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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."
When you can store energy as densely as liquid hydrocarbon, you'll have a successful electric car.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
An engine-developer and seller tells us that the future is in the engines that he happens to be able to sell you. Didn't see that one coming.
Now if someone would just rear-mount that in a cute little chassis, maybe one that looked kind of like a bug or something...
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
If you bothered to RTFA instead of trolling, they explicitly talk about how you can add an electric motor to this engine to really put the mpg off the charts. Basically he's saying that, short term, this will boost the mpg of cars until all electric cars are cheaper / the infrastructure for them is built.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
There is still room for improvement of the internal combustion engine, one is variable compression.
However - a very limiting factor is that consumers aren't willing to pay for the technology, especially in the US where gasoline is dead cheap compared to many other places in the world.
Just look at technologies that have been created earlier - the Alvar Engine (variable compression with a small piston that rotates phase-adjusted to the camshaft, and is actually a assymetrical counter-piston engine), Smokey Yunick's Hot Vapor engine (heating the fuel beyond boiling point before injection) etc.
Diesel engines are also one of the more fuel efficient engines around at the moment. Efficiency up to 55%.
But what really consumes fuel in many cases is the stop&go traffic in cities. Even a short term accumulation of energy in a capacitor bank would help to keep that down. And vehicle weight is also an important factor. Aerodynamic drag is of course important, but only at highway speeds. In a city you can do fine with a shoe box.
So the future for cars is probably a combination of solutions.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Opposed piston motors have been around since the 40s in terms of innovative designs. As far as unique engine variants go, early imagination was not quashed. Books older than you have been written about the pros and cons of I-head, F-head, T-head... 2-cycle diesels, 4-cycle diesels, etc. Check out the Knight sliding sleeve engine. It's all been thought of and conceived, but whether it be incredibly high manufacturing costs or less-than-reliable operation, some force has prevented their use from becoming mainstream.
History repeats itself. What's old is new again.
And why are we beating the dead horse that is ICE engines when we could be advancing other technologies? I wrote in a previous comment how it's very similar to new titanium horseshoes... great, but why?
I'll glad I'm not typing "what happens when the hydrogen runs out?".
I see a lot of buzzwords, but the few words with some real content in it makes it seem like this is just a two-stroke boxer engine.
More efficient? No shit Sherlock, that's always been the province of the two-stroke. The problem was how to keep the lubricants out of the combustion chamber so that it wouldn't be so damn polluting.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
The answer is more diesel powered vehicles. Diesel has a higher energy content and with modern CDI engines can be as fast and greener than a typical gas engine. Although while the cost per gallon of diesel is higher, a small to mid sized diesel passenger car can get 45-55 mpg. Throw in better aerodynamics and we can have more fuel efficient vehicles.
"EcoMotors’ opoc engine is built with opposing pistons, opposing cylinders, and a single crank in the middle. Together, the components work to create a combustion power event with every revolution, unlike existing 4-stroke engines that combust every other turn, Runkle says.
So basically you made a two-stroke flat-four. Color me unimpressed. You're not even using Stirling cycle. Tell me, how the heck did you get Bill Gates to give you money anyway?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
go back a bit further, radial engines used on most pre ww2 aircraft.
Diesel keeps getting overlooked by the hype for hybrid vehicles, but a VW Passat BlueMotion recently broke the record for mileage, getting 74.8 MPG.
obviously the solution is to develop plants that convert sunlight into hydrocarbons. Where's a start up that wants funding for that research? Queue up a slashdot advertisement in 3 - 2 - 1
One of the problems with converting to new technology is that people are still improving the old one. This always happens. That makes the adoption costs of the new way higher, relatively speaking.
Although, I'm pretty sure the cars I buy now are a lot less fuel efficient than the cars I was getting when I first started driving. My guess is either safety regulations are making cars heavier or people just prefer bigger cars. And I'm talking about cars in the same relative class.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Just because some of the world's power is generated by coal, doesn't mean it all is. There are plenty of places where renewable sources make up a significant if not a majority of the power on the grid.
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.
It's perfectly possibly that the future of cheap, clean and geostrategically independent energy passes trough new and improved engines, maybe together with things like biofuels.
Then again it's perfectly possible that electric cars are the way of the future.
Who knows?
No reason to limited ourselves to only one or the other approach though.
That said, this specific gentleman would much rather that more money is invested in "his way" since he stands to make a lot of money if lots of people throw money at it, even if it doesn't work out all that well in the end.
I don't know the limit of efficiency that this new engine design will deliver, but at any sane value this does not solve our biggest problem here in the United States (and probably other nations as well.)
Everything we do is regulated by oil. Our food distribution runs on diesel, our manufacturing runs on diesel. Our military runs on diesel. Our workforce requires gas to get to work. Every facet of American life is dependent on oil based fuels without which our economy, our military, our industry, our agriculture and our commerce will fail. Even with extreme improvement in our ability to harness these fuels, it is extraordinarily unlikely that we can produce enough fuel to be self-sufficient. In short our national security and our very survival are in the hands of foreign powers.
In the best of circumstances this would be worrying, depending on close allies for your ability to survive is harrowing, but sustainable. We are not in the best of circumstances, The nations that produce the majority of oil are not staunch allies, but nations with populaces that are predominantly anti-US. At any time the structure in these countries could break down and we could find ourselves at war with them. This would be a war that even if we win could destroy us as a nation. If we conserve all our fuel resources for the War effort, which we would have to do if we want to win with conventional weapons, we would find ourselves bereft of fuel and the fuel production infrastructure itself most likely in shambles due to the war. Our way of life would be over just as surely as if we had been conquered by a foreign power.
We need to switch to electric not because it is more efficient (although it is) not because it will create jobs (though it will) not because it can be more environmentally sound (although it could be); we need to switch to electrical power because it keeps our vital infrastructure requirements in our own hands. It is a matter of national security, no nation can prosper if it id dependent on unfriendly nations for its very survival.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
Subaru? A gentleman by the name of Ferdinand Porsche (perhaps you've heard of him) sold/licensed the original Boxer engine design to Subaru.
So, they get power out of every stroke using two cylinders, instead of every other stroke using one cylinder.
Is this one of those "don't look behind the curtain" advances?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Tried to figure out how this thing worked and I found this video here: http://www.engineeringtv.com/video/Opposed-Piston-Opposed-Cylinder
Some good technical questions and answers, as well as a working illustrative model of the engine.
Why does this become some conservative v liberal thing. Us v them.
For short trips I don't see why I can't leverage the natural gas, nuclear, coal, wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric grid that we have.
For long trips I can use gas(natural or synthetic), natural gas, hydrogen, or whatever makes sense for my region.
I think the battery is largely for energy recapture (braking,idling,etc) and for a quick charge.
As for gas as a fuel source it seems silly to me to keep going to exotic places(mile under water, middle of the wilderness) to get it when we could be placing that human capital into more sustainable fuels\power sources made in our back yard. Decentralized sources also seem more scalable as population and energy consumption increase.
Also, engines are incredibly complicated analog things. We have gotten very good at their manufacture, but batteries can be turned out a much higher rate. Each engines block is usually crafted with robots, but it can takes hours if not days to assemble a fully functional engine. An electric motor is far simpler, easier to replace\upgrade, and ultimately less prone to failure. Think of all the parts it takes to make a simple 4 stroke engine let alone when you start putting turbos and other things to increase their efficiency. Our mechanics are going to need Doctorates.
When we are really low on oil we can move to liquid from coal, natural gas diesel, and or biofuels.
Commercial fusion is till a pipedream.
it's just one of these, basically:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourke_engine
plus the option of having a hybrid system. The Bourke is the cold fusion of the automotive world. We've been hearing how magical and amazingly efficient it is since it was invented in the 1920s and yet no one has managed to build one that is actually more than slightly better than a normal 4 cycle.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
"On a grander scale, Runkle says the EcoMotors technology is ultimately cleaner than plug-in electric automobiles, because it produces more efficient power without having to tap grid electricity—much of which comes from burning coal."
Again, burning fuel is always going to be the less than ideal solution, no matter what the power is used for.
Clean, renewable energy is the way of the future.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Cylinder deactivation to improve fuel efficiency is already a production technology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_displacement The report should have included more details on the engine.
I not a car guy. So, will someone explain to me how this differs from a boxer engine?
Anonymous Cowards suck.
fuel efficiency and sustainable transportation technology is teaching the average lard-bellied coffee swilling cell phone barking commuter the difference between responsible safe driving and break neck dale earnhart rally racing. for example:
not every green light means floor the accelerator
if its 80 degrees outside, you likely do not need the AC blasting
the posted highway speed limit of 65 is not to be interpreted as 85.
dont "race" up to the red light as fast as you can, only to pound the brakes 60 feet from the intersection
married with kids is not a justification for the latest SUV, domestic or foreign
consider foregoing the automobile if your destination is within one mile.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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.
I don't read AC A human right
The article is light on details, but there's details elsewhere.
The OPOC engine is a horizontally opposed two cylinder two-stroke engine. As a cylinder in a two-stroke engine has a power stroke on every revolution instead of every second revolution, this engine has very high power density compared to a four-stroke engine of the same size.
Traditionally, two-stroke engines have had very poor emissions. Since the exhaust and intake strokes are not separate, the intake mixes with the exhaust to some degree. This means that some of the intake fuel goes out the exhaust unburned, and some of the exhaust remains in the cylinder with the intake charge, reducing peak temperature. This engine, however, uses assisted HCCI with a diesel injection system, meaning the fuel is introduced during compression instead of intake, so unburned intake fuel does not cross over to the exhaust. (I'm not clear what the "assisted" part is in the assisted HCCI. Perhaps there's a spark plug that's only used during low-power, lean burn conditions?)
The cylinder pairs are intended to be balanced and stackable, so that multiples can be connected together for higher output. TFA suggests that it might even be stacked with an electric motor for low-speed operation.
I imagine these would be very useful for a hybrid, despite the summary title. Unassisted HCCI engines have a small power range, but this would be perfectly fine for a series hybrid generator motor running at a fixed RPM for charging.
Compared to what? Got something better for us?
And you think Mr. Fusion isn't going to have its own environmental issues? Solar installations mess up desert habitats, windmills kill birds, hydro dams screw with flood plains and fish migration, nuclear fission leaks radioactivity into the water table and/or atmosphere, coal mining turns mountains into slag heaps, oil periodically decimates ocean wildlife and keeps entire countries locked in hot or cold civil war, and wood used as a fuel results in rapid desertification. There is no "real answer", but you can choose where on that continuum you want to be.
