If any of you have seen Who Killed the Electric Car, you might remember that film’s deeply skeptical take on the fuel cell vehicle.
Fuel cells were, back in the early 2000s, generally believed to be the miracle technology that liberated us from the pollution of the internal combustion engine. Hydrogen and oxygen would be combined, to produce electricity, in something more closely resembling a chemical plant than an engine. The resulting vehicle would be silent, highly efficient, produce pure water from its exhaust, without any greenhouse gases. And in the forefront of automotive fuel cell technology was Ballard Power Systems, the source of much of the actual technology going into the various fuel cell demonstrators around the world.
So what have Ballard being doing lately? selling off most of their automotive fuel cell division, with Daimler and Ford taking over the majority stake, to give themselves a chance to concentrate on products that have a chance to come to market some time soon. Their take on fuel cells in cars?
“Automotive fuel-cell technology development poses tough challenges,” Chief Executive Officer John Sheridan said today on a conference call. A decade ago, he said, automakers expected commercial viability within five years, while their current projection is “still eight to 12 years out in the future.”
Meanwhile, back in the near term the Tesla electric sports car is having teething issues, to say the least. After continual delays caused, apparently, by problems with the gearbox (what can I say, teething issues…), Tesla’s board fired the CEO, Martin Eberhard, who in typical naughties fashion started a blog, in which the second post revealed that the newly-installed CEO has been sacking a large number of senior executives, promptly causing Tesla to threaten legal action to get Eberhard to take down his post. As this guy comments, sometimes this kind of thing happens in startups – or indeed, any business where a project strikes trouble. But, in any case, Tesla’s roadster still remains unshipped to customers.
Tesla and Ballard are quite typical startup technology companies. It’s just that turning ideas into salable products is always harder, costlier, and takes longer to do than what is initially claimed, and a fair proportion won’t work at all. And the same is going to happen with environmentally-friendly technologies right across the spectrum. Furthermore, picking which ones will eventually succeed or not is a mug’s game. Venture capitalists get it wrong all the time. The odds of politicians doing any better are slim.
It seems to me that there was little DC motor control expertise in the company if there was a gearbox problem. Adequate motor control by switching and chopping should reduce the gear possibilities to about two or even one.The usual story with a DC motor is that the speed is controlled by the applied voltage but in this case I’ll bet they have a single battery voltage and are using gear ratios to vary torque and speed (as seen at the output of the gearbox).
It is possible to control a smooth start from a stopped position in an electric vehicle and then to control torque and speed all the way up to a driving speed by appropriate (solid state )switching which takes into account the maximum permissible current drain, and the position of the accelerator pedal.The exact converse should also be true when the car slows under regenerative braking to a standstill.No need for a gearbox or even a clutch.
Put another way, the position of the accelerator pedal should represent a particular speed. If the car has not attained that speed,the motor control should work to increase current to the motor to get there whilst not exceeding the allowable current drain from the battery.If the car is say at cruising speed and the foot is taken off the accelerator the motor drive should work to decelerate the car using the motor as a generator with the maximum permitted charging rate defining the maximum deceleration.
This stuff is all known about so it seems to me that the company had too many auto people and not enough motor control wizards. I think the auto people were the ones who were fired.
Dany, it was a two-speed transmission, apparently, but for some reason they’ve managed to stuff that up. They’re apparently going to put the first cars out with just a single speed, and retrofit the proper gearbox later.
Nothing so clever as to have the motor(s) and gears as part of the wheels then?
Or even using a voltage doubling circuit to dispense with the retrofitting of the second gear?
In the early days of microprocessors there were a lot of complaints about the disappearance of analogue thinking engineers such was the promise of excitement to be had from microprocessor control e.g. for audio processing.
.
Easier to introduce congestion charges to keep cars out the cities and provide decent public transport to move people from carparks around city into the city: trolley buses would make a great public transit system in this role, see http://www.tbus.org.uk/article.htm.
Even if trolley buses use electricity from burning fossil fuels the whole conversion coal>electricity>motive power is a lot more efficient than the IC engine, especially IC engines idling or running slowly in bumper to bumper traffic.
Gee Thomarse, I hope someone in qld main roads is looking at putting those things onto brisbane’s busways. They would be a smashing success!
I think, Robert, that the electric car has suffered from investment split by too many options. There is no one clear optimal process as there is with the petrol engine, so investment has not been stacked (parallel versus serial) for the electric car as it has been for the petrol car. Toyota made a bold move with their Prius by deciding on one technology path and carrying it all the way through using their industrial strength to “make it happen”, and drive supporting technolgical development with solid demand. I would say that there are 2 leading hot spots for electric vehicles. The Toyota led hybride, and the chinese electric bicycle. But equally significant is the lack of future-safe electricity generation capacity. The worlds total new installation CSP capacity is 2 gigawatts per year, at present, and there is no indication that governments or private industry are demanding much more than that. As you will appreciate that amounts to 5/6 of FA. So the electric car is still in the slow lane for a number of reasons.
