From Slashdot:
The NY Times reports that the Chinese government has placed a trade embargo on all exports to Japan of a crucial category of minerals used in products like hybrid cars, wind turbines and guided missiles.
China mines 93 percent of the world’s rare earth minerals, and more than 99 percent of the world’s supply of some of the most prized rare earths, which sell for several hundred dollars a pound.
The embargo comes after a dispute over Japan’s detention of a Chinese fishing trawler captain whose ship collided with two Japanese coast guard vessels as he tried to fish in waters controlled by Japan but long claimed by China.
The Chinese embargo is likely to have immediate repercussions in Washington. The House Committee on Science and Technology is scheduled to review a detailed bill to subsidize the revival of the American rare earths industry and the House Armed Services Committee is scheduled to review the American military dependence on Chinese rare earth elements.”
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Forgot one point.
There are a few states that are pushing into the realm of no gas-taxes. Nope, with hybrids and electrics screwing with the tax structure they want a GPS unit in every car, you will get billed for mileage.
Thus the economic advantage for being efficient will be great decreased!
Chris Edwards says:
September 26, 2010 at 12:12 pm
“It seems to me that politic and crooked money have screwed the equation, the likelyhood is that truck slogging up the hill should not be there anyway, the load should be on rails without hills but the road transport lobby have seen to it that cannot happen so we get a bad transport system. […]”
Rail has 3 problems: Speed, Traffic density, Cost.
Speed: Here in Germany, rail freight reaches an average speed of about 6 kph. Reason is that the tracks are occupied by passenger trains during the day, so freight trains can mostly only travel at night, and your typical cargo wagon will have to change trains a few times, so it will travel for several days.
Traffic density: Railways work with blocks that may be 20 or 40 km or bigger in size, depending on density of signals. In each block only 1 train is allowed. The reason is the huge breaking distance. This results in a low traffic density, and so the available transport capacity is quickly exhausted by bulk goods like steel, coal etc. Your typical lorries freight – food, animals, deliveries, whatever – simply won’t find space anymore.
Cost: The German rail has one employee per km of track. This is an average, of course, it doesn’t mean we have one guy every km standing there watching the tracks 😉 . Maintaining the tracks, the trains, the drivers, office workers, it simply adds up. So if you want to solve the capacity problem by building more tracks, you also need more people.
The problems of slow average freight speed and low traffic density could surely be solved with suitable automation, but it would take a huge investment to introduce such a revamped system on a national basis. Railways are notoriously sluggish with respect to changing anything; very low progress speed. The most frustrating job you can do is being a researcher in advanced railway concepts. Usually after some years of development and testing of a new concept it lands in the bin. The German Transrapid is a great example.
“Diesel is less refined than petrol so must be more efficient to produce ?”
This used to be so, but refineries have optimized their processes so much that the market prizes for Diesel and Gasoline these days are practically identical with respect to the BTU’s you get. IOW, the customer gets the refining for free.
” so what about its energy potential, I was taught in college that the less refined fuels had less potential btu output? ”
I don’t think one can say that in this general way.
From Bernd Felsche on September 25, 2010 at 8:49 am:
One thing I have become singularly impressed by, is the sacrifices that green-minded people will accept compared to what I consider needed for an adequate vehicle, and they will even pay more for the privilege.
I have driven enough different vehicles over the decades to know “ride comfort” primarily begins under your butt and behind your back. Good seats compensate for many issues. I have also taken curves too fast and felt that unsprung mass wanting to lift up against the suspension and fly outwards to initiate a rollover, reducing that effect couldn’t hurt.
However, I fail to see where there would be a great increase. Examining a real wheel drive (the proper comparison since the rear wheels will be powered), I see at the back a differential and rear axles in their housing, and a drive shaft, mounted under the springs. Upon switching to wheel motors, it looks like there should be a net decrease in unsprung mass, certainly no increase. On the front end, under my four wheel drive truck I find similar components as at the rear, thus a similar mass comparison. Wheel motors will allow a transition from beam axle suspensions to all wheels having independent suspension, where applicable depending on vehicle and usage, which reduces unsprung mass.
Also, at the wheels there will be increased spinning mass thus increased gyroscopic stability.
I have seen the transition on cars from steel rims and “normal” tires to larger-diameter lightweight aluminum rims with low profile (aspect ratio) tires. In my real-world driving I encounter bumps, potholes, and road debris including the occasional tree branch or small rock. I don’t think I would trust these new combos to bump against a sidewalk curb without incurring damage, and at the repair shop where I get my vehicles inspected they confirmed they are seeing more rim damage. The market does not seem worried about having a sufficient cushion of air.