If you RTFA, they mention configuring this super-efficient engine to run off any hydrocarbon or even hydrogen gas, which opens the way for a diverse energy economy including renewable hydrogen generation, home-drilled natural gas, ethanol, etc. If the goal is specifically to reduce oil dependence without shrinking the economy, that seems like a good way to do it. If the goal is to waste as much energy as we want without feeling guilty about it, then you'll need to take your logically-inconsistent pipe dreams elsewhere.
Like a VW, Subaru, or BMW bike? This is new?
Ok, they may be taking this to a new level, but this design has been around for quite a while.
No. I thought the same and wondered why it was different from a flat 4 layout. This has two pistons per cylinder, each pushing away from each other. It's also an advanced two-stroke. (I remember in the late 80s and early 90s when all the talk was about how two-strokes were going to be the next big thing.)
You need to watch the linked video to see how it works. It's actually kinda cool. Each pair of opposing cylinders can act as an independent unit, so you can shut one unit down when you need less power. The guy claims significant fuel consumption savings.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Yeah, I got that in my Porsche.
It's not very fuel efficient :-(
go back a bit further, radial engines used on most pre ww2 aircraft.
This is similar to radial engines but it's quite different in having two pistons per cylinder. See video.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
As far as I know, electric vehicles are on the order of not one, but 2 orders of magnitude cheaper to run than a gasoline car. Very few people would want to pay up to 100x as much cash for petrol when they can have cheap electricity.
Battery tech is improving all the time, so we may as well bite the bullet and all switch to at least hybrids (just like using a 60 GB SSD as an OS/boot drive; sorry can't resist saying how amazing SSDs are).
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
No, that's a flat/boxer engine.
Basically, remove the heads from a flat, join the opposing pair of cylinders into one and synchronize the pistons and you get this. When the cylinder fires, both pistons go outwards simultaneously.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Mod parent up - the illustration movie explains everything within a few seconds and it does seem quite unique, unlike the cited historical examples of different engine structures.
I live in Argentina. We've had cars running on natural gas for over a decade. Paraguay and Brazil have Ethanol since even longer.
Fusion power is the only real answer to the world's energy needs. Period. It's going to take about 50 more years, but it's doable. Logically-inconsistent pipe dreams like flying with a machine heavier than air, or going to the moon were made true by people really wanting it to happen - not by people NOT wanting it to happen (oil companies).
You think that the EV's are being powered by unicorn tears? No. It is coal. Shifting the problem to larger plants may seem to make it more efficient, but then you remember we have to build these EV cars and no one knows exactly how bad they are for the environment in the long run. I highly doubt refining thousands of 'rare earth minerals' and then dumping them back into the planet is a good idea.
One smokestack is easier to regulate than a squillion exhaust pipes. There's also the matter of making cities more livable. I love sitting outside cafes in San Francisco while those trolley buses purr along silently. If it were a diesel engined bus you wouldn't be able to hear yourself think, especially when straining to get up those hills.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Yeah, hybrids easily get 50-60 mpg at similar speeds though. So do small diesels (those can do even better, in fact).
You do realize these are exactly the circumstances where a hybrid drivetrain actually helps a lot, even compared to small diesel engines?
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Where exactly do you think all our oil and coal came from in the first place?
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Exactly, I see algae reactors as probably the only long term sustainable future for our transportation energy needs. Nothing else is going to be convenient and cheap enough to supplant fossil fuels. The only thing that might change my mind would be if supercapacitors got small enough and cheap enough to make charge times and range for pure electrics similar to biodiesel and then energy losses might be enough lower than transporting fuel that electrics win out. However, that's a big if at this point considering that the best supercapacitors have about 1/3rd the energy density of biodiesel, are large, and are stupid expensive (with little chance of bringing down costs even with mass manufacturing).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Moreover, electric vehicles allow easy switching between primary sources. An EV doesn't care whether its electricity comes from coal, nuclear or unicorn tear plants, but a gasoline engine is stuck on that particular fuel forever (or as long as supplies last).
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Electricity is not made with coal everywhere in the world. In a lot of places it's nuclear, solar, wind or hydro-electricity.
If you look power to weight ratios, the power (and efficiency) of engines have increased by quite a bit in the past 20 years. 20-25 mpg used to be good milage in the 70's. Now there are a number of cars in the 30-40 mpg range.
So what happened to these saving? Much of it was squandered by putting larger engines into monster SUCs. Even with safety and environmental regs we could get much better cars very quickly.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Does anyone have any numbers on energy and efficiency and financial costs in the various forms of transport? A cousin owning a medium sized fuel transport company told me transport costs can more less be compared as follows:
waterway transport cost - 1
railway transport cost - 10
road transport cost - 100
air transport cost - 1000
Thinking about the physics involved in each mode, especially with friction and inertia, it tends to seem quite true. In any case this is for cargo, but I assume some formulas for energy or dollars per passenger-mile exists as well.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Supercaps don't come anywhere near the energy density of even chemical batteries. They do have a huge power density and the ability to charge almost instantly though, which is very useful for getting good acceleration out of a small number of cells or for regenerative breaking respectively - so even in a battery car, supercaps can have their place.
for sufficiently cheap power you can compromise on density.
Comments so far seem to ignore the issue of mass/power: every kilogram of mass you tack onto a vehicle, reduces its performance. Because that weight has to be accelerated, and at the next stop sign that weight has to brought to a halt. And for most vehicles, "brought to a halt" means wasting the energy that was stored in the form of kinetic energy (vehicle's speed). An electrical vehicle may re-capture some of that kinetic energy, but never 100%. And if a re-capture system adds another 10 kg. to vehicle weight, that's another 10 kg. that rides along, that needs to be accelerated & stopped.
So everything has both a + and - effect on overall efficiency, and driving style / area where a vehicle is used also counts. Cheap power doesn't gain you anything if using it reduces overall efficiency to the point where you started from.
You know, coming from slashdot, I would have thought you'd have an understanding of thermodynamics.
Or at least try to make a look into things before making a kneejerk response.
Even if it's powered by the dirtiest Coal plants available, it'd still be cleaner than conventional cars.
http://imgur.com/ODyoB.png
http://www.grist.org/article/new-study-finds-that-plug-in-hybrids-rule-in-all-possible-futures/
As for batteries, both Nickel and Lithium are nontoxic, and easily recyclable.
(Not to mention, Nickel is the 5th most common element on earth. So it's not that "rare".)
_
What's more, if we are going to solve anything with global warming, we would need to upgrade our grid anyways.
And it takes about 20 years to shift over to a new car fleet. So we best get started ASAP.
Luckily, we have options:
http://greyfalcon.net/solarenergy.png
http://greyfalcon.net/geoenergy.png
http://www.esolar.com/our_solution
http://greyfalcon.net/egs
Citation needed? They both use boxer engines, but Subaru certainly didn't buy the rights to use them. If anybody had the rights to it, it was Mr. Karl Benz who is the earliest known person to demonstrate a flat engine in the 1890's. Also, it's worth noting that the OP didn't seem to be labeling any specific entity as to who did it first, and indirectly referenced Ferdinand when listing VW. If you're going to play the part of Mr. Correction, correct a post that's actually wrong, and make sure you have your facts straight. I bid you good day.
Yeah, but he called it "OPOC".
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Thats cause you're an anonymous cunt who got it all backwards. I meant that oil companies don't want FUSION POWER.
Asshole.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What ever happened to the development of electrically actuated valves? This was a big deal five years ago, and it was supposed to be just around the corner once they ironed out some reliability and electrical system issues... but they had vehicles on the road that worked and had over 100k miles on the clock...
The benefit here would be independently, infinitely adjustable timing for each cylinder for both intake and exhaust, and less moving mass (no camshafts). Some of this can be achieved with other technology. What happened?
I own a diesel VW and have for 8 years, and I still don't get why other manufacturers of reasonably priced autos are not importing more diesel vehicles into the US. I don't think the BMW diesels count, as they're not what I'd consider to be a consumer priced vehicle, in today's economy. I'm thinking Subaru, Honda, Toyota, where are all these players? I know they all offer diesel powered vehicles in other parts of the world. Think of how well a 2l turbodiesel Toyota Tacoma would sell in the US...not everybody needs a SuperDuty.
I have seen 52mpg from my Jetta on a long, flat highway drive (think Kansas), and even in it's bastardized state now (many go fast parts added) I still see 38mpg at the low end, and that's mashing on the accelerator all the time. When a more sedate person drives my car, 45mpg is the norm, but all that torque is addictive and I'll give up 7mpg to really enjoy driving...
Ocean is land, covered with water.
Short term, I see engine designs and hybridization (why run a gas engine at a stop light?). I also see E85 coming from other sources than corn, which will slow down the need for overseas dino juice. Better our vehicles be drunkards than carnivores.
Medium term, I see nuclear power allowing for use of thermal depolymerization and technologies to suck CO2 from the air to combine it with water and make crude oil, thus allowing for gasoline to be produced and existing infrastructure kept. Why nuclear power? It is carbon neutral, inexpensive, has a lot of energy generating capability in a small area, and the technology is very mature.
Long term, nuclear fusion, supercap technology, and electric motors. However, there are large hurdles before this happens, from getting the power/weight ratio of supercaps on par with chemical storage mechanisms like gasoline, getting fusion productive on a wide scale basis, and getting an electric grid that can handle transportation 24/7, so vehicles like the Nissan Leaf can plug in, even when parked near the Pravda "shop" by Marfa Texas.
I can't decide if your pun was intentional or not. Because some plants are already efficient sunlight->hydrocarbon conversion systems. But your "slashvertisement" comment makes me wonder if you meant that or not...
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Anyone who claims that electric vehicles generate zero pollution is misinformed. However:
1. Electricity doesn't only come from coal. In some places, electricity primarily comes from coal, but in other places, it primarily comes from hydro-electricity or other sources. So, the environmental impact of electric vehicles depends on where the electricity comes from, and it's by no means as simple as saying "all electric vehicles effectively burn coal".
2. By concentrating the polluting aspects of energy-production, it is easier to control. Getting millions of cars to upgrade (or even just maintain) their catalytic converters is a non-starter. Upgrading (or properly maintaining) the scrubbers on a single power plant is more feasible. As new technology enables greener power plants, the entire fleet of electric vehicles benefit.