I, personally, do not feel gloomy for the future, though, as I can see many solutions for the root problems. So I will stick my neck out here and say that my technology group feels that we may have a workable solution for the problems with algal oil and are preparing a patent to cover the innovations. Watch this space.
Having seen the doco a few weeks back, I’m feeling equal parts cynical and hopeful about GM’s recent announcement that they’re working on and are soon to release a wholly electric car. Again.
Yes I don’t think this issue has been fully discussed yet. Even if we quickly get an alternative car, there doesn’t seem to alternatives for all of the other things that we use oil for. What about ships? Imagine the Australian economy if shipping stopped or became prohibitively expensive due to the peak oil effect. What about aeroplanes, trucks and rail, or all that construction equipment that use oil? Finding low powered alternative engines that carry passengers around seems achievable (hiccups excepted) but where is the discussion in relation to the big picture?
I’ve read a bit more of Eberhard’s blog, comments and his comments on comments and I’ve come to the conclusion that the whole project is a wank which concentrates on acceleration and performance rather than producing a practical car.
The giveaway is the reported difference in deceleration for different gears at the same speed which points to an inefficient regenerative braking system.
The car drive FGS is an induction motor which is hard to configure as a generator.
I think a practical electric car will end up being pioneered in places like India where getting from A to B is more important than EV hooning.
Peter Mc I seem to remember New Scientist reporting electric engine ship developments in Britain earlier this month. In any case there is an article from 2002 that talks about electric ship propulsion (although I haven’t read it).
The other tesla like car, also in the fading light catagory, is the lotus zap-x and the lotus obvio.
Electric ship propulsion is BS.
The thing that makes hybrid cars efficient, and the range comparisons of electric cars much better than it would otherwise be, is that lots of energy is wasted accelerating and decelerating cars in traffic, not to mention idling at traffic lights.
Ships – whose engines are very efficient turbo-diesel engines anyway – run at constant throttle for days on end, and thus don’t give that big advantage to hybrids and electrics.
Under such circumstances, no electric ship could possibly be competitive.
Unless fuel cells come down radically in cost (don’t hold your breath) There are only two plausible competitors to fossil fuels for powering shipping – wind (fitting auxiliary sails to conventional ships) and nuclear power.
Thomarse, thank you kindly for that link. I just emailed my Minister for Public transport:
Re making ships greener. How about sailing ships: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7201887.stm
Electric ships? Most submarines are battery electric. The Canberra was diesel electric (I think). It is more likely that ships would be hydrogen powered conventional engines if they need to be green in the medium term, I would expect.
Most submarines are battery electric.
ALL subs (apart froma few remote submersibles etc) are diesel or nuclear. The batteries are the short-term option. But yeah, all subs are hybrids already.
Interestingly, the submarine maker that makes Russian boomers (eg the kursk) is interested in making freight subs. Which makes more sense than you may think – no wave energy problems makes them physically efficient. It’s the problem with pressurising them that’s costly. But they’d only have to go down to 50 metres… And the NW passage would be quite realistic.
BilB: fair point about hydrogen ships, but the fuel tank would have to be massive (and thus reduce cargo space and mass).
Ships are one application where I suspect nuclear power will find a home. But the reactor is going to have to be designed to be sealed and extractable from sunken ships. It is a safer application for them as the reators will not need to be plutonium fueled breeders.
BilB, I’m afraid that’s politically naive. Wont happen. Not saying it’s a terrible idea, just that the first nuclear container ship into the (freshly dredged) Port of Melbourne would be blockaded.
Most certainly, Wilful, and excluded from New Zealand as well. But that would account for a very small share of the shipping traffic. The real no go reality is the risk of pirate hijacking. Bin Ladens favorite wet dream would be a floating nuclear bomb. Not that a ship reactor amounts to an effective bomb, but just conventionally blowing up a reactor core in a major harbour would possibly be seen as some sort of victory.
As for the comments about wind powered container ships, the best that can be achieved is wind assisted. Take a look at the massive size of modern ships.
Wilful: won’t happen any time soon, sure.
But things might look a little different in a couple of decades time.
The two major problems cited with electric vehicles is the short range on a charge and the slowness of the recharging process. However there is already a patented battery working concept in so-called flow batteries, where the charge is held dissolved in an electrolyte fluid. The fluid is stored in a tank, both aboard an electric vehicle and at service stations, just like fuel. To recharge, the driver simply replenishes the electrolyte fluid by way of a rapid exchange at a driveway pump. This is not dissimilar to current petrol dispensing.
The best-known flow battery is the vanadium-redox battery developed in Australia, at the University of New South Wales in the School of Chem Engineering. It was first patented in 1986, I believe.
This battery has a drawback in that it has poor energy-to-volume ratio. The general view is that the VRB is better suited to load-levelling applications on land where the electrolyte storage is not a problem.
But it seems to me that there has been squat-all investment into this extremely promising transport technology. It is promising because it solves the two major issues with the electric-car – recharging time and range, both of which can be dealt with by visiting a servo where the fluid exchange would take about the same time as filling up a tank now.
