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Dutch Invention Uses Electric Engines For Wheels
Makarand writes "A Dutch invention is
promising to make vehicles atleast 50% more efficient
and also bring down the soot and carbon dioxide emissions. This is made possible by replacing
the conventional wheels by 'in-wheel' electric engines which are normal electric engines turned inside
out. No transmission is necessary as the in-wheel engines are powered by battery-packs installed on
the vehicle. A diesel-powered generator which replaces the original engine on the vehicle
charges the battery-pack continuously. The Dutch company
E-Traction has built a bus using this technology that
will undergo testing for the next six months."
CAR WARS
I guess we need to look back at more Steve Jackson games for future technology ideas? Or perhaps he patented the idea and stands to make a killing now?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
i'll buy one when they can make them sound like a V8
i think? i saw something similar in one of those consumer science magazines (it was either discover or scientific american) that did the same thing. why'd it take so long for something substantial to come along?
A promise is a promise!
I believe the correct term would be 'electric motors', not 'electric engines'. As this article did originate from The Netherlands, I can excuse them, but...
Back in the ol' Apollo days, NASA's lunar rover operated in exactly the same fashion, if I recall correctly.
l o/ lrv/lrv.htm
http://www.nasm.si.edu/collections/imagery/apol
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
No drivetrain worries...just steering and maybe suspension. I want to get a few and mount them on my couch.
Blar.
Interesting idea, but the real test will be with long term cost of operation. The cost of diesel fuel may be insignificant if this thing spends significantly more time in the garage, or costs more to build.
Not that I want to be a naysayer. I hope it pans out, but don't be too surprised if it quietly goes away never to be heard from again lot a lot of other great ideas. (I remember a british high speed train that leaned into curves, that was quietly taken out of service after much initial fanfare)
My rights don't need management.
Why is this anything more than just a slightly more efficient way of doing a hybrid gas-electric system by putting the engine in the wheel. It's a good idea, but I can't say I hadn't thought of it too. If it's technically sound it's a natural progression.
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Thank god it just got posted to slashdot. That frontpage-template of a website will be gone shortly.
~Lake
this is news how? the idea was built and proven over 100 years ago. ferdinand porsche, who was an ENGINE man, did this in like 1900 and won lots of races with his hybrid car. this feat alone put his name on the map beginging his career.
see this this page
Won't the gyroscpic effect of that heavy a wheel be a lot to overcome. Also, magnetic brakes, I'd hate to be going down a hill with low batteries, and have the engine stall.
We expected nothing less from you, redneck. We never expected you to understand at all, so just go back to your wife who also happens to be your sister.
Too long sad to say. It seems like every good gas saving product that comes out just mysteriously disappears. Like the cars that run on used vegi oil, or the car that get 80+ MPG. I hope this car makes it else where in the world.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
I've heard about this invention, and it promises to make the ultimate 4-wheel dive vehicle! I can now take my old Land Cruiser and remove the engine, replace the wheels with these motors, and load the trunk up with batteries!
It also promises to make auto repair much easier...just swap out a wheel.
Free your ecomony and enact the FairTax
..then they will all die the day after the waranty voids. Won't this create cleaner air AND dumps filled with highly toxic battery-waste?
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
...for some Oil Giant to buy the company off?
I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born - Ronald Reagan
...can be bad because of its lack of noise, there's less warnings to the pedestrians that the bus is coming. It may seem like a silly problem, but the next time you walk on the streets, check to see how often you use the sound as a cue to determine when a car is coming. Of course, you'd still look to be sure, but for jaywalkers, it could be a bad thing.
The other thing is, since the motor is now the wheel, I wonder what the costs will be to maintain these wheels. I think it's still better to have traditional electric motors with the rotor on the inside, since there's really not that much to gain from having an inside out motor, and more to lose when you need to get at it to fix it. Using traditional motors rather than the inside-out motor also means less change need to be made, since the wheels and tires can be used from currently available parts.
I'd still prefer driving a smaller car rather than some crappy yank SUV like Ford crash-Explorer or evn worse Chevrolet. Who's stupid enough to buy this shite anyway ? Oh wait, we're talking about yanks, never mind. ahah.
Diesel locos use a Diesel powerplant to generate electricity, which is then used to run the electric motors powering the drive wheels. It's very effective and proven technology.
They put the engine in the wheel, massively increasing the amount of unsprung weight. The benefits from this layout can't possibly outweigh the huge drawbacks.
This idea will never be marketable, as the vehicle will handle terribly and have a terrible ride.
I got the impression that one significant benefit is the flexibility of electric engines in terms of size and manoeuverability. Being able to have your thrusters turn 360 is critical for ocean going cranes, bow thrusters, and such, and is less complicated using an electric engine than would be required for a direct mechanical linkage.
In the cruise ship example, I kind of got the impression that so much electricity is required for the ship in general, that large generators were a given to start with, so powering the thrust of the ship from the same makes a lot of sense.
Very interesting to see this technology potentially cross over to the consumer. It will be interesting to see if the efficiency makes it feasible.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Low horsepower diesel-electric is probably well suited to inner-city bus service, allowing batteries to charge during the frequent stops. I have no idea whether this is likely to become practical for other vehicle classes.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
While having the motor built into the hub reduces the number of parts and connectors (shafts, u-joints) that rob efficiency, it would seem the major item for efficiency is not so much because of the "inside out" motor, but because of the direct drive on the wheel with fewer parts.
This same company has a similar motor for smaller vehicles here. It uses short axles so the motor is not direct on the wheel.
There are some space considerations with this motor, but while it would work on a bus, such a large amount of unsprung weight on a smaller vehicle would not promote a great ride or handling.
Quit kissing your sister/mom and think for just for the briefest of moments. I know it's going to hurt but try anyway. If it's twice as effiecient as a standard vehicle then we could turn that around and nearly make it twice as big at the same efficiency. Now that's the American way!
The energy savings comes from lack of friction in the drive shaft and the battery bank can store power so you need an engine big enough to supply the average power, not peak power which results in a smaller engine. This is good for larger vehicles like busses and some trucks. It also means more effecent engines can be used. A modern internal combustion engine as found in cars and trucks is designed to work over a wide range of speeds that aren't need if your just running an generator. Once an engine is running on a consistant load and output, efficiency can be improved even more.
This will not work so well for cars beause the high unsprung weight will make a car handle very poorly and the friction losses in a u-shaft would be better than extra weight in the wheels.
The electricity company of Quebec province (Canada) had worked on something similar in the nineties. The actually had a working modified car with in-wheel electric engines. But for some mysterious political reasons, they ended the project...
He's obviously making fun of America and our SUV addiction, not ripping the Europeans, ya'll... if it was done with a bit more wit, I'd say mod it up as funny!
... by a presidential candidate no less.
Why is this anything more than just a slightly more efficient way of doing a hybrid gas-electric system by putting the engine in the wheel.
Well, I believe most hybrid cars today are parallel hybrids - the (gas/diesel) engine can power the drivetrain directly, and the car will use the engine or the electric motor or both depending on conditions and demand.
This bus (and potential other hybrid cars today) is a series hybrid. The only thing powering the drivetrain is the electric motor. The engine either charges the batteries or powers the motor, but never directly powers the drivetrain.
RTFA, it says there is no drivetrain. Everything is in wheel, it is more efficient that way. No gear changing, less heat loss.
:)
Stop contributing to heat death!
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
Laterno, makers of heavy equipment, has been using electric motors on each wheel for decades. They use a diesel engine to pump the hydraulics and run a generator. It's weird opening up a panel on an earth-mover and seeing a big 220-V 3-phase distribution panel. Back in the 80s I did some telecomm work at a big sawmill operation that had a Laterno lift, the owner said at the end of the day it burned 2/3 the fuel of a smaller Cat lift, and did 5 times the work. So hurray for the Europeans for inventing the technology now. What'll they invent next, fire?
Ferdinand Porsche built cars with electric motors in the wheels in the late 1890's (yes, that's EIGHTEEN-nineties). Old, old news......
The neat thing about the turbine was that it could burn a wide variety of liquid fuels with no modification: gin, diesel, gasoline, kerosene, methyl alchohol. The fuel didn't have to be especially pure.