Besides having already addressed the “unsprung mass” issue, I will note the “vulnerability” issue is minor. We already design motors that can withstand physical shocks. A weak point would be the shaft between the motor and the flange the wheel is bolted on, there would be flexing. Which is easily addressed by a shaftless design with a rotating hub, and the assembly can use impact-absorbing rubber mounts.
From my experience with large CNC machining equipment, I can assure you the deceleration of regenerative braking is very likely sufficient, there is also dynamic braking. For situations where you will need regenerative braking even after the batteries are fully charged, such as going down a large hill or mountain, there will be a resistor bank that will quickly convert excess energy to heat. Such has been common in industry since before modern inverter technology made converting that energy back into line voltage practical. If it is determined the batteries cannot absorb the full surge from heavy regenerative braking, and simply adding more batteries is decided against, excess can be shunted to the resistor bank.
500°C? That’s well above the melting point range and into the ignition range of most polymers, and above the flash point of brake fluid (reference). High temperature silicone rubber is available that will withstand just over 500° temperatures, Fahrenheit. Given the use of rubber with brake cylinders and calipers as well as flexible brake lines, your number seems high.
You are giving me temperatures purported to exist with conventional braking. Thus they are not applicable when regenerative braking is employed. Industry has employed motors in high ambient temperature conditions before, the technology exists, and the energy generated on braking will be stored or shed elsewhere thus I do not anticipate great temperatures at the wheel motors.
All of which I have now gone over, plus there are the advantages to wheel motors as I previously described which lead to greater efficiency, reduced maintenance costs, and easily-implemented items like traction control, wheel speed varying steering, and any-wheel drive which will increase handling and safety. They will work.
DirkH that is because the m
unions have killed them, before the 1960s most goods coming into London were trans shipped for local delivery. Sure goods need to travel at night but that is simple to sort out. As for speed, trains are so much simpler to organise than roads, a to b should be heaps faster, as for sorting destinations, they do that all the time with pasenger trains where the front goes all the way to one town and the rear is uncoupled for somewhere else. Just because today Germany has sent their system up an evolutionary dead end does not mean it cannot be rectified.
Kadaka:
Examining a real wheel drive (the proper comparison since the rear wheels will be powered), I see at the back a differential and rear axles in their housing, and a drive shaft, mounted under the springs. Upon switching to wheel motors, it looks like there should be a net decrease in unsprung mass, certainly no increase.
Ho, ho.
That is only because you are looking at an American car, which are generally built like a cross between a tractor and a tank.
If you look at any real car, a European car, you will see that they switched to independent suspension five centuries ago – during the reign of Henry VIII, I think. Lotus used to have inboard brakes too, to reduce wheel weight even further.
Add a motor to a European wheel, and you WILL be increasing weight and reducing ride quality. Also, perhaps more importantly, road damage is proportional to unsprung weight, not sprung weight, so you will get more road damage too.
500 oc brakes? Can they get that hot?
You bet.
This is a Mondeo – a family saloon with ‘go-faster’ paintwork. Looks more like 800 oc to me…..
.
Ralph says:
September 26, 2010 at 10:53 am
Paul says: It is a simple fact, obvious to any motorist, that heavily laden lorries are able to accelerate only slowly, and labour going uphill; I have often been stuck behind one that has been forced down to as little as 20mph, when my car would have cruised on up the hill at 50 or 60mph. When a bus or lorry gets outside its designed optimum torque range, its fuel efficiency plummets (and often it belches black smoke too).
“You have never driven a truck, have you ! A car towing a 4 tonne caravan would also be down at 20mph on a hill – and that has nothing to do with fuel efficiency. ”
And you’ve never learned to read, have you? When you do, please read the two sentences immediately before the section you quoted: “An HGV diesel operates over a narrower range of torque than a car engine is required to; it is for this reason that it is more efficient, but has poorer performance. Efficiency and performance are very different things”. Heavy goods vehicles are badly underpowered compared to cars (weight for weight) and restricting the torque for efficiency only makes that problem worse.
The reason people buy diesels in preference to electric vehicles has nothing to with efficiency; it’s all down to performance and capital cost. With technological advance and product development, those margins will gradually erode.
Perhaps in theory lorries with sufficient gears need never go outside their optimum torque range. In practice they often do. You can see and hear it happening. Probably, the drivers don’t like changing gear every few seconds and hang on too long in the wrong gear hoping they won’t have to shift. Even if they did change sequentially and promptly through the gears, there’d still be a net loss of efficiency; when accelerating, you have to over-rev before changing up, to cover the inevitable power gap when you’re not in gear. Especially uphill.
By the way, I’ve pulled a caravan at 50mph up that same hill where the lorries are often falling below 30mph and full brick lorries are sometimes down to 20mph.