Why has there been so little investment into the VRB? If there was a willingness to get off a dependendence on petroleum, the US could solve the problem with the VRB in under 5 years. Like the Manhattan Project. The atomic bomb cost a lot to develop. But it wasn’t even the costliest project at the time. The Lend lease and the development of the B29 bomber, for example, actually cost a lot more.
I would be interested to know what is happening to this major breakthrough. It seems to have been buried under a pile of hush money and patent paper.
All this fuss and worry about nothing. Just get us enough of the Spice, my friends, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Hey up, Sir Hank! Never heard of that.
Sound just marvellous, although less-used filling stations would suffer financial hurdles they don’t currently. No pun intended.
Sir Henry, you might want to check out this start-up from the UK. They are developing vanadium redox flow battery technology for mobile vehicular applications, just like you described.
http://www.refueltec.com/
And the same is going to happen with environmentally-friendly technologies right across the spectrum. Furthermore, picking which ones will eventually succeed or not is a mug’s game. Venture capitalists get it wrong all the time. The odds of politicians doing any better are slim.
Big difference between governments funding comprehensive basic research (which they should), and trying to pick specific technological applications of that research (which, by and large, they shouldn’t).
Alex,
Good link. But the date on the press release is 2003, so I doubt that they are still in business. Main problem? No cars to fill. The VRB battery stores 20 watt hours per litre in the original patent. Later development promises 40 watt hours per litre. So at best 1 tonne of fuel (1 cubic metre) will provide 40 kilowatt hours of energy. This is useable for medium range vehicles.
There is nothing to stop a network of Li-ion recharge stations from changing over a pack of discharged Li-ion cells.The pack size would need to be standardised and a reliable system of power connection devised because of the heavy current.
I got the dvd of Who killed the Electric Car out. Very spooky the way GM crushed all the EV1s and threatened lessors with the electric chair if they didn’t give their cars up.
I wonder what sort of lease contract they were on? What if you just sent a cheque to GM Leasing and then hid the car? It would now be worth millions as a collector’s item: if it was working (the one in the auto museum has been disabled) it would be the only working example in the world.
Thanks for the comments on shipping. It seems to me that shipping (while an important issue and one that Australia should invest some development resources towards) is just part of the issue. For example, all that massive construction that occurs everyday, relies on oil. What will happen when the cost of oil makes this (and so many other activities) uneconomical? I guess my over-ridding point is that the discussion needs to be made much wider than the press is presenting at the moment.
Peter Mc, here’s what some people think: http://dieoff.org/
Wilful, that is one dog-ugly website right there.
“Gee Thomarse, I hope someone in qld main roads is looking at putting those things onto brisbane’s busways. They would be a smashing success!”
They used to run on Brisbane streets for years until the late and over-lamented Clem Jones had them removed.
http://www.myweb.net.au/mottram/trolleybus/austb/austb.htm
Hal9000,
I grey up in Tweed Heads and I remember them on visits to Brisbane as being a very plain and ugly light grey colour.
I also remember noticing that the connection thingy on the ones I saw were always coming off and it was the conductor’s job to go outside and reposition it to get everything going again.
Perhaps the reason they were abandonned was that they required excessively precise skills from the driver to prevent this thingy from getting into difficulties too often.
Procedure of loading batteries of an electrical vehicle by Aeolic system
The recharges of batteries, which supplies energy to the electric motor of a vehicle, will be carried out through an Aeolic System composed by the following elements:
-rotor
-generator,
-controller with load
-rectifier
The vehicle, being left over, will always have some air amount whose speed will be directly propertional to the same speed of the vehicle.
The air will enter in the autobody by the embrasures placed in the frontal part of the vehicle, and it will canalized towards the rotores.
The rotores could be one or more and they will be placed inside the auto body in a way not to hinder the advance of the vehicle creating friction.
The Permanent Magnet Generator (PMG) concurs of extracting the maximum
power by the rotor.
The controller with loads serves to prevent the damaging of the batteries.
The generated current will be “alternating current trifase� (AC) and will be converted from the rectifier in “direct current� (DC).
The generator, the controllers electronics, the rectifier and the batteries will be placed into the vehicle.
The direct current, finally, will be canalized, by a power cable , towards the batteries and it will recharge to them.
It will be also possible to load the batteries when the vehicle is stopped.
This is possible because the wind, investing the car from several points, will be put towards a rotor that will create described energy.
Purposes of the plan and advantages:
* to produce energy to cost 0 and 0 emissions, bringing a remarkable
economic, ecological and social advantage.
* the energy produced in march feeds the same march of the vehicle and there is no need to stop for the refueling.
* development of an innovative system based on rotators and generators placed into the autobody.
We are looking for patnership
cav. Salvatore Forzisi
via bezzecca 2
40139 Bologna
tel.(+39) 051 6233600
mobile(+39) 3465048310
http://energy1953.blogspot.com/