3. Even if electric vehicles currently rely (partially) on CO2-releasing energy sources (e.g. coal), the long-term possibility is to migrate to other kinds of electricity production. Relying on burning fossil-burns locks one into CO2-releasing infrastructure. However, electric cars immediately 'benefit' from switchovers in the energy grid, as, for instance, more solar-panel and wind-farm sources are added to the grid. Using electricity for intermediate energy storage/transmission, allows us to gradually rebuild our infrastructure to be greener, which softens the switching costs.
4. For fair comparisons, one must also include every part of the chain in both cases. For instance it is true that electric vehicles require extensive mining and manufacturing, and incur transmission losses... but of course the use of fossil fuels requires extensive drilling operations (with associated spills, etc.), refining, and requires transportation (pipelines/tankers/gas-trucks). Each of these steps have variable levels of environmental impact. The intention is of course to have the chain with the lowest impact possible. The two chains are not identical in terms of environmental impact.
Yes, there are tradeoffs, such as transmission losses and the environmental impact of mining materials for batteries. But the idea of investing in electric vehicles now, even though they are not perfect, is to migrate towards an infrastructure where our vehicles have a lesser environmental impact. The end state, where instead of having millions of separate combustion engines, we create power using higher-efficiency power plants (including many that do not generate CO2: nuclear, solar, wind, etc.), is a net gain (even taking into account the impact of transmission losses, mining, etc.).
Traffic lights a great place for hybrids. You can keep your heater or A/C running, while the main gasoline engine is off. This not just saves fuel, but wear and tear on the engine, as well as potential overheating if the radiator fan isn't up to snuff.
It doesn't have to be batteries. I've heard about PT Cruisers actually kill the engine at lights and use the starter motor for slow traffic movement, firing up the main engine when the accelerator is pushed down for real.
Having finally found some details, it is quite a bit different from the horizontally opposed approaches of Subaru/Porsche/VW/Textron Lycoming/Continental (the latter two are aircraft engine manufacturers).
However, it doesn't seem "simpler" to me - it appears to require three piston rods per cylinder (one for the inner piston, two for the outer - a single rod for the outer would result in some significant torque on the pistons from having an edge-mounted rod. Also, this means you have crankshaft rods going OUTSIDE of the engine block.
All in all it looks to be a hell of a lot more complex than a traditional one piston per cylinder design.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
No matter how ingenious a heat engine design is, an old Carnot theorem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot's_theorem_(thermodynamics)
limits its efficiency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_Engine#Efficiency
In practical terms the wiggle room to improve heat engines is small and will only provide incremental gains not sufficient to solve our energy problem. It will simply postpone it by few years.
The real inefficiency is a massive use of personal transport where a mass transit is much more economical.
What I see is: Significant increase in complexity - three piston rods per cylinder, six crankshaft attachments to rods per cylinder pair - plus piston rods on the outside of the engine block.
Good for small engines, but massive increase in complexity and size for more than one cylinder pair.
Also, much of the claimed advantage of cylinder shutdown is negated by gasoline direct injection (an alternative method to reducing pumping losses at low power levels).
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Gasoline powered vehicles were the "clean" alternative to horse poop. We tend to create better and cleaner technology, then push it to the point where the little side-effects become unbearable.
I'm OK with this, as it seems like a very natural tendency. It has allowed Humanity to become as big and effective as we have been. But "clean" pretty much means smaller side-effects, and that means we can use a lot more of it to get to the same level of side-effects. And then we do. Ain't people grand?
The ______ Agenda
The diagrams (and you do have to click a few times to get to them) make it look like it's a standard horizontally opposed design that shoe-horns a 2-stroke style valving into the 4-stroke design by adding a second pair of pistons where the cylinder head would normally be that are running on a second set of connecting rods running on the camshaft such that the outer pistons are about 180 degrees out of phase with the traditional piston. Fuel injection and ignition come in at the side of the cylinder, as do intake and exhaust through ports.
There's not much in the way of technical detail that I can see, but on the face of it, it would appear that this design has something over twice the reciprocating mass as a traditional two- or four-stroke for the same cylinder diameter, no inherent possibility of valve re-timing for load (like the awesome Desmodronic style designs) or even advancement for RPM (like essentially every modern cam-driven overhead valve design). Also, the crankshaft now has to withstand the entire force of compression and combustion, unlike OHV designs where the case takes 1/2 of the force. There are three times as many connecting rods (outer pistons have two each). In traditional crankcases, airflow around the crankshaft is an important consideration for high efficiency / high specific power: as the pistons go up and down, the air inside the crankcase flows from the non-combustion side of one cylinder to the other; here there's the same issue in the lower crankcase, but in the upper part, there's no indication of where the air will go as the outer cylinder cycles up and down (not the fuel-air mixture that will be combusted, but the air within the outer part of the case under what they are calling the End Cover Assembly). That would be such a show-stopper that they must have addressed it, somehow, but damned if the diagrams don't make it look like there's a whole lot of air beating going on. I must be missing something.
Personally, having seen first-hand how strong a connecting rod needs to be, I'm wary of those long, slender dual connecting rods for the outer cylinders. Seems like an excellent place for flexing and harmonic vibration. Clearly, these folks are pretty good engineers (and I've been thinking about this design for all of 5 minutes, so the probability that I'm wrong, and they have solutions is high), but they would seem to me to be a potential longetivity nightmare.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Your futurology, like your sig. Does not make sense.
Once you have a suitable storage system (battery) there is no point having the extra complexity and weight of a mechanical engine in the car.
It's down to the batteries. If they become small and light enough to give good range on a car, we will go full electric over the following decades. The economies of scale for fixed electric generation will ensure this.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
They're getting better, the newest commercially available units are at 30 Wh/kg which competes with cheap nickel metal hydride cells. Volumetrically though they're very far from competing with either batteries or fossil fuels and current research doesn't seem to lead to any way to change that.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Now if someone would just rear-mount that in a cute little chassis, maybe one that looked kind of like a bug or something...
What do you mean? Like those cute little minesweepers or cute little locomotives that have been powered by opposing piston engines?
Opposing pistons, in addition to opposing cylinders.
Perhaps they're horribly inefficient, but have you tried pouring out a gallon of a liquid over 20 miles? That small bead of liquid is enough to motivate a 4000lbs vehicle at 70mph. That's impressive if you ask me.
The reason we still are driving petroleum fueled vehicles is because no one has yet found a better or cheaper alternative. People love bringing asinine conspiracies as to why we don't yet have 100mpg cars. Like every automaker on Earth wouldn't kill to have a fuel efficient car that is a viable replacement for existing vehicles.
I'll give them credit for an interesting way of arranging the crank, con rods, and barrels, to give two opposed piston two-stroke cylinders running off a single crank. I also notice the motor's all shown in CGI cutaways and not as an actual running device. There's also some crucial details omitted in the cutaways that make me wonder how they're solving some of the obvious issues with this engine.
Now, personally, I'm a huge fan of two-stroke opposed-piston motors, but usually in Diesel form. There's also some well known issues with getting these motors to run clean, which is one reason we haven't seen a lot of them since the Deltic motors of the 40's. Does it have potential? Sure. Might even be lighter than a counter-crank arrangement, but hell, the Deltics were popular back in their day precisely because of their power density - finally being supplanted in Maritime service by turbines.
Of course, there's currently some rather interesting engines already well into development with some impressive power densities.
Seriously, though, engine efficiency is great, but we'd all be better off scrapping those 4 ton behemoth SUV's and switching to lighter, more aerodynamic, vehicles.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
All methods have some disadvantages. That doesn't mean however that they're all equivalent in their badness.
For instance, AFAIK, windmills killing birds isn't a particularly big deal. They don't kill that many, we kill lots by just making buildings, driving cars and owning cats (nobody seems to mention that when listing disadvantages like you just did), and progress has been made in making them kill as few as possible. Also the existing powerplants poison them instead.
Solar causes problems in the desert, sure. But that's not the only place where a solar panel can go. There's plenty room on top of buildings and those aren't exactly active ecosystems.
I can't watch the video from work (stupid fucking firewall) but from what I gather, there is an electrically driven turbocharger that aids in scavenging the cylinder post combustion and there must be direct injection of fuel into the cylinder on the next stroke. The turbocharger will supply more than enough air, and if it's electrically driven (or aided) it should eliminate lag.
This would be very important if you have a 4 cylinder version of this engine, and two are disabled to save energy, yet you need to make your left turn through the intersection when the light turns red, as lag could leave you sitting there in the middle of the intersection waiting for that oncoming semi to take you out...
Like I said, I can't watch the video, but it seems like a fancy two stroke, with some sort of way of minimizing the combustion of engine lubricant. Coming from the snowmobile world, I know my 600cc 2 stroke makes a similar amount of power to my 1050cc 4 stroke, but I'll take the 4 stroke any day of the week as I'm not burning lubricant, and don't smell like a lumberjack after a ride. A miniaturized version of this engine would be a snowmobiler's dream. 2 stroke power, 4 stroke clean, and a turbocharger to boot!
Ocean is land, covered with water.
I don't see how it's a big deal having conrods "outside" the block (they're actually inside, but they're alongside the piston instead of under it). Don't forget it's a two-stroke, so you don't have the added complexity of camshafts, valves, timing belts etc.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
hybrid is too expensive now for most uses unless you have a lead foot or you live in your car and drive 50,000 miles a year. 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 and at 30mph. speed is not that big a deal in mpg ratings. 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.
a lot of the SUV's have hybrid versions because most SUV's are modern versions of muscle cars. they are close to 300hp but with luxury and people buy them for the power of hitting the gas and taking off. the hybrid part helps if city driving with constant stop and go since you can get good acceleration with the engine turned off
Sounds like numbers from the 1982 VW Rabbit...
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I have a boxer engine (horizontally opposed pistons) in my Subaru. The fuel efficiency on a four-cylinder sucks balls, to put it mildly. I go out of my way to drive conservatively and I'm still lucky if I can squeeze 24mpg out of it. To make matters even more entertaining, maintenance is a nightmare -- most pro mechanics want to charge me exorbitant prices because they have so little experience working on them, and when I've had to do routine things like changing the spark plugs, it takes a couple hours because I have to gut the engine compartment to get to the side of the engines where the plugs are located. Nifty idea, and sure it probably increases power output and reduced friction as advertised, but fuel economy and maintenance considerations are shit, in my experience.
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Everyone makes that same sorry mistake, extrapolating an unfavorable curve to infinity as if problems don't have gradual solutions. Lost of Bruce Sterling et all sf postulated worlds full of junkies, so many that society fell apart. Marxists had their nightmare fantasies, and when the world moved beyond tose conditions, they refused to recognize it, failed to adapt, and killed hundreds of millions to prove it.