Fuel cells are nice, but each type of fuel cell burns only one kind of fuel - which must be very pure to avoid ruining the fuel cell. I want a fuel cell for my laptop, but not my car.
The other nice thing about turbines is that Batman had one...
This would be a true hybrid. The present hybrids the gas engine changes speed and load as the car moves. the electric motors just provide braking and power assist. In a true hybrid the gas engine always runs at the same speed and load. This means that it can be tuned and fitted for that speed and load. This also has another advantage in that the gas engine can be used as a mobile generator, like during a power failure or if you need to use power tools off the grid.
I love how new tech is always claimed to be so environment friendly. Reading the article went like this for me:
:)
- Electric motors in the wheels. Environment friendly... Cool!
- Ok... Battery packs... Yeah. Enviro PC. Bitchin'...
- DIESEL ENGINE to power the whole thing...
AH!
They're full of shit!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
You could use a sound system to make it sound like anything you want! Do you want it to sound like a Harley, V8, Starship Enterprise, Milenium Falcon, ... Go nuts!
are the new big thing. To look at two totally seperate domains, check out the YS Tech TMD fan (Dan's review) and Canon's Ring USM (Photo net review). This is clearly a technology with potential for anyone working in a certain formfactor who thinks they're making a high enough quantity that they can do custom motors instead of just buying the oldfashioned barrels... and now, it seems, it scales as well. I think we'll be seeing a lot more of this. (Is it so bad of me to want a monocycle driven with this kind of motor?)
I've had this sig for three days.
The unsprung mass is what drives loads up through the chassis for alot of durability events. This drives requirements for heavy (read armored) body structure. It's also difficult to form thick sheet metal, driving cost.
So in addition to making ride and handling performance really difficult to achieve it hurts vehicle structural durability. I wouldn't expect automakers to rush off to re-implement an old idea.
Totally. If we need more gas we can always invade another country that has it... mission accomplished.
Will I have to actually slow down for those speed bumps now. I currently using them to get air.
Among one of my personal projects was an electric car, which I tried to make out toothpaste boxes/etc. The most natural way to move the car was, ofcourse to attach the electric motor (I had only one) to one of the wheels. I did this by attaching a small wheel to the motor shaft. Ofcourse, it didn't work out right: because of only one moving wheel, the car moved in circles, rather than straight as desired.
My point is: doesn't attaching the engine to the wheel seem like the *most* logical choice in the first place? Why build complicated transmission mechanisms and a centralized engine in the first place? The reason, I think was to use only one big powerful engine to power all wheels (or two, incase of a 2 wheel drive) simultaneously. Since the engine is the single most expensive component of a vehicle, it made sense to use only one of them, especially so, because most of them have a very high space:power ratio.
Electric motors seem to suffer from the same problem (high traction motors are incredibly huge). I would like to see figures on the size/power of these engines, and ofcourse, the size/weight of the batteries which the vehicle would need to haul along.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
No, I'm not talking about pastry design, I'm talking about real engineering.
I worked for a Danish company for 2 years in the R&D Dept. I learned that Danish engeineering is done differently than in America. They are very thourough, and documentation and research will be complete before they ever begin making the tangible object.
That is a sharp contrast from how things are done here. They call us 'cowboys' because we'll go off and come back with it either done, or a working (tho sometimes failed) proof of concept. Then we document what worked best. It is this cavalier attitude that I think always gets us winning Junk Yard Wars against the Europeans.
The results are this: This Danish company I worked for posted small but constant growth, making a profit ever year in the last 90 except the first year the company was founded. Here, in America, our growth is much more irratic. We (U.S.) will get the product to market, quicker, but we'll also replace it quicker.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The reasons it is so efficient:
- the diesel engine runs at it's optimal speed (that gives an easy 50-70% gain - engines usually run on sub-optimal speed)
- losses only occur in the electrical cirquits (the current regulaters and so), can cost like 10% of the energy
- and a significant energy gain is made by reversing the enige to generator when braking! (though I assume also a mechanical break for emergency stops). As it is a city bus, it will spend most time either accellerating or decellerating.
Wouter.
I, for one, will welcome the results of the real-world tests of this thing. If it works as well as they claim, they could put those wheel-gines in all sorts of vehicles. And based on the size of them, I'd say they're going in large vehicles first. Can you imagine the Hummer ad campaign when the release a vehicle that is more fuel efficient than a Toyota Echo?
The CB App. What's your 20?
Bus.
Those are some monster wheels.
And what is the actual cost of this wheel?
In fact, Hydro-Quebec (here in, well, Quebec), was working on exactly the same thing. Saw it in person at the Montreal Car show, installed on a Dodge Intrepid.
Hydro-Quebec then quietly dropped the project, and people called foul on the auto industry (the "the oil industry doesn't want this" conspiracy).
I don't know how it would've have turned out on our potholes fields they call streets, though.
If you want to read more (and you can read french), google for: moteur-roue Couture.
Back in the 70's, I developed a WindGenerator that used a similar approach for a class.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Please insert all your jokes under this thread....
the environmental impact will be dramatically reduced when using TheWheel(TM)
Sounds like someone stole an advertising campaign from 55 hundred years ago
I especially love this page with the heading "The Wheel - What It Is, and What It Does"
-----
I've actually read the article.
IANAE (I am not an engineer) but it sounds to me like they're re-inventing the wheel.
-----
In Communist Russia, The Wheel turns The Engine.
-----
1. Re-Invent Wheel
2. ???
3. Profit
-----
Damn STUPID Patent Office has DONE IT AGAIN.
(TheWheel(TM) has been patented internationally - Patent Nr. WO 01/54939)
-----
Have I forgotten anything, folks?
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Wow, all these cogent thoughts from the EE's and CE's, but where are the ME's?!
/.) could calculate the precession-force but I think the more pressing problem is called "UNSPRUNG WEIGHT." For decades, wheel and tire manufacturers have made huge strides toward lighter products to reduce the UW. Lowering UW allows a more agile suspension. (Perhaps "Unsprung MASS" would be more scientifically accurate?) All that having been said, I think the benefits in design would outweigh this one problem...
-Too quiet for a bus?
Round my midwestern city, the noisy, stinky buses are, oh, let's say 30' long, with the engine at the stern. If you're depending on hearing them for avoidance, you're gonna be meat on the front bumper 100% of the time.
-Gyro-effect?
Intersting, a REAL ME (I only play one on
-Various comments on Diesel Hybrids.
MIT's done the math, and I've ranted about this before: Forget Hydrogen as a transportation fuel (for a while), a high acceptance rate of Diesel hybrids would save the world. (Soot? Darkening of the earth? All soluble, and still more manageable problems than the far larger emissions from gasoline as a transport-fuel.)
These are a fairly logical solution to the problem, especially for allowing car-designers to make the car do what you want/need it to do: Carry your self and stuff in safety and comfort.
I, for one, welcome our new motor-in-wheel overlords. (Sorry 'bout that)
You are totally right. Nowadays technology often is quite complex and the real challenge is converting a good idea into working technology.
Let's see, if they ran the diesel engines on Biodiesel, they could totally wean the mass transit system off of petroleum.
Biodiesel -- fuel from the southeast, not the middle east.
..parking! There's no more reason why you couldn't move your wheels 180 degrees! On the other hand, have you seen the size of that wheel? Cars would have a monster-truck appearance!
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
I bet you they could come up with something that doesn't weigh all that much more than some of the heavier rims available today for full size cars/trucks.
it says there is no drivetrain.
Which gives a 60% improvement? As I said it's a slightly more efficient gas-electric hybrid design. The efficiency comes from the lack of a drivetrain. That may give on the order of 5 - 15% improvement in efficiency but not 60%. This is an obvious natural progression of gas-electric hybrid technology if it can be made economical and safe.
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This is essentially what trains have been doing for years. An engineer I met once explained to me that converting the energy from the diesel engine directly into electricity which through a series of batteries drove electric motors uses 70% less energy than a mechanical transmission.
They can give you another 5-10% efficiency on top of Diesel, are much quieter and require far less servicing due to the external combustion. They're not ideal for automotive applications normally because they can't respond instantly, but make good generators. The down side is the development cost, you can go out and just buy a Diesel generator of X size, that isn't quite true of Stirlings.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I agree. Kudos to them for actually doing it.
