Looking To Better Engines Instead of Electric Vehicles

hlovy writes "Don Runkle thinks it's engines, not batteries, that will make automobiles cleaner and more efficient. 'We unabashedly say that we have the best solution,' says Runkle, the CEO of Allen Park, MI-based engine developer EcoMotors International. The startup, which brought in $23 million in Series B financing this summer from Menlo Park, CA-based Khosla Ventures and Seattle billionaire Bill Gates, has designed an opposing piston, opposing cylinder engine that uses fewer parts than traditional motors do and generates more power from each stroke of the engine, CEO Runkle says. He says the 'opoc' engine is smaller, lighter, and less expensive than the motors already out there, and a more viable option than switching automobile fleets over to electrical power."

Comments

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[Mr. Underbridge]

Maker of supposedly cleaner engines thinks that cleaner engines is a better idea than electric vehicles. In other news, maker of windmills thinks wind energy is better than solar. Manufacturer of solar cells disagrees. BP thinks they're all full of shit.

Worse, take a look at the submitter's profile - very few posts (though going back a ways) and a whole lot of story submissions pimping some company or other. I'm catching a whiff of an ad campaign here.

Re:Damnit slashdot

[Firethorn]

You think that the EV's are being powered by unicorn tears? No. It is coal.

Depends on where you live. Still, ironically environmentalism has pretty much killed all non-coal economic sources of electricity - as nice as it is, solar and wind are still far more expensive than then their baseload counterparts.

I'd be building nuclear plants, but you can get EVs that are 'powered' by solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc...

EVs are one of the reasons I think that 'conservation' isn't going to save us from having to build nuclear power plants. EVs get around 3 miles to the kwh. People tend to drive 12-15k miles a year. That's 4-5k kwh/year. Take a 'standard' 2 car household, that's 8-10k kwh, 667-833kwh a month. Or around 2/3rds the standard electric bill. We could save 1/3rd the electricity we currently use by using energy efficient appliances and turning off the lights and such, only to turn around and double our usage by plugging our cars in.

EVs aren't, can't be the 'only' solution for replacing oil based fuels. But they have their spot, I can say that.

Re:why not both?

[Idaho]

my new 2010 CR-V has a real time miles per gallon calculator on the dashboard and i can easily go above 30mpg at 65mph

Yeah, hybrids easily get 50-60 mpg at similar speeds though. So do small diesels (those can do even better, in fact).

the only time it drops a lot is when i accelerate which is a lot since i'm in NYC and we have a lot of traffic lights.

You do realize these are exactly the circumstances where a hybrid drivetrain actually helps a lot, even compared to small diesel engines?

Two stroke diesel engine

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

This is two stroke diesel engine. All diesels are fuel injected. Though diesels do have better torque at low rpms, even they can't match the electric motor when it comes to torque at zero rpm. Electric motors have peak torque at 0 rpm, exactly what you need to get the vehicle in motion. That is why even diesel locomotives run a generator and use electric motors to haul a train. It is not enough to beat the electrics in efficiency, you need to beat it in torque too.

The only reason IC engines are even competitive with the electric motor is because of the high energy density of the fuel carried on board. If you solve the energy storage problem for the electric motor, there is no way IC engines could compete. Not on efficiency, not on torque, not on emissions, not on noise pollution, nothing. You are held hostage by the fuel tank. Not the IC engine.

Re:opposing piston, opposing cylinder engine

[MachDelta]

The deal with lower piston speeds is all about momentum. The less momentum a piston has, the less energy is wasted trying to get it to suddenly move in the opposite direction.

Unfortunately, one of the problems with opposed-piston designs is that they really just move the problem of from one spot to another. Sure, your pistons have less momentum, but you end up attaching two of them (the outside pistons) to incredibly long and relatively fragile connecting rods. At that point you either have to limit the amount of power/cylinder you're producing (so you don't break the rod), or you need a big, thick, heavy, super-strong rod to handle high loads (power) and vibrations (rpm) - at which point you've defeated the whole purpose of reducing the rotating mass (or, alternatively, the total mass when you stack 10 of these things together) anyway.

Opposed piston engines are nothing new. In fact they're over 100 years old. And this guy hasn't given us anything radically new that would thrust an opposed-piston design to the forefront of internal combustion.
So to trot out an old meme: Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:why not both?

[Anne Thwacks]

in most models, you actually controlled your speed with the throttle to the gas engine;

Not in Europe, anyway. Here its typically 750RPM when idling, 1500RPM when applying power. No other speeds are really useable because all the gas flow is in resonant pipes.

In reality, most trucks here are similar too - but there is a slight power band and by having 12 to 24 gears, you can stay in a fairly narrow power band.

Incidentlally, the received wisdom is that you improve MPG 10% for each additional gear you have because of being able to stay in a narrower power band (assuming the power band is narrowed to suit the range of gears as well).

(May not apply to petrol engines) (in my country a "gas" engine burns natural gas, and not petrol).