The world just doesn't work like that, Hydrocarbons won't vanish overnight. They just get more and more expensive, and as the expense climbs, people come up with solutions.
The English burned up all their wood, then found coal, then found oil, and that is how things work.
It doesn't work by flying spaghetti monsters suddenly turning 90% of people into junkies, or sucking all the oil out of the ground in 5 seconds flat.
The biggest problem the world has is the damned fools that think they, and only they, can see the future, and if the world doesn't start working on their pet solution RIGHT NOW, everything is going to hell in a handbasket.
They refuse to believe that anyone else is smart, let alone smarter, that people have always found solutions, and that emergencies on a global scale just don't pop up out of thin air (except killer asteroids and rogue solar waves).
Give it a rest, smarty pants. Get on with your life. Stop living a daily nightmare, you will just scare yourself to death.
Infuriate left and right
The important factor in mileage is whether or not you're putting a load on your engine; whether you're accelerating or merely trying to maintain your speed up a hill. To boost mileage you're going to have to do a lot of coasting.
I installed a boost/vacuum gauge in my car some time ago; it being a turbocharged 4-cylinder. A friend pointed out that it's a handy tool towards managing fuel economy something I've experienced myself. Using that in conjunction with my MPG calculate I know exactly how much throttle input I need to maintain speed on a flat road but maximize fuel economy. If you commute in a hilly area you're going to struggle to keep up your mileage; you will have to let yourself lose some momentum up hills by staying off the throttle as much as possible. And 60mph is definitely better than 80mph.
It's very interesting, but I find that over my 15 mile commute I have to commit to fuel efficiency it from the start.
Having better electric engines could also help. I remember the US Navy at one point considered using superconducting electromagnets to power their electric engines, because it allows a large reduction in the amount of power required to move a ship across a certain distance.
I just noticed that the outside pistons are longer than the inner ones...
A quick summary of the tech:
Overall, this looks promising, but it's important to remember that the energy used to power a vehicle is only part of its overall energy footprint. Something more complex to manufacture and maintain means more energy consumption at that part of the vehicle's life, though that energy could (potentially) be non-hydrocarbon based. It also must not be more expensive than its conventional counterpart, and this engine looks like it would be quite expensive to manufacture and maintain (the central multi-clutch would be essentially a whole additional transmission to maintain, and the number of rotating/reciprocating parts is much larger than a conventional Otto 4-stroke). It's a serious hurdle. But then, we have the Telsa, which is just as exotic. Let's see one of these in a Lotus Elise frame and go head-to-head :)
It's certainly worth investigating.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
I'm just still amazed that we don't have Diesel "Serial" Hybrid systems like railroad locomotives where the engine only kicks in when the battery gets low. Combine that with regenerating brakes and you basically use the engine to "top off" the battery.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Traffic lights a great place for hybrids. You can keep your heater or A/C running, while the main gasoline engine is off. This not just saves fuel, but wear and tear on the engine, as well as potential overheating if the radiator fan isn't up to snuff.
It doesn't have to be batteries. I've heard about PT Cruisers actually kill the engine at lights and use the starter motor for slow traffic movement, firing up the main engine when the accelerator is pushed down for real.
Even if this OTOC engine didn't have a hybrid setup to go with it, it could do something similar. Some of its cylinder pairs could be shut down when less power is needed.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Internal combustion engines have to eat something and then excrete something else. Doing less of each is good, but the problem is that we are running out of stuff to feed engines and we are running out of capacity to deal with what engines excrete.
Hence, the interest in electric motors for cars.
Given the where electric car development is now, someone would have to have a significantly better engine right now, ready for production to make it attractive to consumers on a wide and enduring basis.
If things keep going well with electric car development, in 5 - 10 years nobody will want cars driven by engines.
I guess it depends on where you place the windmills. If next to the shoreline, they're likely to kill lots of birds. But my country has the huge Patagonia. Vast extensions of Nothing. Only grass can grow there because of how cold and dry the wind is. Almost no birds, so it would be a great place to use windmills - just that it's so far away from anything it's not even worth the try.
Solar is OK but I remember reading it requires so much rare earth stuff that we're going to run out of those materials even before making solar panels for 10% of the world's energy needs.
IC engines are not limited to petroleum oil based fuels, they can run on methane, alcohol and vegetable oil to name a few options. I don't see any reason why this engine couldn't use a carbon neutral fuel like biogas or alcohol, its not some radical new tech that is completely alien, it is a refinement of existing tech.
The reason most modern cars use petrol is because that was the cheapest back in the day and the infrastructure developed to exclusively handle it. In the early days of automobiles there where a mix of gas and electric vehicles, even some hybrids, that ran on a variety of fuels.
There is no single answer, we are entering a transitional period where fossil fuels are going to be phased out but it doesn't look like there is going to be a magic bullet that will solve everything, at least not yet.
Even fusion will have its issues. Sure electricity may end up being "too cheap to meter" (we've heard that before) but for cars your going to need batteries, really good ones for long trips in some cases, and a completely rebuilt rail system to use electricity instead of diesel. Add in transporting it all, the current electric grid is already hitting its max, those rolling blackouts on the West coast awhile back where not caused by a lack of available generating capacity it was the inability to get the power to where it was needed.
There is a great deal more work that needs to be done to completely move away from combustion, of any fuel, and this engine is another step in the right direction.
Conservation is not always about replacing a technology completely, its about using what is available in an efficient and sustainable method.
Yeah I'm not sure why 30mpg is anything to be proud of. They're numbers from the the 70's. If a CR-V can't do better than that either you're driving wrong or Honda aren't the company they used to be...
True for most places, but CA for example makes most of its electricity from nat gas, so elec vehicles in CA are run on mostly natural gas.. Just saying. Moving the generation to the large generators isn't great now due to coal but it does allow us to slip new fuel sources into the mix, which is very hard to do when everyone is burning gas from a tank. That seems like the advantage of electric -- we can grow into alternative fuels rather than have to change over all at once.. Of course changing over to electric from gas is still a big switch but once made you're future proof in terms of new discoveries for energy: fusion energy finally online? No problem, every elec car is already "fusion compatible" (tm)..
Nitpick: railroad serial hybrids don't use battery power storage for propulsion. They use a motor-generator fed from a diesel. The diesel is governed at a constant RPM where it has peak efficiency. The motor-gen set acts as a gearbox and clutch -- all electrically controlled. The motors can be installed directly on the bogeys -- you then don't have universal joints to maintain.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Agreed that his motor is "smaller, lighter," and indeed it is a great product, but it sure as salt is not anything near less expensive, not now at least. Their EM100-- good for ~325 HP-- is well over $100k.
Great tech, would love to build a trike with a small one of these, but the price is insanely high atm.
I was thinking the same thing. My 1990 bmw gets around those numbers if I don't slam the gas pedal down and put it in neutral when it makes sense. It's easy to do as the car has a current mpg meter on the dash.
I thought it looked like a variant on Jumo/Culverin, therefore will have the same problems of what happens if one cylinder starts to fire ahead/behind of where it should. This pre-ignition or non-ignition problem was solved in the Deltic. Oddly enough the Deltic engineers never realised this until they fired the first prototype up and found the problem had miraculously disappeared (because they'd accidentally designed it away).
Thinking on that, when I look at the animation on their website, I wonder where does the gas at the back of the outer cylinders go?
threadeds blog
Isn't this engine layout akin to the olde Beetle's engine layout? From what I gathered by R'ing TFA, the only innovation is that this design would turn off some cylinders, and would generate power in all strokes even with some cylinders turned off; perhaps a two-stroke design?
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
So the Government knew this 10 years ago? Didn't the US put man on the moon in less time?
The Prius and anything with variable valve timing already has something much like variable compression, in that it can control when the intake valves close relative to the position of the piston.
They did this before: the Napier Deltic was a two-stroke opposed-piston diesel. The Deltic was meant for use in small, fast ships and trains, and it had three sets of cylinders in a triangle shape, with a crankshaft at each apex. Thanks to its construction it had a high power-to-weight ratio. I haven't been able to find fuel consumption figures for this engine, though.
Maybe it's because the rabbit is a tiny 2100 lb car with the mileage rated at absolutely optimal conditions and special tuning, while the CR-V is a 3,200 lb SUV rated at non-optimal conditions because of the changes in the EPA's rating system?
Solar cell based power plants in Lagrange orbits of Mercury.
There ya go.
Until of course we get "save the solar system!" hippies.
I am not an engineer, but is it commonly accepted for "engine" to mean "internal combustion" or "petrol"-driven motor?
Can't an engine run on a fuel source other than petroleum based products, or does "engine" imply exactly that?
Thanks,
Not-an-engineer, Stewbacca.
Small and light enough. And inexpensive. And not extraordinarily toxic, or highly explosive... sure, it could happen. I'm not going to discount the ingenuity of a lot of people working in the field.
On the other hand, I'd rather put my hopes into synthetic hydrocarbons. Organic energy storage is better in almost all ways: better energy density, better power density, safer, and since it's fuel-based, easy to "recharge." Plus, all the infrastructure we need already exists.
Isn't this basically a boxer motor? Granted, from the picture, it loosk quite a bit smaller than most boxers, but boxer motors are, as they say, a real bitch to mount.
These have been around for a long time, and would have a number of problems all their own.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
s/engines/motors/g
Nothing to see here; Move along.
A small diesel paired with a variable drive transmission is going to smoke that hybrid drivetrain, though.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
You mean like previously discussed here?
Which was reported here.
It's an electric vehicle with micro-turbines powering the electric generators if the car travels past the 68 mi single charge limit... or if you want the extra boost to do 0 to 60 mph in 3.4 seconds.
Oh, and it should be capable of accepting multi-fuels, so we (in the US) don't have to wait for the lift on extremely high EtOH import tarrifs while we also subsidize our corn -> EtOH program or wait for industrial research to fund (and patent) biochemical oil reactors (i.e. algae to diesel), or any of the other promises which trivialize the three laws of thermodynamics (enthalpy, entropy, and politics).
Indeed, I can almost get that on a highway run in my 2.7 tonne diesel 4WD.
Of course there's a few differences from trains - but that's ok - they're all sexy. ;)
I think you read into my post way too much.
I never said Solar/wind can't serve as baseload, I just said that they're still MORE EXPENSIVE than the sources typically used for baseload - coal, nuclear, and hydro, basically.
no-fuel.org link - depends on the size of your grid to actually make 'wind's always blowing somewhere' true. Doesn't change that a 1 GW max output windfarm is more likely to average 30-40% of what a 1 GW nuclear plant would produce over time. You need near perfect wind for the windfarm to reach max production, too fast or too slow and production drops.
for the stanford link -
Interconnecting wind farms through the transmission grid is a simple and effective way of reducing deliverable wind power swings caused by wind intermittency.