I'm simply taking issue with the 60% number. If it is true, it is versus conventional technology, not other similar tried and true gas-electric hybrids.
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This seems to use the same principle as a diesel/electic train. An engine is used to power a dynamo to produce an electic current, and then this is transmitted to electic motors in the wheels.
All I can say is, thisis obviously aimed at large/fleet vehicles, and not your family small-car.
With the wheel-integrated-with-the-engine concept, there's NO WAY that MaryJane Q Citizen (or even JimBOB SixPack truckdriver) is going to be changing a tire on his/her own.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I hope somebody has thought about electromagnetic interference while designing this (but somehow, due to nature of this motor, I doubt it...)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Here is an example of another patent that should never have been issued. As a child my neighbor was an ex-pat Canadian EE who was very proud of the busses he put into service in Switzerland just after WW2.
As I remember it a diesel engine powered a generator and spun up a flywheel, which acted as a large battery. Each wheel hub had an electric motor that was used for propulsion and regenerative braking.
I'd say this idea falls into the obvious category.
The concept is hardly new. The motor-in-wheel has been in play for quite some time in the electric vehicle domain.
;)
Technologies M4 here in quebec, a Hydro Quebec subsidiary, have been working on such electric vehicle motor-in-wheel technology for some time now.
I smell a lawsuit coming...
Read more here:
http://www.tech-m4.com/index_en.html
Uhhhh... but it uses less energy and has lower emissions. How is this bad?
- I am made of meat.
I have noticed that things, from physical objects to software, are generally more complex than they should be. I think the problem is that people stop working on it when it works and don't do the final refinement that would take the product to it's most efficient form.
A working prototype? Undergoing testing right now? What the hell is this doing on Slashdot? We're only interested in vague vaporware!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Nearly every disk drive on the market uses this same "invention". Have been using it for many many years. tb
I'm sure that the passengers will be gutted that the driver won't be able to take his favourite corners flat out at 90mph.
And the parent got modded up as interesting. Says quite a bit about the value of moderators. Either that or "Fuckwitted" should be a moderation option.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
This is hardly a new invention, Dutch or otherwise. This is standard operating proceedure in large mining equipment and has been for decades. They call them electric wheels.
The problem with this in passenger cars is the large increase in unsprung weight. This markedly effects most of the factors that are included in "ride comfort" negatively. In otherwords, it'll be a damn difficult sell for passenger cars. Buses might work, and trucks too. Cars - doubtful.
You got me. How much more efficient are hybrids than traditional gas? Maybe they mean 60% more efficient than traditional.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
This is not a new idea, construction vehicals have had this technology for years. Just look at the large dump trucks, etc.. They all have electric motors in each wheel and those are driven by a diesel motor generating electricity.
FarkDot.
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
The efficiency of the system means a smaller engine to acheive the same effect, because the electric engines have a greater range of optimum efficiency.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
True, they're not available for general consumption, but at my alma mater we have busses that run on used vegetable oil from the dorm cafeterias.
Check out this press release from last spring...
Biodesel Busses
this was the original Aerovironment design for the GM Impact - one motor in each front wheel.
GM nixed it because they said if one motor failed, the car would do endlesss tight donuts.
Of course, millions of cars will do this anyway if their traditional IC motor mounts fail, but hey.
The resulting Impact was less of a performer or as efficient as originally designed.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
With Thermal dempolymerization we don't have to worry about toxic waste anymore. We can take any waste and convert it to oil, minerals and water. Just throw those used batteries in with everything else and you'll end up with clean by products. By the way, one of the major investors of changing world technologes is Howard G. Buffett, the son of Warren Buffett so I don't think this technology will disappear. In fact I'm drafting a letter to my county representative to see if we can get one of these plants for our landfill and sewage treatment plant. I recommend that each of you do the same. If local plants can sell oil for half the price of opec then we are one step closer to energy independence and distributed energy creation.
Hey all,
didn't see this one already in the thread (I'm surprised nobody else came up with it...) There is a company which is connected with Wesley Clarke (the presidential hopeful) that is working on Darpa funded technology along these lines. They have a really interesting bike (wish it had better energy storage/maximum range):
http://www.wavecrestlabs.com/
Cheers
All I can say is flat flat flat, not the tire the Netherlands ;-). Unsprung weight is not to important in a low performance vehicle running on good roads (Apeldoorn has well maintained roads, you should see the taxes here). In a bus the unsprung mass will still be rather a small proportion of the total mass even for rather massive wheel motors. The big bastard springs that carry all that bus will not have to much trouble holding the wheels on the road.
Nadolig llawen,
R.
Maybe you live in interesting times
Diesel-electric technology has been used to power locomotives for 60 years. D-E locomotives have no mechanical transmission and the motors drive the axles directly. This electric transmission affords good efficiency, a very wide range of torque conversion, and allows the engine to operate within its optimal RPM range. Almost all of the efficiency benefits that this article attributes to the wheel motor can be had by this 60-year-old design.
There's also nothing new about regenerative braking, though it isn't practical for locomotives.
The real novelty here is that the motor turns with the wheel, rather than being stationary and transmitting its torque through a half-shaft. The benefit is the elimination of these half-shafts and a couple of CV joints. The cost is huge size and tremendous unsprung weight of the motors, plus significant engineering challenges of running high-current wires across a sprung connection, and the concern about competition with the brakes for the limited space and heat-dissipation capacity of the wheel area.
Have a look at the rear wheels of the bus in the photo. They're HUGE - the bus has obviously been modified to fit them.
In summary, the only novelty in this design is in transmitting the power the last 2 feet to the wheels. A conventional design would use half-shafts and CV joints while this design uses high-current electrical transmission. It may be that the engineering challenges of the latter can be overcome, but I remain to be convinced that there's any overall advantage. The company's interests would be better served by an article with more restrained hyperbole.
Very interesting idea. Force is expensive to transport, so it is good to create it where it is to be used. Like with the muscles of human body.
But even if it is a real improvement: often better technical solutions don't make it. The classical example is the now ubiquitous QWERTY keyboard layout. This was initially invented to slow down typing speed on very early typewriters, in an attempt to solve mechanical problems with those thin levers with the characters at their top.
But in this example there are no problems with migration: to the human driver the new engine should be transparent, while a driffrent keyboard layout demands re-training on the part of the writer.
Information is a process.
Although we're still a long ways away from mandatory mass transit or fully automated "cars" (a la Minority Report), I still fear that in my lifetime gasoline burning vehicles may be severely restricted in some parts of the world.
This doesn't bother me in principle, except that no one has made a feasible hybrid/alternative motorcycle. Reasonable bikes these days get 50-60 miles per gallon, so it hasn't been a concern, but with "vehicles" like the Honda Insight getting 70+ mpg in the city, bikes may soon need to worry about having a reputation as gas guzzlers.
Anyway, here's to hoping Janklow gets the maximum sentence.
It's a good idea, but I can't say I hadn't thought of it too.
You are either modest or a liar. I will say it for you, you had no fuckin idea about putting the engine into the tire itself and using it as a generator during braking to refuel the batteries. If you had even HALF of that idea you would be doing something important right now, not posting on slashdot about how great you are and how stupid the inventors are. You may go back to tooting your own horn now.
I am told that GM has done this with a Hydrogen Cell for fuel. Much better than any diesel in my opinion. We'd be better off if we eliminated diesel from our repertoire of fuels.
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
for one simple reason:
... about 80 years now?
Tire changing.
This doesn't look like an easy tire change to me.
BTW, this is in no way new technology. Remove the batteries, change the wheels to steel, and beef up the diesel engine a couple a hundred times and you have the standard diesel-electric drive transmission used in every train "loco"-"motive" ever made since the demise of the steam engine for trains.
What's that
-- Mean People Suck
What the hell is new about this? This type of hybrid vehicle has been around for years.
The most common are Diesel-electric railroad engines. However over the years the idea of Diesel-electric has been used in buses and cars. There is nothing novel about this "invention".
If I know something about batteries...dumps filled with highly toxic battery-waste?
Nope. There is a facility called 'recycling centers'. They take the SulphurLead compounds and reduce them back into lead. The lead then gets re-used.