I have provided you with a direct physical calculation of the efficiency of your car, based on your own claimed mileage. You can get the drag coefficient and rolling resistance from wiki, or any other convenient source. For a variety of reasons, it does not get anywhere near the theoretical optimal thermodynamic efficiency of a diesel engine.
Ralph says:
September 27, 2010 at 1:05 am
“Add a motor to a European wheel, and you WILL be increasing weight and reducing ride quality. ”
A well-designed hub motor can provide its own suspension; essentially, it is fixed relative to the hub, not the tyre. It is not an unsprung mass.
Actualy the yanks use all independent on some of their trucks now, most of their cars are european too, but you are correct electric motors in the wheels is a victorian idea no good today, another codge up to get it done. Put a profit margin on hybrids and see how many are sold outside hollywood then, another scam where we all pay and the few get something cheap, a common tale in the green world.
Actually, the last time I looked up one of those supposedly scarce minerals, IIRC one needed for advanced batteries for electric cars, I found that claims of China supplying almost all of it were wrong – Australian mines were in significant production and could expand if needed.
PaulB, the motor would multiply the unsprung weight however it is designed you are talking magnets and windings that have to be spun accurately very near eachother, then half the weight of the power cable is there too, this extra load on the suspension needs heavy duty components, a heavy spring and damper, half of both are unsprung, this all adds up to awfull chassis dynamics, an unsafe car in the hands of joe public. The whole electric car thing is a can of worms, there is not the generating capacity outside France and some scandinavian countries to charge the things and there is not the expertise in the motor trade to fix them (as an ex computer engineer who works in the motor trade I feel I can say that) and if the cars were not heavily subsidised by us normal drivers then no one would buy them. I also had connections with Lucas CAV in the 60s and 70s when they experimented with diesel and electric cars and vans, electric they gave up on.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says: It should be mentioned however that those “diesel” locomotives are overwhelmingly diesel-electric, i.e. the gen-set concept.
Yeah, I’m waiting for the ‘gen-set concept’ to show up in long haul trucks. But the major advantage it has is high efficiency at low speed start of motion traction, and that’s not as important for cars and trucks.
Gen-set electric does make sense, even more so with energy storage. Gen-set using diesel for the fuel likely makes even more sense, except for that nagging engine difference where diesel relies on self-combustion under pressure instead of ignition by a spark plug thus a diesel engine is more limited on potential fuel choices than a regular internal combustion engine.
Saw a design goal paper from VW once where their multi year design convergence point was an engine with high enough compression to diesel, but with a spark plug too. Since it’s all fuel direct injection and computer controlled, it would run on any of alcohol, gasoline, and Diesel (or Kerosene). Would love to have one, but haven’t seen it make it out of the lab yet…
USA has Diesel Electric trains because of infrastructure costs for electric rail. On short rails, external electric works; on long lines it’s cheaper to tank up Diesel…
Another part of why the powers that be need to leave the fuel alone and concentrate on tuning energy sources into gasoline, kerosene, and Diesel…
LoneRider says:
– IIRC when a generic diesel is running at stoichiometric mix, it will pump out some smoke, most diesels don’t because they are fed a lean mixture for emissions, which ironically causes them to be less efficient.
Um, Diesels don’t really have a “mix”. It’s a constant air volume compressed so hot that any ratio of fuel, on injection, burns. For low speed you inject very little fuel, for full power, you inject all you can get away with. They are highly efficient even with small demand and low fuel injected. “Smoke” is usually an error of some kind of a fuel injector set to inject more fuel than needed. That used to be done to keep it running cool and at even higher power (burning the H and tossing the C from the fuel) but not any more.
And again, per the notion that truck Diesels are somehow magically different from auto Diesels: No, they are not. Sorry, but just “no”. As I said, you can get the Cummins in a Dodge passenger pickup and it’s the same engine used in larger commercial trucks. Just overpowered for the pickup and barely enough power in the commercial unit, so they put in a zillion gear transmission. And the Mercedes Diesel in my car is the same engine used in Mercedes commercial trucks (modulo some minor peripherals). There are some very new car Diesels with short stroke and high RPM and common rail injectors, but those features are headed for commercial trucks as well. In the 1980’s most passenger cars in the USA that got a Diesel were just the commercial engine stuck in a car. The exception was GM that took a gasoline engine and put Diesel heads on it. POC from day one, shock itself apart, and substantially killed the Diesel Car market in the USA for a generation.