Additional interconnects cost money. A power source that costs $1/watt of maximum capacity costs more per kwh than a power source that costs $2/watt if the first only produces, on average, 30% of it's capacity while the second averages 90%.
Getting back to EVs vs Gasoline engines, the biggest problem with EVs is the battery. They're simply not good enough, not cheap enough. Often the cost of battery depreciation exceeds the cost of the electricity used as fuel over the life of the pack.
I don't read AC A human right
Several things:
First, rare earth is not that rare. There's lots and lots of the stuff in the crust. The recent issue with China is just because China beat everybody on price. The only reason everybody else is not mining it is because they couldn't compete with China, not because there's any lack of it.
Second, there are different ways of making solar cells. Silicon ones are made from (duh) silicon, which is 27% of the crust. The stuff is absolutely everywhere, the hard thing is making it pure enough for semiconductor applications. Fortunately, as pretty much everything has silicon in it these days, I expect there's a lot of interest in making production cheaper.
Third, even if the most efficient cells do require something unusual, IMO it's not really necessary. What's needed is cheap cells. If you can plaster cheap solar cells on every surface they don't need to be especially efficient.
Emissions have been reduced. In fact, a catalytic converter is no longer required on the new Mazda rotary motors. What they did is they run the motor a little rich so that some fuel makes it through the engine (but only a little). After the combustion cycle they add air to the exhaust and burn a second time to ensure all the fuel is burned. The second burn does not generate any power - this is why the fuel efficiency of the motor is lacking. But for the market they are designed for, it does not matter.
Well, actually it does. Fuel economy is important because a car maker's entire product fleet has to average a certain fuel economy level. Wasted fuel is never a good thing, although Mazda's fleet does mostly consist of smaller cars, so that helps.
The exhaust burn was so hot on the system you describe that the exhaust pipes had to be made of a very expensive grade of stainless steel, not usually used for automotive exhaust tubing, which pushed the cost of the car up. The energy required to pump air into the exhaust is also wasteful.
Putting moderation advice in your
If we had the electrical infrastructure to really support them. Decades of fear mongering have left us way behind on our return to safe and clean nuclear power, which could easily handle the increase in power consumption associated with a switch from ICE technology.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
What you described is a standard diesel-electric engine, which is essentially a diesel engine with an electric transmission. The engine was not always constant RPM; in most models, you actually controlled your speed with the throttle to the gas engine; forward, reverse and neutral were controlled by electrical switches. That configuration was invented almost a hundred years ago because it was physically impossible to build a 55,000 horsepower mechanical transmission. Battery-based hybrid locomotives have come into vogue in the last 20 years for yard switching, and more recently as long-haul engines, and were an obvious extension of the diesel-electric concept.
I used to wonder like the GP about the absence of all-electric-drive hybrids. The reason why hybrid cars like the Prius and the Volt use an electric-mechanical combination transmission is because it is more efficient for the gas engine to power the wheels directly when you're going 70mph, since it's close to peak efficiency there anyways. Then you don't need a larger, more expensive electric motor, and avoid losses in the electric transmission whenever possible. On the scale of a locomotive, this is physically impossible, but in an automobile it is the desired configuration.
The OP isn't entirely incorrect. GE for one is designing locomotives with more sophisticated power systems to increase fuel efficiency. Namely, they are incorporating regenerative braking and a battery system;
http://www.getransportation.com/rail/rail-products/locomotives/hybrid-locomotive.html
Isn't this basically a boxer motor?
Yes, its a boxer, suitable for plugging into any Subaru or flat-engine Porsche, but not many other current vehicle architectures.
Video interview with the EcoMotors designer here,
http://www.autolinedetroit.tv/journal/?p=10723
Well, I hope so! I live 27.27 degrees south, I got plenty of sun and a tin roof that could really use some shadow from panels on top of it. But I've been waiting for years for these to become cheap enough. I don't have $20.000 to spend, and my electricity bill is $100 a month average (3 air conditioners, electric rice cooker or oven, and some electronics here and there make it $200 in summer - 42 degrees celsius is common, 50 is not unheard of).
I read the article and watched the video, and it's certainly interesting. But what I don't understand is why there aren't more 6-stroke engines out there. In the 6-stroke engine, there's one intake/compression cycle, followed by the usual power cycle, followed by another power cycle that gets power by heating air from the surrounding engine heat. Unlike 4-stroke engines that seem to not get better than about 30% energy efficiency, the 6-strokes can get closer to 50%. They're mechanically a bit more complex, but they needn't be less reliable.
So what's holding us back?
That is a good point. I would say that in places like the US, we are nearing the maximum vehicle demand though. We are not there yet, as private jets for long trips are still pretty limited, but for ground based travel, I would be surprised if fuel side effects have even a 5% impact on how much people travel. If a perpetual car engine were to be created tomorrow, I doubt that we would see any significant increase in consumer auto travel.
Of course, your point might still hold true in that if we no longer used petrol in cars, we might see more of it diverted to rocketry, and we might just start traveling to other planets.
Not quite. This engine uses 2 pistons per cylinder. Basically, take a boxer, remove the heads, and link the cylinders into one, with a single spark. Both cylinders get moved simultaneously rather than alternately as a boxer does.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Correct
For those who don’t have a lot of background on engines, review and under stand the “Opposed-piston engine” and keep this concept separate from opposed or “boxer engines” as in the, VW (air-cooled bug), Porsche, GM Corvair, BMW motorcycle, Subaru and others..
This ‘opoc’ engine combines these to architectures into a single engine.
It is kind’a cool, however as pointed out the complexity is not trivial.
A rebuild on a thing like that would be nasty.
Yes opposed piston is an old idea. For a time they were popular for high power density applications, and high efficiency applications (awesome axial flow properties). The reason this old creation fell out of favor is that, for the high-density extreme-efficiency uses fulfilled, there was an all around better replacement: gas turbines.
Gas turbines, however, have their own host of issues which make them unsuitable for all applications. Captone's 30kW microturbine, for example, is itself small, but has a sizable host of systems to support it and deal with the high temperatures, and costs a decent fraction of a million dollars last I checked. It and it's upsized bretheren are found in buses, and the occasional exotic-- see the CMT-380: a car custom built around the sizable & demanding microturbine power plant.
Given the challenges of using gas turbines, EcoMotors opting to dust off and enhance the next best thing makes some sense. There's big opportunity to evolve this already uber efficient two stroke's airflow with modern techniques and tooling. You've pointed out a number of mechanical challenges, but these seem to me considerably more mundane than the challenges of adapting a gas turbine to an every day machine. It may be old tech, but it's considerably better than what powers nearly a billion motorized vehicles on the roads and in the fields today.
I'd say the revival is both well timed and worth pausing to examine. Please feel free to contribute alternative reasons for their having fallen out of favor; would be most interesting to collect more facts or anecdotes.
I have read about this during a couple of previous appearances. It doesn't really improve on ICE efficiency. It is more about packaging and power/weight, which is good. But not revolutionary.
It might be a great Range Extender engine, but I don't see people rushing replace anything with this.
One thing that a gasoline engine, no mater how efficient, will never be able to do is use the output of a nuclear power plant to run. For me, that's one of the biggest reasons that I'd like to see all-electric cars. They could finally move us away from using fossil fuels for transportation and give us even more reasons to promote the safe use of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is something I'd really like to see more of, as long as they don't build the plant or store the spent fuel anywhere near my house. From what I can tell from the political discourse coming out of Nevada, that's a perfect place to put nuclear waste.
While it's a good idea to make gasoline-driven cars as efficient as possible, and I salute these efforts, I worry whenever I see stories like this that it's really about making sure that we never, ever, EVER stop using fossil fuels until the fossil fuel industry can find a better way to drill money out of the Earth.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The reason is because while the electric motor is simple and efficient, the electric to battery to electric conversion process is extremely inefficient.
Yes, because 85% efficiency is just so damn low. So much lower than the 35% you'll get, at best, from any sort of ICE engine in a car. Oh wait.
So in other words you're likely an idiot misquoting studies (no easily verifiable citations, how cute) with no idea what you're talking about. Yawn.
Speaking of removing the drive train, what about removing it altogether? I remember seeing a show where a bus had 4 electric motors - 1 in each wheel - resulting in much less wasted energy than a conventional drive shaft + differential design.
http://www.hybridcars.com/components/michelins-reinvents-wheel-with-motors-25308.html
Ah, very soon my super tanker mobile charging station of tesla coils will be realized.
Vehicles will merely pull along side one of the many banks of tesla coils for a quick charge and all without stopping their vehicles.
Who will charge the rechargers you might ask?
An even larger super tanker platform of tesla coils of course...
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Making H2 from water using solar/wind does not need to be the most efficient method, it lasts as long as the suns fusion reactor.
It's clear that the process will also get better over time. A square meter of earth on a sunny day gets more than a Kw. A couple
of sunny days on an acre of land gets more than a barrel of oils worth of energy. More than 50% of the energy that falls on
desert area typically bounces back into space. The land area of 2 south western states could generate all the energy used
by humans at the moment. We can beam energy from space...
Besides you don't need to use H2 to create electron potential. You can distribute it easily enough, we have it ll over
the place. Getting it live solves a lot of problems. Less storage in vehicles, less mass to store it in vehicles, no
recharge time, no range limits... I ride on electric buses all the time, they climb the steepest hills around here
packed with people.
Electric motors are smaller, lighter and faster than comparable internal combustion engines. No unburned fuel,
no C02 emissions or others that have a negative effect on your living.
We use hydrocarbons because it's more convenient right now. Even when a better solution arrives we will not
change because we already paid for the ICE engines in our cars and want to get the ROI on them. Same
for producing vehicles. Companies want the ROI on plants, people, process. It's clear that we could
build out an electric grid to support EV based transport, it is just not economic quite yet. Vehicles last 50+
years, I see people still driving 60's cars. Even when we start switching it will take 50+ years to see a
major impact. Even then ICE cars will roll on for ages. Jay Leno still drives his steam powered
car on occasion!