Same goes for the Nickelmetalhydrides.
The mobility of Hydrogen in batteries is what makes them work - Hydrogen power. Better than taking water and making H2 gas.
This means that even if increased the gas engine efficiency to 0 cents per kWHr (through smaller engine run at peak efficiency to only charge batteries) but ran all the power flows through the lead acid batteries, you costs would increase from 40 cents to 60 cents per kWHr delivered to the wheels.
Anyway, this argument is for series power flows. The traditional automatic transmission is a series power flow, at best 80 percent efficient. The automotive industry has latched on to parallel power flows as a way to boost efficiency. Modern automatic transmissions use split-torque direct drive and torque converter together with direct-drive clutches to boost this efficiency. The commercial hybrids today are parallel electric and gas engine drive. The Toyota Prius is gear shift free, but instead of the Diesel locomotive series drive of engine-generator-traction motor, the Prius has the gas engine, generator, and traction motor tied to a planetary gear set so there are parallel mechanical and electric torque paths, again to boost the efficiency.
If you have a parallel hybrid, obviously you need to use your 60 cents/kWHr battery electricity under circumstances where the gas engine electricity costs more than 60 cents/kWHr, or perhaps use it to resize the gas engine for greater efficiency while consuming the minimum of expensive 60 cents/kWHr juice. But given that batteries are 1) expensive, and 2) wear out (think laptop or cellphone or iPod battery), the hybrid vehicle is not a slam dunk.
that might make you pretty unique around here :).
Well to both of you, the company isn't exactly claiming to be the first to think of it.
i think the original poster ( the Oh puLEASe guy) was referring to the title of the article: Dutch invention Uses Electric Engines For Wheels-which is kind of implying that the concept was the invention of these dutch folks. of course original poster didnt read the article.
so the poster is probably either
- new to slashdot and didnt realize that slashdot has a habit of sensationalizing their headlines
or
- has been posting here for a while and like a good little slasdotter, didnt bother to read the article and decided to rely on amature reporters and editors to provide all the information he needed to make decisions.
-- john
It's my understanding that it depends on how the vehicle is used. For cars it is 20-40% more efficient. For something that constantly stops and starts like a city bus, it's much more than that since the electric braking system recovers the kenetic energy of the bus when stopping so it can be reused when starting back up.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
As if jacking your rims in a pothole wasn't expensive enough...
-R
in holland ?? feh.
Burky turkey, engini in the wheelie go vroum vroum bye bye fastye with the diesilie /Sweedish chef jokes
Despite my earlier comment: now I'm convinced this will be a success. I read over all commenting, and there are only two types of reaction
1. This won't work.
2. This is not new.
And this pattern is always a clear an very strong indication ton the positive.
8)
Information is a process.
The problem with adapting this sort of tech to an off-road vehicle is that the motors will be right where the vehicle takes the most abuse. With the engine on the vehicle's body it's buffered by the shock absorbers; but inside the wheel the only thing between it and the rocks it's going over is a pneumatic tire. The tire will certainly provide some protection, but it may not be enough.
One thing though, if you ever did it, you'd have a monster truck. Take a look at the size of those back wheels, and imagine 'em mounted on a Dodge pick-up.
Their larger earth movers do this as well.
This removes any friction from axles (no bearings, no grease, no physical contact at all) and significantly simplifies the physical process while also making the whole package smaller.
So yes, this actually is a significant improvement on existing solutions. RTFA.
Electric engines are nice and all, but what about magnetically driven wheels? Might not be ready for the harsh environment of road conditions, water, grit. Yet I can think of many a person that would want a no-contact fan engine that will last many times longer if only because there's no engine to gum up and the magnetic field might even repel some of the dust.
:)
Just a thought, patent pending
- Dan
It's actually not technically sound at all. It drastically raises the unsprung weight at each wheel- the thing will ride like crap, and contact with the road will be extremely poor. It might be OK for slow moving busses, but certainly not passenger cars, SUVs, or light trucks.
The difference between a 15lb rim and a 30lb rim(rim= wheel minus tire, ie, the metal part) on your car is extremely noticeable, and racers/performance enthusiasts will go to all lengths to find lighter rims, and even braking systems made up of higher-tech, lighter materials(hence Porsche's ceramic brakes, for example.) Even suspension components themselves are usually made up of carefully designed aluminum components to be lightweight. Less unsprung weight means that it's easier for the suspension to keep the wheel firmly planted to the ground, to grossly simplify the situation.
This thing will eat tires like no tomorrow, too; it'll cause a lot of stress in the tire because the tire will need to flex a lot more than normal. Flexing takes energy, by the way- and that can add up fast. Improperly inflating your tires causes more flexing in the tire than usual, and can have a noticeable effect on your mileage.
Putting an electric motor inside the wheel is about the stupidest thing I've ever heard of- it should, if anything, be in the center of the car, with a traditional half-shaft and CV joints(slight loss)...or instead of using a standard automatic transmission, they should be using a CVT(constantly variable transmission) or something like Audi's DSG(Direct Shift Gearbox).
Please help metamoderate.
Otherwise known as a city street in winter.
I can't imagine that salt spray on the inside of a motor is going to it any good.
This type of wheel was invented by Robert Letorneau for heavy earth-moving equipment.
e s/view/LL/fle36.html
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articl
The problem with using the system in cars is unsprung weight. If you don't understand that comment, move on to another article.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
the main advantage to this motor is the increased amount of torque you get for the energy you put in. By putting the rotor on the outside of the stator, you get increased leverage.
To use an example I used on fark last night to explain it... imagine if you jacked your car up off the ground and stuck your finger in a slot in the middle of the wheel. Try to turn the wheel that way. Difficult, because the wheel is heavy and your finger is pretty small. This is how a normal electric motor works.
Now imagine you wrapping your arm around the outside of the wheel in its axis of rotation and pushing or pulling your arm. Quite a bit easier to rotate the wheel, even though the potential energy (contained in your body) is the same.
Like direct drive, ring motors aren't terribly new either. Ceiling fans use them. But a ring motor used for a vehicle... that is new.
-
Unsprung weight.
Making a wheel that is an electric motor would make such a heavy wheel thtat the vehicle would handle and drive like total crap. The huge weight of the wheels would require shock absorbers with huge dampening ability to keep the wheel planted on the road over uneven surfaces. It would ride like a dump-truck.
-=-=-=-=- osjedi uses Debian GNU/Linux. -=-=-=-=-
The benefits of using an hybrid approach come from a simple idea: by letting an eletric motor drive do the final job (traction) you can put the diesel/gas motor to work in the point of optimal energy generation.
We're talking here of energy conversion, either eletric-eletric(transmission) to eletric-mechanical(traction) or mechanical-eletric (generation). The best you do the energy conversion, the better you are using your primary energy source. Personally, I think that putting the motor drive into the wheel would do no better than having a simple motor tracting a single wheel: today all gas motors with front traction just tract one single wheel. Why to make complex and put two (or more drives)? It just lowers your efficiency (by having more conversions). And yes, there's the battery problem: conventional Li-ion and Ni-Mh batteries accept no more than 600 charges; And dump this batteries is another problem, not to mention if you use the electrical power grid to gather the power (you're just leaving the trash production to some other place).
The point is: electrical drives are more flexible and efficient energy converters than combustion ones. This was one of the greatest achievements of the modern technology. The problem when applying this aproach on vehicles is that you don't have the power grid always on: you have to carry your energy source, and burning gas is more simple and cheaper than carrying heavy batteries that carry also lots of chemicals dangerous to the nature. If you solve this problem, you can have much better approaches for eletrical vehicles.
Maybe the best approach would find a better way to convert gas/diesel/ into electrical energy, in a way you don't need to have a big accumulator (batteries) to power an energy efficient motor drive.
What happens when the bus gets a flat? That does happen every now and again. It seems like the weight of the bus will fall on the engine. Are they planning on putting 2 tires in each wheel well (like a truck) in case this happens. Also, will you need to keep a spare engine in the trunk in case you do get a flat and you need to change the tire.
I guess this might not be a big deal for a city bus company, since they can just radio HQ and get someone to drive out with a new engine. But if this technology were ever used in real cars, that would be a major drawback.