For the modern common rail direct injection automotive Diesels, their efficiency is BETTER than the older designs, not worse,so asserting car Diesels are less efficient than truck Diesels is just wrong. The 30% efficiency number is going to be an old number for gasoline cars, not a Diesel number. THE big difference between cars and trucks is the kW/kilo ratio (or Horsepower / pound). FWIW I also have an old Mercedes 240 D that is heavy (nearly 2 ton) and underpowered and, well, drives just about like a Diesel Truck… but very efficiently. Gets about 32 mpg. My 300TD with a turbo and another cylinder (but otherwise the same engine beefed up for the turbo) gets 22 mpg. NOT due to any loss of efficiency, but due to giving me lots of acceleration to play with and more air drag.
All Diesels prior to the common rail designs were prone to narrow RPM bands as it physically took a long time for the fuel drops to burn. The electronic pulsed high pressure injection of common rail systems finally let them run at higher RPM, and that is true for both cars and trucks, with greater fuel misting to small drops. Cars were able to get by with 4 speeds instead of the 8 or 10 due to having excess power / weight ratios compared to the trucks. Big engine, not so much car. NOT due to any vastly different engine design (until the common rail designs came along).
FWIW, there is now a “Diesel Electric” car being made:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-27/peugeot-s-varin-pitches-diesel-electric-car-in-race-to-catch-toyota-prius.html
Notice that point about “small efficiency gains”. Basically the regenerative braking is about it. The Diesel is already so efficient in all power ranges that you just don’t get much by running it through a loss laden generator / batteries. Note that the Diesel is direct coupled to a drive axle. The electric is just for regenerative braking and perhaps some ‘limp’ low speed maneuvers. (Parking? Traffic jam creeping?)
Bottom line is that it’s darned hard to beat a Diesel with a mechanical drive. Nearly impossible, IMHO. And that is why they dominate so much.
Oh, and rockets are MOTORS, while Diesels are proper engines… 😉 so not comparable…
Chris Edwards says:
September 27, 2010 at 5:13 pm
“PaulB, the motor would multiply the unsprung weight however it is designed you are talking magnets and windings that have to be spun accurately very near eachother, then half the weight of the power cable is there too, this extra load on the suspension needs heavy duty components, a heavy spring and damper, half of both are unsprung, this all adds up to awfull chassis dynamics, an unsafe car in the hands of joe public.”
Not with a well-designed hub motor and appropriate suspension system. You don’t just take the wheel assembly of a conventional internal combustion car and stick an electric motor on it. The motor itself would be part of the sprung weight, the main suspension being between the mainly non-rotating hub and the tyre, and mainly magnetic repulsion between the motor and self-exciting aluminium outer windings (or some similar arrangement). You can get +/-10cm of suspension travel there alone; add another 5cm from the tyre and you’ve got plenty, so, steering apart, the motor can be semi-rigidly attached to the body. Alternatively, if you prefer a close-coupled motor, you can get the whole 15cm in the tyre with a clever compartmented design (which can also reduce rolling resistance at any given pressure). The important point to realise is that when you change the basic technology of a machine, the traditional design compromises will no longer be ideal. You need to rethink the whole thing (maybe not all at once, but eventually).
E.M.Smith says:
September 27, 2010 at 11:33 pm
“And again, per the notion that truck Diesels are somehow magically different from auto Diesels: No, they are not. Sorry, but just “no”. As I said, you can get the Cummins in a Dodge passenger pickup and it’s the same engine used in larger commercial trucks. ”
They are not “magically different”. Cars and heavy goods vehicles are physically different, and their engines are set up very differently, the former for a much wider torque range, the latter usually with many more gears.. A diesel engine suitable for a lorry would be ridiculously large and heavy for an ordinary car, where it would not operate efficiently. A Dodge pickup is not a car. I suspect that have failed to appreciate the difference between heavy goods vehicles and light goods vehicles; diesel engines from the latter have often been put in cars.
“The 30% efficiency number is going to be an old number for gasoline cars, not a Diesel number.”
No, the old number for petrol cars is 20% (at 56mph). Average considerably less. The diesel equivalent would be around 25%. Just do the sums (or see mine above), fuel consumption against drag.
Why some people seem to want to believe in the “magical” efficiency of diesel cars is hard to fathom. Are they so insecure in their anti-Green fanaticism that they can only see the disadvantages of electric vehicles, and have to deny the real advantages? Electric vehicles are more efficient than diesel cars – both overall and in terms of the core thermodynamic cycle for the same primary fuel – though at present they have far higher cost and lower performance. If it were otherwise, we’d be using rows of diesel cars in power stations!
“Oh, and rockets are MOTORS, while Diesels are proper engines… 😉 so not comparable…”
Rocket motors are combustion heat engines, so yes they are comparable. You can even use them to drive a car – but not very efficiently unless you want to travel at 4km/s!