Greenhouse gas emissions

(ii) If you cannot visual (sic) in your minds eye just how simple it is to replace a piston and con-rod powered crankshaft with a similar crankshaft powered by electric motors, then you are going to find it very difficult to persuade anybody that you are electrical engineers.


Well I do not know what you are visualising of course, but you certainly do not need a crankshaft, a straight one would be better, but a motor in each hub and eliminating all the transmission shafts bearings and losses and so on better still.

The problem is that the motor and its controls are  the really easy bit.

You need to power it, and that is where the 25 year campaign will be needed.

More chargers, more street distribution, more HV transmission, more generation, all will have to be accomodated.

Oh, and if you can develop a better battery for us as well, that would be good.

At least motorbike makers are talking about agreeing on a common swap-able battery format, that should make things easier in terms of charging speed.

Mike.

Don't forget that with current technology you are going to need to do a lot of excavation with all the damage that will do too. Portugal is high on the list right now and others will have to follow. Current lithium is not sustainable at all. I'm sure it will be OK for a few years but we will need alternatives pretty quickly. 

Hydrogen is gaining popularity but has its own issues too. I suspect we will Land in some sort of mid ground using a bit of both.

I'm just an Electrical Engineer, my Father was an electrician, his Father was a Motor Mechanic.

(Who could be better qualified for this job?)


My brief is to change the fuel we use in our engines, that's all.


Therefore:

Beast of Burden engine - You feed it, it breaths in and out, its' limbs move (add two wheels = one horse power).

Steam engine - You feed it, it breaths in and out, its' limbs move the wheels directly.

Internal Combustion engine - You feed it, it breaths in and out very fast, better power to weight ratio, cutting edge transmission systems.


"Now change the fuel powering the engine", not "now redesign the bio-mechanics of the Horse"!



And yes:

A crankshaft fed by electric motors is basically just a straight bar with a cog somewhere along its' length. The advantage of which is; it is feasible to shift the location of the electric motors to different positions along the length of the crank every time you pull the clutch in, which means you can effectively emulate the handling characteristics of a 'Flat (inline) 4' and a 'V4' ICE powered Motorbike, on the same lap!

To a bike racer, this is Utopia.


We try thinking of our battery bank in terms of a (large animal) '4 stomach energy storage/breakdown system'. Four different chemical compositions of battery, utilizing our variations in voltage and temperature across the battery bank.


We use motion of front wheel(s)/air flow/kinetic energy for charging on the move.


We kick internal combustion in the butt.

Using electric power is, from and engineering standpoint, far superior. Right now the source of the electricity is the real challenge.  Lithium cells are not very energy dense I'm afraid. It needs 1000kg+ of cells to produce as much energy as 100kg of petrol or 5kg of hydrogen (not precise figures but you get the idea). My current car would need 1000kg of cells for a 350 mile range (big car). Whist the technology will improve it is never going to get to parity. The cost of cells is likely to rise as the raw materials become scarce and the batteries are already more than 35% of the total cost of à battery electric vehicle

The price of cells is currently falling.  That's why you can buy electric vehicles with longer ranges at lower prices than you used to be able to.


Before long, we may have UK battery factories using lithium from Cornwall.  Someone has realised that there's lithium in Cornish granite.  It's not a particularly high grade ore, but there's an awful lot granite in Cornwall.

I would appreciate being given more information on this 'electric engine' . The use of the motion of the front wheels and air flow for charging makes the whole thing sound like a perpetual motion machine. Charging power is surely always going to be a problem. The power transfer at a petrol pump works out at about 10 to 15MW, whereas a plug in system is maybe around one thousandth of that, so that the equivalent of filling a petrol tank takes 1000 times as long. I have been promised that my road is to be recabled  so that future demand from electric vehicle charging can be met. Not sure where the power will come from. We have burnt a lot of coal in the last couple of weeks.

The recharging does take many times longer than filling a tank - some hours instead of 30 seconds to a few minutes often the longest wait is in the queue to pay.,  - The only way to do it that fast electrically, would be battery exchange, which is not being seriously considered for anything bigger than some electric motorbikes at the moment. - though as we can use regeneration for braking, there is less energy needed on a stop-start journey, as you only drain the batteries when you are accelerating and overcoming friction and air resistance. You still need motor power of some tens of KW and you do NOT  get back any that which is  used for prime moving, just the fraction that would have gone on heating brake pads, and wasted idling in traffic jams, but that can be half of it, so is very much  a saving worth having.

Mike,

Not sure that Nero had the right idea!

As an oldie I remember the CEGB and SSEB was heavily into majority coal /Nuclear generation. attending IET CPD talks on this topic gives an idea of how far we have moved, eg on gridwatch.co.uk, as i write this at night, 55% of  generation is from renewables, 22% Nuclear, 15% CCGT, 2% Hydro, 7% Biomass. Coal 0% and Oil 0% also 45 % of 55% renewables was Wind power. There is no such thing as a zero emissions car as mining materials, manufacturing all create emissions and I agree that batteries have their issues. However as York city are showing recharge is likely to move to overnight domestic / Park & Ride 8 hrs + and at work parking, with a variety of slow, normal and rapid charge points to cater for different requirements, Distribution companies are addressing the issues of upgrading supplies to areas without suitable capacity. The problem may be finding a petrol/diesel station in the future?

If we should crack 'perpetual motion' I would predict a sudden increase in the suicide rate among theoretical physicists, therefore for now perhaps we should concentrate on making the battery bank last as long as we can eh?