Interesting. About 7-8 years ago I lived in Montreal and I saw about an hour and a half of documentary on the 'new concept' - an electrical engine in a wheel. In the documentary they were showing a car that had one wheel that was an electrical engine that could output 600hp, so even with only one electrical-wheel the car was still running smoothly. That development was done by a team of researchers working on a power-plant somewhere in Quebec. The documentary also showed a mechanical battery - the flywheel in the battery would need to be spun once every hour or so and would consistently output electrical energy.
I wonder if this is an independent research by the Dutch or if this technology somehow found the way outside of Canada? In the documentary they noted that this technology was forced down, the management did not allow this to continue.
And a question - isn't it bad for the engine not to be protected with shocks? I mean this engine in the wheel will take all kinds of punishment that our tires normally take. Also if you get a flat, what do you do? And if you get into an accident there is a higher chance to kill your wheel than your engine right now, but if you engine is your wheel, wouldn't it become just too expensive?
You can't handle the truth.
Solar racing cars have been using in-wheel motors for years.
I am pretty sure LETOURNEAU INC did this same trick for huge earth-moving machines back in the 1950's... an electric wheel with a diesel-powered generator, etc. What is different about this approach??
Check out the size of the wheels on this page.
A single buswheel (SM700/3) is weighed in at a hefty 750 Kg. Interesting to see how this will affect the suspension system.
Take a peek at Wavecrest. They have the same idea which they have built into a car and a motorbike already.
I thought modern diesel electric trains used direct drive as well.
Clear, Dark Skies
This is very similar to GM's HyWire concept car, which uses a motor on each wheel (though possibly not in-wheel, but still no gearbox in between). The HyWire is designed to run on fuel cells but any practical model would probably run a diesel engine also.
/ fuel_cell_innovation.html
This is GM's site: http://www.gm.com/automotive/innovations/Fuelcell
Oh right, you meant the idea of the shaft being the stator. Yes, there's virtually no work involved in getting from that to a functional bus is there?
I think far too much is being made of unsprung weight. Modern magnesium alloys vastly reduce the weight of stators to the point where it's a small factor, compared with other benefits.
Consider that a suspension is supposed to give a smooth ride; but trying to offset the ride squatting while carrying a V8 engine, not to mention the engine's effect on centrifugal force while cornering, has always been a helluva challenge.
My main concerns about electric wheels would be:
- EMI radiation, messing up nearby radio/microwave (shielding compensates);
- Keeping dirt, dust, water, sputem, vomit, etc out of the armature interface (now, this scares me).
For those who are saying this is an "old idea", well WhyTF haven't we done it then?! Yes, it's more efficient; yes, it pollutes less; yes, it's an improvement. Yes, we had the tech to do this years ago, so WHY HAVEN'T WE? Kudos to the radicals, I say.
Glad to see motor-in-wheel, and I think a turbine is the best generator.
Campaign finance reform is national security.
Rail transit has used motors in the wheel trucks for a century. Frank Sprague did the original motor design around 1890. But the motors are not actually in the wheels.
... because:
...).
1) the unsprung weight is not so important a factor since subways (e.g. Montreal metro) run on smooth tracks;
2) the increased efficiency will mean less heat generation which becomes a problem in summer and necessitates air-conditioning (massively inefficient); and
3) decrease in the noise levels.
Note, a subway version would not have the power concerns that necessitate batteries and small diesels (although with hydrogen fuel cells
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
If I remeber correctly, HydroQuebec invented this years ago in a partenership with Crhysler. They put an electric motor inside a wheel. Unfortunately, the governement killed the promising project.(HydroQuebec is state owned).
Sorry... I guess my point (besides being humorous) is that there is no true environmental friendly vehicle - at least according to the granola-snarfing crowd.
:)
Examples: As fast as you can say 'Hydrogen' some tree hugging nut starts talking about increased HEAT emissions!! Windfarms can also be hazardous to rare species of bird! Hydro power destroys river climates, etc. Forget the fact that the alternatives are often far, far worse.
The truth is, if you live, if you breathe the air, you can't avoid damaging the environment somehow. True, newer Diesel engines and hybrid cars will help, but it will never be enough for some that can't regognize a middle ground.
The article struck me funny simply because of its major enviro slant and almost small print mention of the fact that it still uses a diesel power plant. That said, I applaud the makers of the vehicle for doing it certainly; in fact, I LIKE biodiesel!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Virtually identical designs were used almost a century ago.
OTOH, this is why inventions eventually enter the public domain...
Ferdinand Porsches first patent IIRC was an electric car with motors-in-wheels, regenerative braking. all wheel drive, etc.
Had lead acid batteries, which made it impractical, which is still the case for the most part.
A hybrid is , has been, and will be, the only sensible solution for a LONG time.
Absolutely nothing new here.
Such a wheel-motor was developped by Hydro-Quebec (Quebec's electricity provider) in the 1990's. In prototypes, the wheel-motor proved very efficient and gave an amazing amount of torque. The project was however canned for "political" reasons... Sort of reminds me of the Avro project...
Hydro-Quebec developped an electric motor-wheel about 5 years ago. Why would a gov. hydroelectrical agency build that? It's the question they answered when pulled the plug on the project, unfortunately :(
nah, just the sheer mass difference between a hummer and a toyota echo will always give the fuel economy avantage to the echo. hypothetically speaking, even if the engines/powertrains on both those vehicles were 100% effiecient(not physically possible in this universe), it will still take more fuel energy to accelerate the hummer than it would for the toyota echo.
I saw this same sort of concept on the cover of Popular Science about 30 years ago.
It looked interesting, but didnt seem practical at the time.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
the article doesn't say "60% more efficient than all other hybrid or electric designs," presumably they mean 60% more efficient than your normal gas powered city bus.
also, the article does not claim 60% "more efficiency" solely due to the lack of a transmission. All the improvements together (drivetrain, tuned gas motor for electricity generation only, regenerative braking, small elves to get out and push every now and then, etc) add up to a 60% more efficient bus. And what do they mean by more efficient? More fuel efficient? more mechanically efficient? Cost efficient?
it's just a pop media article, not an engineering paper.
We even saw a demonstration on tv with the minister of energy trying a car retrofit with 4 motor wheel.
l motor/
The invention was almost forgoten because the main inventor left the lab over a dispute with Hydro and his team disolved.
But it's now commercialized by a division of Hydro Quebec called tm4. You can see it here: http://www.tech-m4.com/eng/tm4transport/moto_whee
vhs head drums have had this system for a long time. the stator is mounted on a fixed axle and the rotor magnets surround it, and are mounted on the same axle with a ball bearing. then the drum is attached to the magnet assembly (the rotor) in a direct-drive fashion. speed is pwm-controlled
Very large earth moving equipment uses this approach, or at least it did in the 50's, and the motors *are* in the wheels. Also, some of the newer electric bicycles put the motor in the hub. I think it's a great idea... unlike kinetic energy which must be transmitted through a driveshaft, electric power can be transmitted through wires which should save some weight.
The fan on your processor is a spindleless, inside-out electric motor: the stator, with an electromagnet coil, is in the middle and the armature, with ceramic magnets, is on the outside. There is no commutator: the reversal of the current in the stator coil is done by means of a bridge of four transistors, and timed by one of the magnetic poles passing a sensor. So there is nothing particularly new in putting the armature on the outside of the stator.
..... and being a Diesel engine, it'll run quite happily on cooking fat, so the Dutch won't have to go to war with anybody when the oil wells run dry!
Nor is there anything new in the way the control system would work. In Europe, most washing machines are front-loaders. The drum has to be able to revolve at a low speed in both directions for washing, and at a high speed for spin drying. Instead of using a gearbox, the motor's windings are split so they can be connected in various series and parallel combinations. Electronically there is no difference {a motor doing 300 watts of work is using 300 watts of electricity and just looks like a resistance dissipating 300 watts of heat} -- mechanically there may be an improvement {the speed-changer need only be a set of relay contacts, not a solenoid-operated or electro-hydraulic gearbox}.