The real question is when is it smarter to start changing? In the SF Bay Area the pollution ruins
the hiking during some parts of the summer. That lowers the value of living there, that lowers
the price some people pay for housing... It is a small health issue as well, it takes a long time for
us to get to dealing with activities that kill/damage a very small percentage of people. Also is
it smarter to change first and become the leaders in a new market? Then there is the cost
of buying fuel from overseas and what it does to our freedom here. Do we lower our standard
of living? Less money for health care, education? What about the war's? Would we have cared
at all about Kuwait? How many free people have died for it? Is that smart? What does it
do to our greater wellness? Would you be subject to so many security hassles? Is that
increasing or decreasing your freedom?
i'm in NYC
In NYC? Oh when I lived there there was this super advanced nuclear-electric vehicle over there that goes all over town. It was "subway". Actually it's over over 100 years old, not so new, but still quite efficient
http://www.eia.doe.gov/state/state_energy_profiles.cfm?sid=NY
"Although New York’s total energy consumption is among the highest in the United States, energy intensity and per capita energy consumption are among the lowest, due in part to the region’s widely used mass transportation systems."
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
You think that the EV's are being powered by unicorn tears? No
can you back that up with a few links to studies ?
Studies indicate that unicorns do not exist.
Apologies if I didn't infer the correct nature of your objection to the GP.
France has approximately 31,939 km, or 19,845 miles, of track. The USA has approximately 233,000 miles of track, or over twenty times the track that France has. But the USA is only about 17.7 times the volume of France.
The problem isn't that we haven't put effort into the rail system, the problem is that the continental US is so much larger than France. France is 543,965 sq kilometers; the USA is 9,629,091 square kilometers, or about 17.7 times the volume. By both rail-km and rail-volume, we actually have more track than France.
It just isn't enough -- nine million square kilometers is a huge area to serve, and it is area that developed at a rate that was different than the rate rail expanded. In addition, France's population density is hugely higher than the USA; you have 60 million people, about 110 per sq-km, while we have 300 million, about 31 per sq km (and actually, because we have very high density coasts, that number is way too high for the US interior and way too low for the coasts.)
France and the USA present two entirely different rail problems, and the same strategies can't be used to solve both. It's not practical to set up a rail grid that serves the USA in an equally distributed way -- it wouldn't save money, or fuel - it would lose money and waste fuel.
We would benefit a great deal by moving to dual-track on many routes (the US hiline is one good example... many trains sit and wait for hours in sidings because there is only one track in many locations) and of course, with all that area, hi-speed rail would be lovely - but again, with 17x the area to serve, the amount of funding we're talking about is simply staggering.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"The B--- S--- Ends, When the Green Light's On"
my 1979 VW Dasher Diesel got a standard and reliable 55 MPG, so much so that I stopped calculating when after almost a year of fill ups the mileage was almost always the same. Too bad it shook like a paint mixer and parts literally fell off it...
Not quite.
The locomotive series 'Diesel Electrics' don't use batteries. The diesel simply is a generator to run the electric drive motors. Most long haul trains use this I'm pretty sure as its more efficient than just diesel power.
However, from here: 'Electro-diesels' do exist that have both full electric and diesel operation ability. These are mostly for localized areas where they need to be able to go full electric in limited areas (city centers).
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
a normal two stroke has recirculating air in the combustion chamber. when you exhaust you dump some fuel. when you intake you mix with existing fuel/air. air is coming and going from the same general area.
axial flow is the key to opposing piston. the chamber is shuffling a little forwards and backwards in opposed piston design, exposing intake and exhaust ports at opposite ends of the chamber. since air is moving in a net direction, circulation can be much more tightly controlled. there's huge potential to get air behaving according to design and engineering wishes-- the trick, the reason these guys are spending money and this hasnt taken over already, is that this timing is incredibly difficult and exacting. if done right, you get a two stroke that breathes as well as a four stroke. it's just not easy.
opposed piston's been championed for high efficiency and high power density since the 1950's. this is why. given the tooling we now have at our disposal to understand complex factors like airflow and thermal dynamics, it should be no surprise these things are gonna see a huge resurgence.
Diesel engines are heavy, expensive and already good at handling partial loads. That makes them rather unsuitable for hybrid vehicles. The only reason why locomotives are diesel-electric is that it is reasonably difficult to design a clutch which will survive getting 40 loaded wagons rolling from a stop.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
What I see is: Significant increase in complexity - three piston rods per cylinder, six crankshaft attachments to rods per cylinder pair - plus piston rods on the outside of the engine block.
True, but: no camshafts, no timing belts, no valves.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
The idea is to get away from fossil fuels. A pure hydrogen based engine might satisfy that requirement, but, I have read somewhere that pure hydrogen leaking into the atmosphere is a bad thing too. Sorry, can't provide a link and maybe that's wrong, but if correct then storage of hydrogen could be a big issue. (how do I make a paragraph break here? Do I need to enable javascript or something?) Maybe off topic but, what gets me is that all the talk is about rechargeable batteries in the vehicle. Why not something like aluminum oxide batteries that could be exchanged at the equivalent of a filling station when they run out? The driver wouldn't have to wait around and the spent batteries could be efficiently recharged by specialized equipment for re-use.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
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
Dirt cheap, subsidized fossil fuels have pretty much killed all non-coal economic sources of electricity. Environmentalism is (mostly) a convenient scapegoat. I'd be building nuclear plants too, but they're mostly not competitive with cheap coal, and the current 1970s-era designs are probably /not/ the plants we should be building, at least not if we're serious about building out on a massive scale. It would also be helpful if we agreed on some standardized designs, rather than the hodgepodge that we have today --- this would go hand-in-hand with more regulation and less civil liability for operators.
EVs aren't, can't be the 'only' solution for replacing oil based fuels. But they have their spot, I can say that.
The story of the next 40 years of transportation/energy policy is going to be of fleet electrification, combined with the rollout of more and more non-fossil-fuel based power and huge improvements in efficiency. The grid will contain wind/solar (maybe 25% of total) and a huge amount of nuclear baseload. Uranium/thorium/pebble-bed/reprocessing/breeder technologies, whatever is feasible. All of these things will have to happen together --- they're entirely complementary --- though they may not happen on the same schedule. It's weird how many Slashdot posters (such as the GP poster) act as if these are all somehow competing technologies, and Only. One. Can. Prevail.
I'd like to ask Ecomotors how can by any means a petroleum engine burn less oil than an EV. This is clearly a research heavily biased toward oil companies as EVs can be recharged on fully renewable energy source such as solar panels or wind turbines, something that petroleum engines, no matter how little oil they burn, will never do. We have had petroleum cars for 100 years. That's enough. It's time for a change and we don't need any kind of alternate fuel engine. They are old and dated by now. If we really get engaged in this feat, lithium batteries will get less and less expensive while solar factories will grow larger and in number (not considering even further breakthrough on the way such as solar satellites). Oil is the past, let it be.
It's a two stroke boxer motor with a second set of outboard pistons running opposite to the primary units.
The only real big changes worth noting over existing auto engines - it's a two stroke, and they have it running off a turbo decently.
If you were to make a modern DFI two stroke with their turbo you would see the same compactness and emissions and even FEWER moving parts. The double opposed setup is just flash to distract you from the fact that it's a two stroke.
Now, combine said theoretical DFI motor with Polimotor's research, aka a nearly all plastic motor and you'll see the power density go through the roof. THATs the engine I want.
and the gas powered Mazda 2 is suppose to get 70 mpg using 14:1 compression ratio and direct fuel injection
It appears that the use of the long connecting rods from a common crankshaft will do away with the gear couple crankshafts use by Westinghouse in their natural gas underground storage facilities of 5 decades ago. Those engines, mounted with the cylinders vertical, had the cranks geared together via a long shaft with bevel gears on each end. It was very efficient, with a 6 cylinder model whose pistons were about a foot in diameter, was also a two stroke IIRC, with fixed port timing. It ran at the then unheard of 600 rpm, and developed several thousand horsepower, keeping a 12" natural gas pipeline full, whether it was pumping it into the underground storage dome, or pulling it out during the winter. The most memorable thing I recall about it was its mechanical noise, largely from the the poor mesh of the bevel gears, combined with the ignition as it was essentially a diesel that ran on natural gas. No one allowed in the building without company issued ear muffs that were at least as effective as the 30db Silencio's I wear at the rifle range.
However, go back to those long connecting rods. I see a huge, destroy the engine problem when the resonant frequency of the con rod matches the rpms. That will break the con rods in the middle, as quick or quicker than the now ancient mopar slant 6 engine, and which mopar left the harmonic balance on the design table. This engine was quite capable of goodly amounts of horsepower in a race car, but until a balancer was approved by the racing authorities, the drivers had to be very careful to not let then stand at 7700 rpm for more than a fraction of a second else they coasted to the wall with a 2 or more piece crankshaft.. I can see the same effect in the length of the outside con rods, but I do not have a solution for it either short of switching to a short rod like the center rods, which is attached to a slider that moves in a straight line and reaches on out to the outside pistons long wrist pins. And there goes half the simplicity of the design, right straight into the toilet.
EcoMotors needs to sponsor or provide engines to an endurance racing team. LMPC or LMP1 are probably the best candidate series. The engine has been through lots of prototyping, but it would be proven publicly by endurance racing a highly tuned version. If the engine is as efficient and powerful as they say it is, it will clean up in the Le Mans Prototypes. If it blows up and throws its opposed pistons all over the track every time its out...
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).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Reading comprehension skills lacking?
There will be NO sudden drop-off in the production of oil. It will happen gradually, the price will rise gradually, alternatives will gradually become feasible, and it WILL NOT disrupt lives. This is how all of history has worked, other than asteroids killing dinosaurs.
Infuriate left and right
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
That's pretty terrible. I can get about 26 mpg cruising at 70 mph in my 2011 v8 Mustang.
We definitely need to rid ourselves of the "combustion is bad" mentality which is patently false and really stupid. When we finally get to the point where we can make a hydrocarbon molecule in a 100% carbon-neutral way (either from plants or some solar-powered catalytic process) then I don't see any problems with widespread use of IC engines in many applications. Electricity is nice and all, but simply doesn't cut it in many applications. Batteries just don't hold a candle to a gasoline or diesel molecule. Electric big rigs with batteries certainly aren't practical, and electrified rail can't run everywhere we need to haul stuff. If we had a renewable source of diesel fuel, with the new draconian diesel emissions regs coming into force, the air coming out of a big rig would be cleaner than the air going in, in terms of pollution. That wouldn't be a bad thing at all.
Though the those electro-diesels don't actually have any batteries.
This is true. GE had to create their own molten salt battery (something like 1/2 ton) to store all the kinetic energy an entire train would have.
