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Gas Powered Fuel Cell Could Help EV Range Anxiety
thecarchik writes "While electric-car advocates may avoid the issue, some buyers simply won't choose a plug-in car that can't travel unlimited distances. That's where the Chevy Volt-style range extender comes in, though the Volt adds unlimited range by burning gasoline in a conventional engine to generate electric power. Now, a new type of fuel cell offers the potential for a different kind of range extender, one that removes the enormous practical problem facing hydrogen fuel cells: the lack of a distribution infrastructure to fuel vehicles that require pure hydrogen to feed their fuel cells. Researchers at the University of Maryland have managed to shrink the size and lower the operating temperature of a solid-oxide fuel cell by a factor of 10, meaning it could conceivably produce as much power as a car engine but occupy less space. The advances come from new materials for the solid electrolyte, as well as design changes, and the researchers feel they have further avenues for improvement left to explore."
The problem is that the energy and even automotive manufacturing industry don't want the yoke taken off until the last minute. Why do you think there was such a push for ethanol and hyrdrogen fuel cells? Both of those still need you to fill up at a pump. Electric cars would be able to use a wide variety of energy sources as long as the end result was electric potential. This breaks your dependency on the industry for fuel, which they don't want.
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At first glance, the summary fails to say how this development (which appears to make demand more likely) manages to ease the problems on the supply-side of the hydrogen fuel cell option. What it didn't include is the information that a solid oxide fuel cell can conceivably burn any hydrocarbon fuel stock. TFA mentions gasoline, diesel, natural gas and propane. The idea is that a fuel cell extracts more energy from hydrocarbon fuels than the pitiful 25% claimed for ICE technology. What isn't stated is whether this new fuel cell can handle any of the hydrocarbon fuels without any hardware changes. e.g. pipe in propane or natural gas or supply liquid diesel or gasoline for either gas or liquid based fuelling.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
They say the most Harley owners 'detune' their new bikes just to get the right sound out of the muffler. With the way that things might be going, I wonder if some won't miss their cars making engine sounds, not to mention blind people.
Most noise from a car comes not from the engine, but from the tires (unless you have specifically modified your vehicle to be loud, which is often illegal).
Road noise is the main contributor to the overall loudness of a vehicle.
Most noise from a car comes not from the engine, but from the tires
Someone hasnt been around electric vehicles much. Theyre everywhere in shanghai, and they are substantially quieter than non-electrics (nearly silent).
This is (generally) true - at highway speeds, the vast majority of the sound is either aerodynamic or from the tires impacting the road. Even at 25mph/50kmph, you'll get more than enough sound from that to warn pedestrians.
The problem is at parking lot speeds. You don't get much noise at all just moving at 5mph/10kmph. Even with a gas engine, it's mostly the acceleration that provides the noise, the engine revving up, not the engine just running.
Since the main time pedestrians and cars are maneuvering near each other and have significant risk of collision is in precisely those situations, I think the "electric engines don't make enough noise" problem could actually be a legitimate problem. By no means a showstopper or a product-killer - after all, a car is usually a pretty large object, and I for one tend to notice large objects in motion. The solution could be just a simple "noise generator used when moving below X speed" - that would handle the pedestrian problem, without increasing noise in areas where noise is an issue and pedestrians are not.
Temperature is actually more important than the energy density in this case. At 650C never mind 900C, you'll still have a lot of trouble with heat--material have an unfortunate tendency to expand and warp (or, worse, snap) at that kind of temperature. Thus, you may be able to turn your car on and off only dozens of times before the SOFC breaks down. This is the real reason why SOFC has never been seriously considered for cars--SOFC has always been relatively compact for the amount of energy they produce (except for the apparatus you'd need to get rid of the huge amounts of heat).
Now, 650C is easy, at least if you are using natural gas as feedstock. (Gasoline may be somewhat more difficult, but not impossible.) Other solid oxide fuel cells that are trying to enter the market operate at or near that temperature range. 350C, though--wow. That will be remarkable, and may indeed be able to brings in an era of fuel cell vehicles, but it'll involve whole new set of chemistry, and I won't believe it until I see it.
This is basically how they think the Bloombox fuel cells shown on 60 minutes last year works. Bloom is how start-up in Silicon Valley with prototypes powering several buildings there. Except the Science article says their technology is five times more space-efficient. A 5' by 5" plate could generate 50W to 100W for a portable computer. 10 of these plates could run a military backpack or appliance. 100 could power a car or house. 500 an office building.
Woo, ringtones for your car, that'll be awesome...
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
They say the most Harley owners 'detune' their new bikes just to get the right sound out of the muffler.
Harley engines get the "right" sound out of the muffler because of their unique firing pattern.
The cyclinders do not fire every 180 degrees, instead they fire every 315 and 405 degrees of crankshaft turn.
It's funny how we have electric cars today, but all the technology that'll make them a true replacement for ICE is 5~20 years away.
And internal combustion hasn't really been pushed to its maximum efficiency yet, so who knows how long it'll actually take.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
And apparently you failed to notice that the gasoline cell is only an emergency backup.