Many trains in Britain {where not all railways are electrified} use a Diesel engine to spin a generator at constant RPM {everyone knows this is the most efficiengt way to run any sort of engine}, which then drives several small electric motors via an electronic control system which actually depends on the waveform of freshly-generated, as opposed to stored, electricity. I think this was invented by our baguette-munching neighbours at the SNCF {Societe/ Nationale de Cattle Freight by my own experience} but not sure so don't quote me on that.
So, all in all it's not much new. But hey, it's an interesting application anyway
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Hm, homokinetic couplings...
homo kinetic couplings?
homokinetic couplings...
homokinetic couplings?
Hm...
Campaign finance reform is national security.
If you take a look at that graph, you'll see that even a lead-acid battery can last many thousands of cycles as long as they are shallow. The Yellow Tops in question are, I believe, rated at 55 AH (20-hour rate, don't ask me what discharge rate was used for the test) or about 660 WH nominal. The total throughput over 4500 cycles to 25% depth of discharge is over 600 KWH.
Let's make an assumption here. Let's assume that mass-production batteries like the Yellow Tops would cost about the same per AH as a deep-cycle trolling/starting battery does now. I bought a 105 AH unit for about $65 a couple years ago, assume $70 today or $0.66/AH or $55/KWH nominal. 4500 cycles to 25% depth would cost $(55/1125) or 4.9 cents per KWH. Depending where you're buying your juice, this is somewhere between one-third to one times the cost of your off-peak electricity.
Gasoline costs quite a bit more. At 6.67 lb/gallon and 0.4 lb/HP-hr, you'd get 16.7 HP-hr/gallon or 12.7 KWH/gallon; this is about 36.5% of the 119,000 BTU/gallon of energy that gasoline really carries. At $1.50/gallon you're already talking 19 cents per KWH. Hybrid propulsion using reclaimed (regenerated) energy appears to be quite a bit cheaper than making power from scratch, and charging from the grid when opportunity allows would be cheaper than buying fuel even at today's US prices. At typical European prices, it's a no-brainer.
That said, it makes you wonder why the in-wheel-motor hybrid scheme hasn't been done for the last 50 years. I recall seeing one of Ferdinand Porsche's early attempts to power a string of trailers using in-wheel electric motors... for World War One, to move war materiel. There is very little that's truly new under the sun.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The Europeans have the right idea, working to create quieter cities and environments, as indicated here: http://www.bksv.com/2932.asp
This is, by and far, NOT a new idea.
A gent by the name of R. G. LeTourneau (The same one that founded LeTourneau University) invented this idea ages ago for very, very large earth moving machines that they made. They still make some of these and everybody uses the same basic design nowadays on these monsters.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Hydro Quebec also had an electric car in development for a while which was based on the electric motor wheel principle... for some reason the project was abandonned... this is the only page I could find about it (in French only)
o lt ants/auto_electrique/auto.htm
http://esoterisme-exp.com/francais/dossiers/rev
Diesels don't have terribly large idling losses, so I'll lay money that the efficiency gains come from the application of regenerative braking to the city-bus driving cycle of frequent stops. The placement of the motor in the wheel hub might allow different use of the space where the axle and differential would be, but would not otherwise alter the efficiency by much. The biggest benefit I can see would be lowering the floor of the bus, making it easier to get in and out. Cutting the overall height would also reduce aerodynamic drag a bit, but a city bus doesn't cruise fast enough for that to be a big problem.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Ergo, no one's putting an engine in the wheel. They're putting a motor in the wheel. I once watched a Chrysler engine engineer chew out a student engineer for making this same transgression. It was rather amusing.
Mind you, people have put engines in wheels before. The Megola Sport was a front-drive German motorcycle in the '20's. 5 cylinder radial engine with the crankshaft rotating opposite the wheel's motion, nifty.
EXACTLY
By then there would very likely also be a Toyota Echo (or something like it) also available with this technology, with fuel efficiency that still blows away this hypothetical Hummer. The only way to get around the extra-size => extra-mass => extra-energy-needed-to-move-it issue would be to develop a gadget that makes any object it's connected to massless -- and even then only if it doesn't take more energy to make more mass massless. Good luck.
Well, you get all wheel drive as a bonus without including two separate drive trains and elaborate differential mechanisms. That's certainly a plus.
You also lose the weight of the drive train and the transmission. Speed is regulated by current.
You have 4 wheel regenerative breaking that doesn't apply a reverse torque on the drivetrain the way current systems do.
Anti-lock breaks and anti-skid systems become extremely easy as they can be applied by simple software routines. The anti-skid technology in such a vehicle could apply a regen brake on one wheel and an acceleration onto another.
Another big plus. Four wheel steering is also very easy to do. Such a system would also be useful for righting a skid.
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One of the greatest gas savings of a hybrid is that it almost always runs the engine at it's most efficient RPM. It accomplishes this storing extra energy for when it's needed in the battery.
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Is there *THAT* much energy lost in the transmission of a normal car that doing this would result in an energy savings?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I've first seen that concept around 10 years ago (maybe it existed even before that) in the Hydro Quebec electrical car prototype. They had a 100 hp engine in each wheel. The project finally failed because of political issues and internal fights (too much fame too early). The car was already working, but I think the electrical wheels had some problems: 1) the wheels would heat and 2) the moving parts in the wheel add inertia when turning the wheels.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Can you imagine the Hummer ad campaign when the release a vehicle that is more fuel efficient than a Toyota Echo?
;-)
Wasting gasoline is a birthright of Hummer owners. So no, I can't imagine it
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If you think about the wheel as a bouncy ball (the pneumatic tire provides the bounce) that needs to be held down to the road as much of the time as possible, you begin to see the difficulty. The only thing holding the wheel down is the weight of the vehicle (buffered by the springs) so as the wheel gets heavier it takes less and less of of a bump to make the wheel lose substantial amounts of traction (or even complete contact) with the road. You can't steer or brake with a wheel that isn't touching the pavement, among other difficulties. I would think that weight on the less-compliant tire is going to do more damage to the far sides of potholes than weight passing through the more-compliant springs; it is going to hit the far edge a lot harder if it's only sprung by the tire.
For a bus where the motor is a small fraction of the vehicle weight and speeds are low, this is probably not a big deal. But for a 4x4 that ever intends to see a highway, it's probably a killer even if the motor is nigh invulnerable.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Does it really matter where the extra weight is.
You've replaced a VERY large engine and a drive train. You must provide a greater torque in order to accelerate the vehicle.
In the case of the wheel motor, the weight is simply transferred onto the wheel. Additionally, you have a large series of batteries.
If the ultimate weight of the small engine, wheel motor and battery combo is less then the large engine and drivetrain, does it matter much whether its in the wheel or on the chassis????
BTW, one benefit of this scheme is that you lower the effective center of gravity for the vehicle. There will be less body lean in corners. If the scheme works well, we might start seeing race cars take advantage of this principle. Certainly a sports car or minivan could take advantage of it.
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it is cucumber time - no news during the holidays...
Is that even physically (physics-aly?) possible for any motor?
This system is in fact not what is used in trains. The bus relies on the large battery to energize the traction motors, and uses the diesel engine strictly to keep the battery charged. That allows the engine to run at a constant RPM where it is most efficient.
A train uses a diesel engine to directly energize the traction motors, meaning that when you want more power to the wheels, you have to open up the throttle on the diesel. The reason trains require the electric stage is because there's no way to make a clutch that will start a 10,000 ton train at the bottom of a hill. And of course it's totally impractical to carry around a battery that can supply the requisite megawatts.
aQazaQa
This might work good for city vehicals on good roads, but even then what about shocks? Can the engine itself take much of a bump without damage? the wheel is gonna weigh a lot more also. Seems like adding complexity to what is esentially a replacable part now would affect cost of running over time...
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
1. There is still credible opposition to the theory that human activity has yet to alter the environment and if it has, for the worse.
2. You will attract more bees with honey instead of vinegar. Your holier-than-thou annoying environmentalist screed will help neither you nor the movement spread its ideals. Energy efficient products aren't worth a damn if they do not appeal enough to people to make them want to buy them.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
The auto industry and several private firms have been working on putting electric motors in the wheels of cars for years. There is a company, sorry can't remember the name, that has put these "pancake engins" on dirt bikes for use by military and police patrols. This is the first I've heard about where they turned it inside out though.