No, it's the giant microwave antennas on the ground to receive the space-based solar power that will cause problems then. I forgot to mention that in my list.
> 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.
The thing is, you could have the vehicle plugged in at night which would make the
plant generating the electricity lots happier. Less use of the expensive and inefficient
generators used at the peak usage time, more usage for the cheap(ish) and more efficient base load
plants, like nuclear. Night time usage is also cheaper in someplaces.
We will run out of oil at some point in the near future. Using less oil moves this point further into the future. But still at some point it will be gone. The alternative is using bio fuels. However, they reduce the area we use for food production. But we should not do that, as we need the food to feed people. As some fertilizer products depend on oil, the output of the agrarian areas will decrease. And even if we can compensate by using animal based fertilizers, the amount necessary to support all these cars out there with bio fuel is far bigger than the cultivatable area. Lately the corn prices in Mexico went sky high, because a lot of corn was used to produce ethanol for cars.
Second, cars waste a lot of energy while they are considerable heavy 1-2 t and they are used to move (in most cases) one person from A to B. While a person weight is 60-120 kg. So you move approx. 8.33 to 33.33 more matter than necessary. The better solution would be
a) To move jobs and people closer together which enables them to walk or you a bike
b) Use public transport system (which need to be improved in capacity and service quality, at least in some areas)
An additional benefit is, you need less space for traffic. You need less resources to build the transportation system (remember 50% or more of the energy used by a car is used to build it).
Most likely you don't like this scenario. In the end you still have to live with it, because there are no viable alternatives. And don't tell me you want to replace the oil based energy by nuclear power plants. Try to do the math and the think about where you want to build that many power plants.
"oh, the oceans are big so that makes it okay to pollute them with garbage" are idiots"
I'd say rather, that anyone who thinks people these days actually say anything like that are idiots.
Yes it's great to reduce pollution, but as the person who responded to you said you are in a world where everything is a dire emergency when in reality real life is more gradual. The oceans are more polluted than they were but have already started (gradually) reducing pollution, which you can do in a reasonable way without putting a bunch of people out of work.
Again, I never said that.
You never had to. It's implied in everything you say. After all, anyone who doesn't agree with you about pollution MUST want to dump raw pollution into the ocean as fast as possible, and is therefore an idiot. When you call everyone else idiots, how are you not saying you are smarter?
Yeah... it's much more comfortable to live in the now, uncaring.
And another example, people are not as afraid as you and are therefore "uncaring". You are a real piece of work. Sadly that work is a large installation piece with a lot of parts.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It just so happens my grandfather invented an engine that was powered by horse poop, but unfortunately just too late for it to rule the world!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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.
I believe you are correct, and I can correct my statement with a more perfect understanding:
You control wheel torque with the diesel throttle; when you throttle up, the engine gets more fuel and produces more power but the electric system regulates the engine speed to stay at 1500 rpm. Nowadays that is all handled electronically, but back in the day it was an actual mechanical throttle and independent electrical governor that controlled it.
The motors can be installed directly on the bogeys -- you then don't have universal joints to maintain.
"Hub motors" are one idea that doesn't transition well from trains to cars. In terms of efficiency, handling, comfort, and just generally keeping the tires touching the pavement, unsprung weight is bad, and rotating unsprung weight is worse.
Other than that, a serial hybrid with enough battery "cushion" to allow constant-RPM motor operation under normal driving conditions does seem ideal. Especially as it lets you be no longer bound to piston engines. Turbine engines are extremely weight-efficient, can run on anything from biodeisel to alchocol without modification, and have far higher theoretical thermal efficiency possible than pistons. They also suck for direct drive, as they can't change RPMs quickly, but serial hybrids make that problem vanish.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
to produce power and both are horrifically inefficient
an electric engine is CERTAINLY NOT inefficient. In fact, replacing the gearbox of an ICE with an EVT (electric transmission : ICE engine --> electricity --> electric engines at the wheels) INCREASES the fuel efficiency of the car !
http://martinhoeijmakers.nl/publications/hoe2004b.pdf
in fact, generating electricty from oil, and using it in electric cars also is more fuel efficient as the ICE. dumping batteries you say ? Why ? you can SELL them: a broken battery is worth a lot.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
cost ?
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Cents_Per_Kilowatt-Hour
http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/publications/factsheets/factsheet_economy2.pdf
The con-
stancy of wind power costs justifies a relatively
higher cost per kWh compared to the more risky
future costs of conventional power due to volatile
oil, coal and gas prices.
Whatever the truth is : MASSIVE investments in windpower is being done by big energy companies, so it can't THAT expensive methinks.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
indeed you are correct.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
You think that the EV's are being powered by unicorn tears? No. It is coal.
Depends on where you live.
Exactly. I hate the coal argument as it doesn't apply to me. Where I live 80% of the power is hydro electric and the rest is natural gas fired thermal (i.e. no coal).
Sure a large portion of the US is coal fired, but so what? It is easier to control emissions of plants (compared to individual vehicle emissions) and there are plans to move forward with cleaner power sources aren't there? Not going to electric because current power generation in some areas is not clean is a ridiculous argument. Yes it isn't clean now, but it makes a better path for the future. Electric vehicles create motivation for cleaner power plants.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
All true. I just felt going this far in would be getting excessively off topic, and I didn't want to write a multipage manifesto.
I don't read AC A human right
Cost? Excuse me if I don't trust peswiki's cents per kwh figures.
I mean, US nuclear plants are closer to 4.9 cents a kwh, not 12.
The second factsheet linked tells me nothing I don't already know.
Whatever the truth is : MASSIVE investments in windpower is being done by big energy companies, so it can't THAT expensive methinks.
Because they're also getting massive subsidies, up to 50% of the build cost in many cases and often including sweetheart deals for buying the electricity.
Personally, my non-hyrocarbon electricity generation 'mix' tends to be around 20% wind, 20% solar(day peaks), 40% nuclear, 20% 'other' which includes hydro, geothermal, etc...
By preference the Nuke plants would be cogenerating types - desalinating water, producing hydrogen, heating a town, providing industrial heat to produce ethanol or even refine oil sand/shale if we're not completely to using other sources yet. The options are pretty widespread, actually. Plus let's get to reprocessing, building breeders and thorium reactors, plants that can burn up our current nuclear waste safely.
Heck, have a process that you can ramp up/down elegantly and you can use nuclear plants as peakers even more efficiently. The CANDU already has the ability to scale in power production over 50%, so it's not like the ability isn't there, it's just not often used.
I don't read AC A human right
I believe it was Lee Iacoca who once said that "electric cars are the wave of the future,,, and always will be".
,,,the exact same things people are still claiming today about electric cars.
While researching a related subject recently, I looked through a LOT of 75-100+ year old automobile and motorcycle literature--newspaper stories, books and periodicals. There's reports from literally a hundred years ago saying how "electrics are going to become popular very soon" and "recent improvements will lead to breakthrougs in storage efficiencies"
And yet even now, 99.99% of everybody is still driving around in non-electric cars, and those that are driving electrics are either paying drastically higher prices per-mile, or dealing with drastically-lower range issues, or both. Nothing about electric cars has changed, other than the government subsidies you can get now (which is just government bureaucrats throwing YOUR tax money away on another unworkable plan).
I generally support polluting the world less, but the "real soon now" song has been sung about electric cars for over a hundred fucking years . I doubt very much that electric cars are likely to be any significant part of that goal.
I myself have often wondered why road-going vehicles do not use cross-head engines. They are standard practice in large ship engines. These can get nearly double the thermal efficiency of a normal piston engine, and are buildable right now with current materials, and current manufacturing techniques.
~
As you have mentioned trains, they also have from time to time used opposed piston engines. The pistons share a common cylinder and compress the mixture between the two. This involve finding ways to connect two crankshafts. Most of these were two stroke diesels and neither they nor the four stroke diesels were found to have any advantage over more traditional diesel engines. The same idea has been tried for smaller gasoline engines and had little success as well.
All you guys on this thread need to try harder and stomp that accelerator.
If you guys can't get your mileage lower then that you aren't trying.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
>>>Yes, because 85% efficiency is just so damn low. So much lower than the 35% you'll get, at best, from any sort of ICE engine in a car. Oh wait.
You forgot the 60% loss froom coal or CNG to electricity in the central power plant. BTW volkswagen claims 45% efficiency with its diesel ICEs
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Pushrods are part of the valvetrain.
Regarding compression and tension almost all metals have about the same theoretical strength in both modes.
But compression has issues that tension doesn't. Cross sections have to be larger to prevent buckling.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"Error! Grasshopper is disassemble. Reassemble!"
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Pussy foot and you run with no boost, stand on it and you get increased 'effective compression'.
A turbo with an electronically controlled waste gate is a doubly variable compression engine.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
All that proves is that you don't know what the word 'fungible' means.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If you truly own a Porsche (condolences on your last repair bill) and you give a shit about fuel efficiency then you are a moron.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yes, I agree about hub motors. On a train engine (as opposed to a powered car), the bogey can be almost as tall as the chassis. On a car, you want the wheel and moving suspension to be ideally massless.
I also think that you should be able to have a high-RPM gas turbine under the hood, to drive a generator. When you have high RPMs, the torques can be kept small -- thus you can have a very compact generator. On top of that, since the turbine runs at constant speed, the generator can provide a fixed-frequency multiphase high-voltage AC. The electronics that generate DC from such a voltage can be optimized for the very voltage and frequency, thus making them very efficient. I'd think you could even get by with a permanent-magnet (brushless) genset that way -- low torque with low current means that you don't need as high of a magnetic field.
The fact that the turbine can run on a lot of different fuels only adds to the benefits.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Why nuclear power? It is carbon neutral, inexpensive, has a lot of energy generating capability in a small area, and the technology is very mature.
A couple thoughts about the section I bolded...
Carbon neutrality is certainly one advantage to nuclear power, but I think it's far from the best. Carbon dioxide's damage to the earth's biosphere is far from being as well understood as the damage caused by coal power's potpourri of radiation (dumped into the goddamn SKY ), acid rain, particulates, organic mercury (the worst form of mercury), and coal mining (accidents especially). With coal, we don't have to rely on a computer model's prediction of the future to judge the negative externalities.
As for the expense aspect, that's actually a huge problem right now. We need more nuclear plants today, but they're REALLY expensive to build. It's partly because Greenpeace's FUD has ensured that it's hard to secure liability insurance in case of a near-impossible Chernobyl v2.0, but it's mostly because (IIRC) every nuclear power station in the US is of a unique design. Every new nuclear plant requires millions of dollars to draft/review/get approval for blueprints, etc. I don't know what's stopping the NRC from signing off on a few pre-fab designs, it would really cut down on all the red tape for a new reactor. Like you said, nuclear is a mature technology; building more of it should be simple and cheap by now.
