Gas Powered Fuel Cell Could Help EV Range Anxiety 162
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."
Re:Tex Richman won't allow it. (Score:3, Informative)
You presumably failed to notice the part where the fuel cell is likely to be powered by gasoline?
Re:Vroomm, Vroomm a thing of the past? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Tex Richman won't allow it. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Tex Richman won't allow it. (Score:1, Informative)
I call patenting a system that lets you attach a generator to a bike, so you can ride the bike to charge a battery, and then plug the battery into your car to charge your car from the batter.
Tens of kilowatts of energy is hard to generate on a bicycle especially when most of the energy from pedaling has to propel the bike. Even on a stationary bike this would be tough. And have you seen the size/weight of the battery packs electric cars require?! Carrying that on the bike will be FUN.
Added benefit: Cyclists will now drive somewhere else to bike, bike, and drive bike. Infinitely better than them clogging up the streets and ignoring traffic laws because they insist on biking to and from the place they're going to bike at. Or worse, when they decide to make the streets the place they bike at.
While you're at it, maybe you can tell the cyclists a few essential things they don't seem to understand.
1) No man looks good in spandex. Maybe gay men think so, but I'm not a gay man and I really don't want to see this shit. If the cyclist is not a gay man, perhaps they don't want this kind of attention.
2) Riding well below the speed of traffic on highly congested roads during rush-hour is a Darwin Award waiting to happen, and as a motorist I don't want the hazard of swerving around these idiots and towards opposing traffic just to preserve the life of someone who obviously doesn't care if he dies that day, you fucking inconsiderate self-important assholes. What is it about lots of high-speed traffic that makes you want to bike there? Is it so gay men can see your spandex-covered ass hanging up in the air? Did you guys know about these cool things called secondary roads? They avoid most of these problems and are much safer for you. Of course, that might require putting a tiny bit of thought into things and well, if you see how most people are you know why that's too much to ask.
Re:Vroomm, Vroomm a thing of the past? (Score:4, Informative)
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).
Re:Vroomm, Vroomm a thing of the past? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I must be misunderstanding (Score:3, Informative)
There's a common misconception that because an EV puts out no emissions, that it's 100% clean. And that because electric motors are 80%-90% efficient, EVs are 80%-90% efficient.
About 2/3rds of electricity is generated from fossil fuels, burned in power stations operating at about 40% efficiency. So if you can get the efficiency of this gizmo high enough, you could actually exceed the overall efficiency of plug-in EVs. The transition point would be at about 75% efficiency by my back of the envelope calcs. Of course then the question becomes, why not put these in the power plants. (If you're anti-nuclear, about 2/3rds of that remaining 1/3rd comes from nuclear. Only about 1/9th of our electricity comes from renewables. So that transition point shifts down to about 50% efficiency.)
If your fuel source is predominantly biofuel, then that transition point drops even further.
detailed description in Nov 18 Science (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Vroomm, Vroomm a thing of the past? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Tex Richman won't allow it. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
entirely missing the point (Score:5, Informative)
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 [lkcl.net] for details.
Re:Tex Richman won't allow it. (Score:2, Informative)
to extract enough energy, the cyclist would be super buff, and thus roid crazy. i don't want even crazier cyclists on the road.
a simpler solution would be to require anybody who uses public roads to have a limited license (limited in the sense that it covers tested knowledge of road rules but not operation of a motor vehicle).
Sounds like a regular driver's license in the States to me.
Knowledge of signs and traffic laws is just about all they test for. That's why so many idiots brake uphill, on banked curves, don't understand that you steer better when you're not also braking, don't know what "end speed limit" does and doesn't mean, tailgate, can't stay off the median in their SUVs, never heard of engine braking, think four-wheel-drive means they'll never oversteer on ice/snow, and don't understand what the left lane is for... just to name a few off the top of my head.
If they actually required you to know how to effectively handle the vehicle and (maybe using a simulator) to keep calm during emergency maneuvers, to correct without overcorrecting, to read traffic patterns and use foresight... maybe 30% of the people driving today would retain their license. The rest would have a lot of learning to do before being issued one.
They talk a great game about safety but it's a secondary priority. The primary priority is ticket revenue. Getting shitty drivers off the road means fewer people racking up fines. They have no real incentive to do it no matter how many injuries and deaths it would prevent.
It's called "economy of scale" (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Um... (Score:4, Informative)
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."
The point is that a gasoline-powered vehicle can be refilled in a short enough time that it doesn't really matter that the range on a single tank of gas is "only" 400km. If an "alternative" powered vehicle could be refilled in a similar amount of time (and if the infrastructure needed to support that refilling system was widespread) then it could also be considered to have "unlimited" range. Currently pure electric and hydrogen powered vehicles do not have the infrastructure (and for the electric the time-to-refill is generally thought of as being too great.)
Re:Tex Richman won't allow it. (Score:4, Informative)
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.