Another great thing about this is that it has a diesel powered generator in it. As another post pointed out a diesel works best at a steady RPM, also they can run on almost any type of fuel oil, including sunflower, canola, even the sap of a type of tree found in Brazil.
The realy great thing about this sort of motor/generator configuration is that people would buy the car because the fuel is readly available, then once an economicly viable alterative to the diesel generator becomes available, be it fuel cell, cold fusion, whatever, you can replace the deisel engine without haveing to sink a boat load into a new car. This sort of hybrid concept has also been around for years.
A little off-tobic but on the subject of fuel cells, how about a fuel cell that uses gasoline? Fuel cells are more efficient and cleaner than internal combustion engines and gasoline is easy to get. I know there would still be issues about releasing old carbon into the air but the rate of change for joe sixpack would be low enough not to freak them out.
This engine sounds aa awfull lot like the motor of a floppy disk drive. Fixed coils with a ring of magnets.
Modern diesels (now over 52% efficient) have all kinds of emissions controls on them, making them quite clean.
It would seem that using external combustion could present a bigger problem with pollution.
Otherwise, busses do appear to the best best vehicular candidate for sterling engines.
Building a motor directly into a wheel limits you right off. One thing that ought to be obvious after a bit of thinking is that the force you can get out of a magnet doesn't depend on speed to any great degree, so your maximum motor torque is pretty much independent of its speed (depending on the rest of the design). Something that falls out after a bit more thinking is that power = force * speed, so the faster the two sides of the motor move relative to each other, the more power the motor can make. If you build the motor into the wheel hub the rotor and stator cannot move relative to each other any faster than some less-than-unity fraction of the road speed of the vehicle. Further, your driving force is limited to the force that the magnets can exert across the rotor-stator gap, divided by the mechanical disadvantage from the tire radius being larger than the radius of the rotor-stator gap.
If you have powerful enough magnets or low enough demands that you can do the job without need for more power or force, great. But everything else is going to need gears. Gears aren't a bad idea anyway, as a 3:1 gearset is probably going to weigh a lot less than the roughly 2/3 weight saving you'll be able to take out of the motor. Eventually it comes down to parts cost, parts count, simplicity vs. complexity of arrangement, and all the other quotidian details that drive most engineering.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
If these guys ever get their act together and ship product, the Insight will look like a gas-guzzler.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Uh... Just what exactly do you do with your disk drives?
this is why bicyclists are absolutely rabid about wheel weight.
Cyclists are just plain obsessed about weight. They are obsessed because of the extra mass it takes to accellerate. They are doubly obsessed about the amount of weight they must push up hills.
Personally, I believe it's largely a bunch of rubbish. That is, the amount of money one spends to knock 2 pounds of your rig is disproportionate to the value you get. A poor craftsman blames his tools.
The weight of a bicycle wheel is nothing compared to the weight of the rider. The wheel weight won't affect the suspension on a bicycle.
Regarding the weight of wheels on a car. I get what your saying now and it makes sense. Some type of compensation is necessary in the suspension system.
I think your exagerating the difference in acceleration whith mass in the wheels. The biggest reason is the heaviest component of the engine (the copper coils) are fixed, they don't turn. Only the magnets lining the wheel hub turns.
To find the effective moment of inertia one should consider the the mass of the wheel's turning portion and the distance between the magnets and the outer edge of the tire (as opposed to from the center). The mechanical torque isn't applied from the center. It's applied on the magnets.
In this respect, much of the extra torque needed to turn a larger hub/wheel is effectively negated. The most efficient configuration would be the honda boy racer thin tire setup with large wheels.
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- Eletric motors are much more effecient
- No transmission at all
- The diesel engine can be tuned and optimised to run at a peak out-put level since it only ever turns a generator
These all add up.> If you're depending on hearing them for avoidance, you're gonna be meat on the front bumper 100% of the time.
This is actually a good thing. Evolution in Action, man. If you're dumb enough to get hit by a quiet bus, we don't need you in the gene pool.
....except when somebody steals your wheels you might as well ship the rest of the structure to them. That because these wheels will be the more expensive than the rest of the car or bus.
Also, some of the newer electric bicycles put the motor in the hub.
Aha, this is the technology I need to make a two wheel drive mountain bike. This would make the bike more effective turning sharp corners and climbing steep hills.
It would also make for very easy shiftless continuously variable bike.
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What happens when you get a flat tire out in the middle of nowhere? I'm guessing it's a lot easier to carry a couple spares than a patch kit and tire replacement tools. I carry those also, but many punctures are not repairable, especially on the sidewall.
I don't see this ever being useful for offroad or high performance use. City buses and urban transportation makes a lot of sense though. You have an army or mechanics and support standing by.
J
The disk drive hub motor is the exact configuration as this articles' so called engine. The spindle motor is "inside out", ie the outside, with the disks mounted to it spins. The center shaft, which would spin in a normal motor configuration, is stationary.
My comment was about the so-called patent for 'configuration'.
You may find it interesting that motors of large size are built essentially the same as motors of small size. Take a look at some disassembled. A friend owns a motor re-build shop. He has plenty if you need to look at them.
He limits the hp rating he works on, only because he has tools which can only work with motors up to 100 or so hp. Bigger tooling, bigger motors. The bus is built by the auto company.
The powered wheels are HUGE. Looks like they had to chop the bus up like a drag racer to get them to fit. I dont think it can do wheelstands or 8 second quarter miles though. One problem with this design is unsprung weight. Not that you would notice a big difference in a bus, but if motors are to be used this way in cars they will have to be lighter and smaller (less diameter) with a lot of torque.
TallGreen CMS hosting
Turning the wheels into a motor is an impresive feat, because--even for electric motors--that's a lot of torque needed to start moving without the aid of any gearing. It's also a feat because making the engine light enough to not to cause too much of a problem with un-sprung weight, while still being very robust and able to deliver a lot of power isn't the most easiest thing to do.
Just think of the torque needed to turn with those guys... they'll be like extra-massive gyroscopes. This is part of the reason that tires are filled with air, rather than solid.
Take a bicycle wheel off a bike, spin it while holding both sides of the axle, and try to turn it to see what I'm talking about.
Salty road slush will make short work of these in Canada.
Yeehah!!
The Ride of The Valkeries blasting out of a silent
combine harvester of doom with razor blade threshers
and a wax hopper of hydrofluouric acid.
That should take care of those queer aliens.
Wonder if we could use the chemical reaction to offset the power drain.
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
Considering typical road vehicles have transmission systems with efficiencies of the order of 85%, I think the gains of this old idea (has been published in a number of journals, and is actually present in a prototype military transport vehicle in South Africa - but there you have a *lot* more space to use ...) are overstated. You could possible achieve 15% max over a similar hybrid-electric, at the cost of higher purchase and maintenance cost (high efficiency/power dense electric motors are quite expensive ...).
The big unsprung weight might be why the rear wheels have such huge tires compared to the fronts. Was it just me or did the rears look almost 50% bigger diametrically than the fronts? The larger tire volume combined with the lower speeds of city traffic might make the ride acceptable.
and don't turn.
Unless these busses have 4 wheel steering, but I doubt they do.
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How about a big, fat tire, with 9'/6' outer/inner diameters, with an inner ring in which I sit? The ring turns the tire with this Dutch motor. Behind me, a couple of smaller fat tires are steered as a rudder, along with shifting my weight side to side, like a motorcycle. This would be fun not only on streets, but offroad on beaches and wood trails. If the tire/engine wheel seals are watertight, I could flip ot over at water's edge for amphibious transport. Finally a reason to consider portage trips "vacations" :).
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make install -not war
Nothing new. The US military is gonna use it for all future large vehicles because of the reduced maintence costs and problems. Replaces transmission / drive train w/ wires & electronics.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
Have to join the chorus here, though: nothing significantly innovative in this idea at all.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Don't they know anything about unsprung weight?
this thing may be efficent but will ride like a skateboard.
How is it practical to put 'engines' out on the end of axles and use them as wheels? Shouldn't wheels be used, since they're round? The whole way the article title is worded sounds like the awkward way C. Montgomery Burns would describe something like this.
"Smithers, let's take the steam car out to see the cinema." etc. etc.