I've rented a Volt twice now when traveling, and never had a problem finding a charging station. They're in mall lots, gas stations, next to Walgreens, and in lots of places you would never expect. For someone who lives in an urban or suburban setting, you could go for the life of the car without having to use a drop of gasoline. Plus, they are really nice cars. You get in and you realize how far Chevy has come. I can remember driving a piece of shit Citation back in the 90s and my dad had a Lumina, and they weren't nearly as nice as similarly priced Japanese cars. The Volt is awfully nice in a way that American cars have seldom been.
I'm not ready to buy a Volt because they're still way too expensive. Sort of like the first nice tablets or the first generations of SSD drives or a certain big-name desktop computer with dual Xeon processors. But now you can build dual-Xeon box with a pair of good size SSD drives for less than half the price of those first aluminum-boxed shiny "Pro" desktop computers. And there are capacitive-touch tablets coming out of China with the HD video out and SD slots and Ice Cream Sandwich and all that stuff for about 1/4 the price of those first fancy-pants tablets without SD slots.
It's just a matter of time. The end of fossil fuel dominance is coming, whether or not you like it and whether or not the guy who talks on AM radio says it will never happen. Those oil fields are not refilling themselves and there are more and more smart people thinking in terms of technologies for transportation that do not involve the 200 year-old internal combustion engine. Your squeezing your butt cheeks together is not going to stop progress.
You are welcome on my lawn.
the article is entirely missing the point. range extension doesn't help if the vehicle into which the range extension is placed is massively inefficient. that means that you need to fix the problems associated with standard vehicle designs (box and wedge shapes) in order to get the aerodynamics losses cut by at least 50%, and you need to cut the weight by over 70% (1.5 to 2.0 tonnes down to 350kg) in order to be able to take advantage of hard compound "ECO" tyres, which would otherwise rapidly wear out on a "standard" car. once the aerodynamics are efficient and the weight is low, "range extension" actually provides enough power to run the vehicle pretty much directly. see http://lkcl.net/ev for details.
If they're like the University students around here, they'll step out into moving traffic without looking even if you were driving an F-111 with afterburners on full blast.
ICE can't be pushed anymore without using higher quality fuels. Tell me how much it'll cost to fill your car with methanol. You will be able in increase the compression ratio and add a turbo charger as well to increase the efficiency of your ICE. Its just not practical to use methanol in cars.
My car was designed to use 100 octane petrol that's available in Japan, but in NZ we don't have that. The ECU compensates for this by retarding the timing so it doesn't knock, lowering the efficiency of the engine.
You could switch to diesel and use stupidly high compression ratios and boost pressures. However the higher the boost pressure the larger the turbo, the more the lag. Its always a trade off between efficiency and practicality.
Last I checked, gasoline-powered vehicles don't have an "unlimited" range either. It may be an order of magnitude farther before you have to fill up a gas car than you have to recharge an electric, or somesuch, but that's still far from "unlimited."
Liberty in your lifetime
You've included generation and transport in the EV case, but not with ICE. Factor in the refining and transport of fuel for the ICE and you will have a far differnt story.
You're not comparing apples to apples.
First of all, you're ignoring the amount of energy required to import and refine the gasoline. I've heard estimates as high as 8kWh per gallon for refining. Most of the power plants in the country use coal, which doesn't have an energy intensive refining process.
Secondly, you're ignoring the fact that 40% of electric vehicle owners have solar panels. This negates that pesky coal power plant and its transmission deficiencies.
If you compare the efficiency of the vehicle itself, when you put electricity into an EV, it is 85%+ efficient. If you put gasoline into a car, it is 25% efficient (max). With a gasoline car, no matter what technology comes out, that vehicle will never be more than 25% efficient. With an EV, if you want to have a green car, you can buy solar panels and charge your car that way. Or you can live in an area with wind, solar, geothermal, or nuclear sources (Southern California) and offset pollution that way. Or you can join a program with your electricity provider, and pay a little extra, and get a higher percentage of your electricity from renewable sources.
-Bill
If they could also shrink the cost by a factor of 10 we would have a winner.
It's called "economy of scale".
When they're being built in hundred-thousand lots by automated factories several model years into vehicle production, the design and tooling costs have been largely paid off, and some competitive product is bidding for customers which creates price pressure, they will cost a lot less than the parts in the concept-car prototype or the first model year.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The sad thing is, if you have ever spent any significant time in many parts of the world (basically anywhere outside of The US/Canada and Northern/Western Europe), you would realize that American drivers are EASILY (and sadly) among the upper echelons of the world's drivers when it comes to knowledge and safety.
Try driving for a day among the "licensed" drivers of any country in South America, for example, and you will see what I mean.
This is still significant technology. Solid-oxide fuel cells are on the order of 80%+ efficient. Combined with an electric motor they handily beat any internal combustion engine you might fit in a car. They have less moving parts, they're basically silent to operate. It's all the benefits of hydrocarbon fuel without the downsides (sans CO2, but even that uses less).
Since we're also talking a purely electrical connection, it means we can also think about modularizing the powertrain - i.e. power source and motive force can be effectively isolated, and the power source interchanged. For a move away from fossil fuels that's huge - if people can own vehicles which mean they can switch between short-haul batteries and long-haul hydrocarbon, that's almost a solved problem - since once the economics of batteries become favorable, market-forces will end up with people using them most of the time.
Not to mention, it would mean biofuels go back on the table - the power source of choice for long-haul travel, if short-haul only needs batteries.