The problem with boxer engines isn't so much in mounting them, it's in MAINTAINING them without removing them from the vehicle. At least that's what my long-time mechanic always dreaded -- any problem that requires access to (and removal of parts from) the top end of a normal engine is simply not workable with a Subaru H-6 in-frame, aside from the fuel delivery. I loved the car (when it worked well, not so much in its current state) but the owner of the garage would run and hide (half-jokingly) when he would see me pulling up. After he did the engine swap he said "come and get your car, I'm sick of looking at the damn thing."
From what he described when I did pick up the car, his own oversights led to him placing and removing the replacement engine three times because he couldn't get to some critical spot with it in the car. It probably wouldn't have been so bad if said replacement engine had come complete, but he had to take many of the parts off the blown engine and they didn't always want to match perfectly (the perils of bolting 1989 parts onto a 1991 engine).
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
hybrid is too expensive now for most uses unless you have a lead foot or you live in your car and drive 50,000 miles a year.
What I'm curious about is why I never hear about hybrid engines in articulated lorries. You know, big rig 8mpg pulling along 50 tonnes of cargo type things. They are banned from travelling over 55 or 60 mph even on the 75 mph roads over here in europe, and have massive fuel costs due to the way we tax fuels in the EU. Are there hybrids in these machines these days? I've never heard of them, and they would provide significant fuel savings to an industry where fuel is the single highest cost.
You forgot the 60% loss froom coal or CNG to electricity in the central power plant.
I didn't forget anything, you never said anything about that but solely blamed the charge/discharge efficiency of batteries. Please stop trying to mask your own previous idiotic statements.
Power plants add all sorts of lovely considerations such as how you rate different fuel types. France runs pretty much on nuclear and plenty of other areas run on hydroelectric. There's also geothermal, wind, solar and probably others. In certain colder countries power plants also provide heating to the surrounding area which raises their efficiency to nearly 100%. Newer natural gas power plants get up to 60% efficiency. On the same fuel type a stationary power plant will have higher efficiency and less pollution simply because weight need not be optimized for. In practice the efficiency also depends on when cars are charged since doing so at low demand period could be nearly free up to a point (ie: currently wasted off-peak electricity).
Then there's the costs of refining and transporting diesel fuel which you seem to have no qualms about omitting. Of course then there's the secondary energy costs of needing to create the batteries, future maintenance costs (lower for electric engines but not batteries) and so on and so on. It's an endless game and not really worth playing but I felt like snipping that line of argument before they started.
The capitalistic measure of cost per mile for energy (be it a gallon of diesel or a kwh of electricity) usually puts electric way ahead short of idiotic assumptions (like charging at peak times with tiered electric prices). Which of course makes sense since energy costs are roughly the same at the pump/charger and electric cars get the equivalent of 120+ mpg.
BTW volkswagen claims 45% efficiency with its diesel ICEs
Optimally I'm sure, short of certain hybrids your driving will never be optimal in the eyes of the engine. Like I said 35% seems a nice rough number for a high efficiency diesel in practice, gasoline engines are too abysmally low to even bother considering.
Like the 1960s motorcycle that Sears sold. The Puch Allstate twingle. Two stroke, two pistons, single cylinder. Engine design, like most engine designs, was first tried before 1920.
I sold my Sears, but I ride a Montgomery Wards Riverside 2 stroke.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
http://www.angellabsllc.com/ Gates may be backing the wrong horse- power. :)
subsidies you say ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
"If the nuclear industry cannot have enough faith in its own technology to guarantee full responsibility for their own mishaps, then nuclear energy does not deserve these continued taxpayer subsidies. "
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Last year, the Navy spent $424 per gallon to buy 20,055 gallons of algae-based biofuel — a world record price for fuel
See the article here
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
They would consider superconducting magnets in motors to increase the power for a given size. The efficiency gain to be had is pretty small because electric motors are already very efficient.
I got modded down as redundant, apparently because I did a "MOD PARENT UP" post and the mod saw that the parent was at 5. However, at the time I posted, it was at 2.
Mods who can't appreciate posting times and what they reveal about relative posting order; or who don't understand how quickly things change on slashdot are unqualified to get mod points. I sure hope a meta-mod gets a crack at the parent to this post.
When piston bores are horizontal, they will wear more at the bottom quadrant due to the weight of the pistons and connecting rods.
It's easy: car pool!
With two people in the car, the amount of useful work* is doubled!
* = hauling people around, as opposed to hauling a large heavy metal box around
A fundamental problem about cars and energy efficiency is not about the engine, or how to improve its efficiency with 20% or so, it is about how we construct our societies, roads, public and goods transportation. When we build ourselves into a car centric, there is really isn't that much we can do to reduce our energy consumption.
I'm pretty sure that the volt *is* a series hybrid, or "all-electric-drive hybrid", as you put it.
It's actually more efficient than a typical two stroke because it more fully expands the combustion products after combustion. Still, I wonder how they are dealing with the emissions problems associated with two strokes. Direct injection maybe?
Wrong. It is completely possible to build a fuel factory that pulls co2 out of the air and converts it (along with hydrogen cracked from water) into gasoline. It requires catalysts and high temperatures, but if the price of crude oil rose enough, then it would become profitable to build one of these factories next to a nuclear power plant and churn out gasoline.
My Mitsubishi Colt does what you suggest. When you stop the engine cuts out, and as soon as you put your foot down on the clutch again it starts up. There is some intelligence that avoid stopping the engine when it is cold or the battery is low, or when you are clearly about to make a turn and have the wheels at 45 degrees.
It works very well. Quote a few manufacturers offer it now. There are various names but the most common seems to be "Auto Stop and Go."
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yes. It would be better.
You are welcome on my lawn.
They have been making horizontally opposed/boxer engines for decades. The article fails to distinguish the difference between the opoc and a regular boxer engine.
That whooshing sound is you completely missing the point.
These 'new' numbers aren't really any better than the 30-40 yr old numbers, for cars that tried to optimize fuel economy.
In other words, we haven't progressed much when it comes to engine efficiency. Hence, the reason for TFA.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I thought so too, until I read an actual review of the actual car. It said explicitly that the gas engine can drive the wheels directly at highway speeds.
From Wikipedia:
At speeds between 30 to 70 miles per hour (48 to 110 km/h) and if the battery is depleted, the internal combustion engine may engage (via a clutch) to assist the traction motor to drive the output, improving performance and boosting high-speed efficiency by 10 to 15 percent.
You bring up price-anderson as though you think I don't already know about it. I do.
Fact is, the government has never had to pay out under Price-Anderson. EVERY energy source gets subsidies, the question is how much. Natural gas gets the least amount of subsidization, followed by coal and nuclear. Then comes wind, solar. Sadly enough, 'Clean Coal' gets the most.
Another thing I'll point out is that there are actually plenty of other industries that can have similar levels of harm, it's only for nuclear power that they're properly controlled for.
Bhopal - 4k-15k deaths, 500k injuries, 38k disabilities
Hungarian chemical sludge spill
Coal just keeps giving...
Let's not forget Deepwater Horizon
Airline industry - If we're going to look at the probability levels of a properly built reactor having complete containment failure, we gotta look at airplanes accidentally flying into buildings. As 9/11 has shown us, this can lead to massive loss of life, and lingering illness from chemical pollution released from a burning, collapsing building.
Compared to all this, the worst US nuclear power accident* to date, TMI, statistically killed nobody. Of my listed examples, only the slurry spill didn't kill anybody.
*I'm excluding military and research reactors
I don't read AC A human right
Darn it, hit submit accidentally.
To get to the point - the government gets involved in any disaster of a large enough magnitude, and it doesn't have the greatest record of charging for it. Superfund, for example.
That level, due to price-anderson, is actually a bit higher for nuclear power disasters than it would be for bad chemical spills.
In conclusion, price-anderson isn't even that big of a subsidy, and nuclear power remains one of the safest power sources going.
I don't read AC A human right
I think I would rather have a car with that MYT Engine in it running off Bio,... or hell air even,.... ^_^ http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Massive_Yet_Tiny_(MYT)_Engine#Videos I'm surprised this isn't in anything yet,...
Jesus. *what* 2.7 tonne diesel 4wd?
What the fuck stupid shit are you smoking? Getting the same milage on a car with 50% more weight and a larger aerodynamic profile is a definite improvement, while a car that's actually remotely comparable (Honda Fit) driven correctly can get 45+ mpg - and that doesn't even mention the difference in how the numbers are gotten. You also don't mention the very distinct possibility that people aren't going to sacrifice safety, speed and comfort (and thus weight) to get the 100+ mpg you can get on the superefficient superexpensive superspecialized 25mph experimental machines, instead opting for something they can fit 5 people in comfortably with decent gas mileage.
Hey dumbass, you might want to go look at the actual mileage from back then. They still beat the Honda Fit. 40 years later.
1981 VW Rabbit - 54+ MPG.
http://www.mpgomatic.com/2007/10/08/super-cheap-high-mpg-cars-1978-1981/
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
The thing is, you could have the vehicle plugged in at night which would make the
plant generating the electricity lots happier.
Why do you think I proposed building nukes? Solar isn't going to help that much to charge vehicles at night. Wind is okay, but still more expensive than nuclear.
I don't read AC A human right
Low emissions, safety features, and amenities of the new cars.
God damn, you're totally ignorant. That's for the diesel version (look at page 15 of the pamphlet [linked] this guy pulled info from). As you know, diesel contains a large amount more energy per volume unit. Real mileage: 28 mpg of GAS. That's on a TINY car, whereas the CR-V from earlier is a fucking SUV with 50% more weight, AND tested in sub-optimal conditions, unlike the rabbit. On top of all that, emissions of NOx, SOx, unburnt hydrocarbons, and all sorts of other shit has been lowered substantially, which you don't account for at all.
>>>you never said anything
Yes I did. See my previous reference to ACEEE.org and greenercars.org which examined all those problems.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
No, you didn't. They may have but that's irrelevant since you claimed to be summarizing them.
Your own claimed "summary" of the studies was:
The reason is because while the electric motor is simple and efficient, the electric to battery to electric conversion process is extremely inefficient.
Note that the only thing you mention as being relevant are the batteries. Nothing else.
So you gave a summary and reason which you now admit are flat out wrong. Stop trying to weasel out of your own stupidity, it's not fooling anyone.