"After it passes, there will be a rain of soot and CO2"? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Like so many bright "new" ideas, this one has been done before. On a huge scale, I might add. Check it out at the Letourneau Web site.
Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.
2003-12-25 00:49:11 Dutch Electric Bus Finally Practical ? (articles,news) (rejected)
ASSHOLES!!
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
OK, two words and a hyphen. Been building earthmoving equipment with motors-in-wheels for a long time. Big diesel driving a big generator providing electricity to the wheels. And for the same reason that diesel-electric locomotives work so well: maximum torque at zero RPM (or stall speed if you prefer).
You wouldn't want this sort of tech in anything much smaller than a bus. Unless they can make the "revolving stator" and attendant magnets a lot lighter then the sprung/unsprung mass ratio is going to take one hell of a hit. It might be cheap and fuel efficient, but if it has the ride and handling qualities of a 1950s tractor, it's not going to be a sales phenomenon.
Electric motors replace the wheels, an engine replaces the engine, and the electric motors have no transmissions because they're powered by batteries?
:)
I suspect it's more like:-
The transmission (and the brakes to a certain extent) are replaced by electric motors mounted *in* the wheels, which are still very much on the vehicle. The original engine, is also very much still in the bus but now charges the batteries instead of driving the wheels directly.
I mentioned the brakes (and this is mentioned briefly in the article) because you can recover energy from the vehicle's momentum (convert kinetic back into electrical, and then chemical) by using the motors as brakes. This happens when the motion of the bus drives the wheels (and hence the motors) to re-charge the batteries. The drag created on the bus by the motors gives a useful braking affect, and some of the energy is reclaimed. Electric motors, are of course also very useful because if their constant torque output - no gearbox required.
The motors are not "inside out" either - brushless DC fan anyone? chop off the fan blades and stick a tyre on it. The diagram in the article confims this: the coils are on the centre piece - not a new plan.
I don't think they can claim to have "invented" it either. I'm sure many others have pointed out by now that diesel-electric trains work a bit like this. The last paragraph of the article also contradicts this claim - it seems that lots of people in japan were thinking about this in-wheel concept..
It has the potential to be much more efficient than a regular bus, due to less moving parts etc etc, but I am surprised you can get enough energy to pull away just from the batteries (with the engine just running constant revs), unless they were really huge. Diesel electric locomotives rev their nuts off to generate enough power to get moving - the batteries are just smoothing capacitors.
It's a nice, low loss, low friction transmission, but it will cause the suspension boys some headaches because of all that un-sprung weight. Nice to see someone's built a working vehicle though
So with those huge magnets running so close to the surface, do they have to worry about picking up metal debris from the road? I know here in the S.F. Bay Area, there's stretches of freeway where it's not uncommon to see alternators and u-joints in the road.
Forget the energy savings - two of the smaller 48V wheels whould make one heck of a powerful Battlebot!
If you read the article, no where in it does it use the word 'invent', which would be to make a novel (ie, new) item. The person paraphrasing the article either thought it was new, or didn't understand the implications of the word.
The whole motor in the wheel concept has been in use for axial-flux motors for at least eight years that I can confirm, as I helped to build one for the 1995 GM SunRayce. I have no idea how much older than that they've been in use, but I know we were working off of an Australian design.
[The only difference being, in that case, the stator was a disk, and so, we had some issues with centrifugal action trying to fling the magnets off, which you wouldn't have with a cylinder]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I worked on solar cars in University. This 'revolutionary' technology the Dutch firm is using is simplay a hub motor! We've used them for years on the Midnight Sun Solar Car team at the University of Waterloo . Lots of solar cars do - they're very efficient, and no they don't make the car handle like crap.
...because it would be a great way to get people into experimenting with EV/Hybrid if they could "bolt on" wheel motors to the non-driving wheels of their vehicles.
The big problems with such bolt-ons? First, you'd either have to re-work the axle or lock the rotor and let the bolt-on wheels run free. The former is expensive. The latter is dangerous because most (all?) modern vehicles have 4-wheel braking. So, you'd be cutting your braking power in half.
Of course you could incorporate braking into the wheel-motors, which they almost certainly did for their bus. That adds to the expense. Also, you can't run traditional hydraulic brakes to the wheel motors unless you go with the modified axle. So, you'd have to use electric braking of some kind; but unlike hydraulics, electrics don't work if the power goes out.
In all my years of driving I've had many electric failures, but the only time I ever had a hydraulic brake fail was on a car that had 30-year old OEM brake lines and a lot of rust. Hydraulics usually give you some warning before failing too--mushiness etc. With the normal hydraulics gone, I brought that car safely home with the emergency brake (which IIRC was cable operated).
A good answer to this problem? I think the wheels should use some kind of a centrifugal device that applies braking power in *inverse* proportion to vehicle speed. When the wheels are powered, the centrifual device is not deployed. If you lose power, the device deploys. Obviously you don't want full braking at full speed. The inverse relationship takes care of that. Lose power at highway speed and you begin to slow, but you don't lock up and burn rubber. You just come to an orderly crawl at say... 5 mph where you can deploy a mechanical emergency brake, or hit a guard rail if the emergency brake doesn't work.
Of course, if just *one* wheel loses power that's a problem--you're burning up that one wheel with the other 3.
So, a serious design would have to put a hydraulic brake rotor on a modified axle. Why not the traditional axle? Because traditionally the wheel and the brake rotor are locked together, and the caliper is on a stator. If the wheel is a motor, that means the stator is in the wheel! Alternatively, the rotor could be built into the wheel, which would make for some wierd looking tires. To change a tire, you'd have to somehow get your brake caliper out of the way, and then pull off a rather heavy motor-rotor-tire combo. That sounds a lot more akward than chaning a regular tire... and then... where do you keep a spare.
OK, so then put the motor inboard of a traditional rotor/wheel combo. But by then, you've got two motors on the axle close to the centerline of the vehicle--you might as well just use on motor.
Nevermind of course, that multiple E-motors are expensive! I think that's part of the reason why you only see this system on large vehicles. Trains and ore trucks cost millions each. Mechanical transmissions on such vehicles would be heavy, and would represent a single point of failure. In those businesses, time is money. For the average car, such a redundant system isn't worth the likely added expense. Even if it's more efficient; you still have to get the consumer to buy 4 times the drivetrain components up front.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This will never be adopted in America - with the big wheel mounted on the rear the bus looks funny.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Leaning trains hardly went away. The Amtrack Acela high-speed train between NY and Washington leans into turns. It was the only way to run a high-speed train on the tracks designed for lower speed trains. I've ridden it and it works very well.
Deisel loco's aren't exactly the same system. The bus uses a very small engine to charge batteries continuously. Locomotives use a very large diesel engine connected to an electric generator that directly drives the electric motors providing power on-demand. It is less efficient than the bus but probably provides more maximum sustained power.
Anyway, the innovative part of this bus is the moter "being" the wheel, not the combo drive system which is fairly common and nothing new.
Why would they use diesel? Diesel is very dirty is one of the leading causes of smog in cities. Seems to me, if all you need is a constant generator of power for the batteries, why would you use diesel? Diesel is used in heavy trucks because of its ability to achieve much higher torque at low speeds. Is there a fundamental reason why diesel would be used as opposed to regular gas? The only reason I see is so that bus companies don't have to have 2 different tanks for the differing buses... which, i guess, is a big enough reason.
I think my principles are reachin' an all time low
I've read about this idea in old soviet magazine "young technician". Maybe in the end of 80s or like that. There was a picture of a car with futuristic design and wheels, which are it's engine. Electrical engine. And everything was looking quite safe and logical. I think this idea worth trying.
If you check the photos accompanying the cited article, you'll see that the wheel-cum-motor is not what's so big; rather it's the tire that surrounds it.
... with a huge cushioning tire!
It appears they've answered the problem of unsprung weight by springing it
This electic car (previously mentioned on ./
) has 8(!) electic motor in wheel thingies - much cooler!
Also, most CPU/case fans use "inside-out" motors.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
for several months the stage coach bus company in the city of auckland in new zealand has been running a fleet of buses driven by electic hub motors powered from batteries charged by gas-turbines. they are extremely quiet, just a faint whistle from the turbine. you can see more here - http://www.stagecoach.co.nz/citycircuit/