Looking To Better Engines Instead of Electric Vehicles 570
hlovy writes "Don Runkle thinks it's engines, not batteries, that will make automobiles cleaner and more efficient. 'We unabashedly say that we have the best solution,' says Runkle, the CEO of Allen Park, MI-based engine developer EcoMotors International. The startup, which brought in $23 million in Series B financing this summer from Menlo Park, CA-based Khosla Ventures and Seattle billionaire Bill Gates, has designed an opposing piston, opposing cylinder engine that uses fewer parts than traditional motors do and generates more power from each stroke of the engine, CEO Runkle says. He says the 'opoc' engine is smaller, lighter, and less expensive than the motors already out there, and a more viable option than switching automobile fleets over to electrical power."
energy density (Score:4, Insightful)
When you can store energy as densely as liquid hydrocarbon, you'll have a successful electric car.
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Is there any method of building hydrocarbons with base compounds and electricity? Maybe we just need synthetic gasoline powered by electricity. Solves nobody's problems, but it's an interesting idea to me.
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You can make H2 from water and electricity, but the conversion efficiency is bad.
You can make H2 from high temp (nuke or solar) cycles for better efficiency.
You need to compress/cool H2 to store it liquid form and that loses efficiency.
You can grow biomass and convert it to liquid hydrocarbons.
There are some methods for converting CO2 to hydrocarbons, but they are usually inefficient.
We are stuck with coal and oil for a few centuries, methinks...
Re:energy density (Score:5, Insightful)
We are stuck with coal and oil for a few centuries, methinks...
50 years max.
It's only a matter of time before we can engineer plants or processes which mimic the photosynthetic process or tweak it to minimize the amount of afterprocessing for biofuels.
We can put jellyfish genes in piglets, make goats produce similar proteins to spiders, eventually we are going to figure out a way to have refinery plants that consist of... plants.
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50 years max.
It's only a matter of time before we can engineer plants or processes which mimic the photosynthetic process or tweak it to minimize the amount of afterprocessing for biofuels.
What makes you think the company licensing the patent is going to allow [alternative] to be produced for less than the price of oil?
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Yes, we can
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer [wikipedia.org]–Tropsch_process
When the USAF tried to get Congress to let them build a plant in Montana it has been blocked by Congress because it doesn't reduce CO2 emissions, however some processes can be near carbon neutral, Henry Waxman won't allow it unless it's carbon negative
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/us-air-force-syntheticfuel-program-in-limbo [ieee.org]
With the House going Republican, I bet the USAF project comes back to life in '11-13
Re:energy density (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? The Reagan administration is sitting on funding and permission for the United States Air Force to go ahead with a program in 2009 and 2010?
Mainly because of a bill passed in 2007 by the Democratic majority that came into Congress following the 2006 elections.
Zombie Reagan has more power than I thought.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/30/air-force-liquid-coal-fuel [guardian.co.uk]
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0109/013009kp1.htm [govexec.com]
"We don't want new sources of energy that are going to make the greenhouse gas problem even worse," House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said in a recent interview.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23811258/ [msn.com]
Re:energy density (Score:4, Informative)
Waxman is out as of tomorrow or whenever the new congress critters get swored in.
Re:energy density (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't a flat limit, for sufficiently cheap power you can compromise on density.
Better engines and hybrids make sense as long as gas remains a viable fuel. At some point in this century it likely will not be a viable fuel unless we perfect synthetic gas cheaply without compromising our farmland.
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We won't have hundreds of years of coal if we use it as a primary transportation fuel.
Re:energy density (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, we may, even using it as primary transportation fuel.
We have 250 years at current rates, including about 50% of our electric generation.
http://www.clean-energy.us/facts/coal.htm [clean-energy.us]
Our coal usage for electric is almost exactly that of our transportation needs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USEnFlow02-quads.gif [wikipedia.org]
So we could switch to nuclear for electric, some plug-in hybrids, coal for liquid fuels and be good to go for hundreds of years. Not even counting our Natural gas reserves.
Re:energy density (Score:4, Insightful)
We have 250 years at current rates, including about 50% of our electric generation.
http://www.clean-energy.us/facts/coal.htm [clean-energy.us] [clean-energy.us]
Emphasis mine.
That's your mistake, and the mistake of many politicians when planning for the future.
Nobody seems to have paid any attention in their maths classes.
Our rate of consumption of practically everything has been increasing exponentially for centuries now. A large part of that is increased population, but increased per-capita usage also contributes. Think about what will happen when everyone in China will want a car!
"Current rates of consumption" doesn't even account for linear growth, let alone exponential.
You'll find that we have less than 50 years of oil left, and when it runs out, we'll likely switch to coal for whatever we used to use oil for. That will increase coal usage massively, on top of the background increase in usage.
Read about the Energy policy of China [wikipedia.org]: "China currently generates around two thirds of its electricity from coal-fired power stations.[15] It is progressing with the construction of 562 new coal-fired plants over the next few years.[21] In June 2007, it was reported that an average of two new plants were being opened every week."
You might assume that "domestic coal usage will remain unchanged", but coal is a global commodity. If the price is driven up by the demand anywhere, it will be traded to maximize profits. Australia, where I live, is building multi-billion dollar docks to increase the amount of coal that can be exported to China. We export $22B AUD/year of coal now, and their demand just keeps going up.
