soon to be released...wonder batteries" have materialized and even back then a lot of those articles were old.

 

Battery advances are simply improvements on and within the current production capability, i.e. the manufacturers do not want to stop there billion dollar factories and production and start all over again from what they know so currently all you will get is refinements on a theme. That theme is dangerous and polluting and of course, just like coal, the products come from a mine.

 

As far as I am concerned, redox batteries are the way to go, instant recharge simply by emptying the fluid safely even if it spills down a drain, refilling and a few minutes later on your way again.

 

I was very interested in a scaled down redox battery in Germany but the guys took 6 months to return my emails and then stopped again and I have moved on now.

 

http://evworld.com/news.cfm?newsid=21974

 

http://cleantechnica.com/2014/06/08/almond-farm-site-new-flow-battery-powered-solar/

 

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/vanadium-redox-gaining-ground-in-energy-storage

 

http://bestmag.co.uk/industry-news/german-scientists-proclaim-breakthrough-redox-flow-battery

 

You should tell everyone about redox flow batteries because battery manufacturers don't want you to know about them but they are good enough to find their own way and will succeed eventually IMO - even without the big money leveraging Governments.

 

 

[dutchroll]

Yeah Andy, my German-made Sonnenschein SLA gel batteries are good for discharge to around the 60-50% level before the life cycle is exponentially affected. Certainly less discharge is always better.

 

We are talking about batteries or energy cells that will power a vehicle economically and environmentally, not your application. I am acutely aware of what's available because I spent 2 years chasing around the world with a budget to find them and simply wasted our time. That was 5 -7 years ago and none of the "coming soon, around the corner, just over the horizon, soon to be released...wonder batteries" have materialized and even back then a lot of those articles were old.

My point is firstly that the technology is there already (e.g. lithium-titanate batteries), but it simply hasn't found the economies of scale and thus the cost benefits yet. Secondly we have become so used to rapid technological breakthroughs in many areas (particularly computing) that we have developed unrealistic expectations of how fast cutting edge research in other areas actually proceeds.