For the love of god, educate yourself (and your representatives) about the implications of exponential growth. There's a great series of videos on Youtube which you must watch, because "at current rates of consumption" is basically deluded. You may as well believe in Santa Claus.
The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See (part 1 of 8) [youtube.com]
Re:energy density (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, let's stall for more time and wait until we're actually in trouble before we do anything! Forget future problems, all that matters is now!
The same sorry mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone makes that same sorry mistake, extrapolating an unfavorable curve to infinity as if problems don't have gradual solutions. Lost of Bruce Sterling et all sf postulated worlds full of junkies, so many that society fell apart. Marxists had their nightmare fantasies, and when the world moved beyond tose conditions, they refused to recognize it, failed to adapt, and killed hundreds of millions to prove it.
The world just doesn't work like that, Hydrocarbons won't vanish overnight. They just get more and more expensive, and as the expense climbs, people come up with solutions.
The English burned up all their wood, then found coal, then found oil, and that is how things work.
It doesn't work by flying spaghetti monsters suddenly turning 90% of people into junkies, or sucking all the oil out of the ground in 5 seconds flat.
The biggest problem the world has is the damned fools that think they, and only they, can see the future, and if the world doesn't start working on their pet solution RIGHT NOW, everything is going to hell in a handbasket.
They refuse to believe that anyone else is smart, let alone smarter, that people have always found solutions, and that emergencies on a global scale just don't pop up out of thin air (except killer asteroids and rogue solar waves).
Give it a rest, smarty pants. Get on with your life. Stop living a daily nightmare, you will just scare yourself to death.
Re:The same sorry mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
"The biggest problem the world has is the damned fools that think they, and only they, can see the future"
I never said anything like that. I was merely implying that people who think "oh, we have plenty of oil" or "oh, the oceans are big so that makes it okay to pollute them with garbage" are idiots. They actually don't have any sense of the future.
"They refuse to believe that anyone else is smart"
Again, I never said that.
"Give it a rest, smarty pants. Get on with your life. Stop living a daily nightmare, you will just scare yourself to death."
Yeah... it's much more comfortable to live in the now, uncaring. If no one worried about the future, there would be no warnings. Why investigate possible harm that a certain action could cause? We should just live in the now! No, oil won't magically vanish, but finding a better solution more quickly instead of procrastinating is preferred.
Re:The same sorry mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
Any decent history of England says that. Of course, the King's forests were preserved, so were the Royal Navy forests, and as firewood got more expensive, less and less was cut down. It never reached total destruction, just as when oil finally becomes really expensive, there will be a lot left when people switch to alternatives. But one of the reasons for the use of coal was because the price of wood rose so high that mining coal became worthwhile.
It's EXACTLY the same situation as those fools who worry about running out of oil. It won't happen overnight, it will simply gradually get more expensive and alternatives will become worthwhile.
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You are assuming that the driving paradigm doesn't change. I used to think the same thing until I realized that the vast manjority of people could do just fine with either a volt style hybrid with ICE backup or simply by using a 100 mile range electric and renting a car for long trips. I drive 70 miles to work 3 days a week and I could still do electric if they get the range up too 150 miles (with overnight charges).
I literally cannot remember the last time I needed to drive father than 150 miles in a singl
Train infrastructure US vs France (Score:5, Insightful)
France has approximately 31,939 km, or 19,845 miles, of track. The USA has approximately 233,000 miles of track, or over twenty times the track that France has. But the USA is only about 17.7 times the volume of France.
The problem isn't that we haven't put effort into the rail system, the problem is that the continental US is so much larger than France. France is 543,965 sq kilometers; the USA is 9,629,091 square kilometers, or about 17.7 times the volume. By both rail-km and rail-volume, we actually have more track than France.
It just isn't enough -- nine million square kilometers is a huge area to serve, and it is area that developed at a rate that was different than the rate rail expanded. In addition, France's population density is hugely higher than the USA; you have 60 million people, about 110 per sq-km, while we have 300 million, about 31 per sq km (and actually, because we have very high density coasts, that number is way too high for the US interior and way too low for the coasts.)
France and the USA present two entirely different rail problems, and the same strategies can't be used to solve both. It's not practical to set up a rail grid that serves the USA in an equally distributed way -- it wouldn't save money, or fuel - it would lose money and waste fuel.
We would benefit a great deal by moving to dual-track on many routes (the US hiline is one good example... many trains sit and wait for hours in sidings because there is only one track in many locations) and of course, with all that area, hi-speed rail would be lovely - but again, with 17x the area to serve, the amount of funding we're talking about is simply staggering.
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When you can store energy as densely as liquid hydrocarbon, you'll have a successful electric car.
Correction: when the energy density times usage efficiency for electricity is comparable to that of a liquid hydrocarbon fuelled car THEN you'll have a successful electric car. Petrol engines are far less efficient at converting the stored energy into mechanical motion, and recapturing that mechanical energy when breaking, than electric motors which is the only reason that electric cars are even thinkable with current technology.
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Not to mention that an electric motor doesn't weight as much as a air/fuel engine, which means a lighter vehicle.
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Nope. Without batteries, electric motors run between 3 to 5 times the power to weight ratio of internal combustion engines. Electrics also provide high torque from 0 RPM, so they start better, and you don't need a transmission. That in turn allows them to more easily put that weight right down in the wheels, which improves the weight distribution of the ve
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These numbers may be approximate for goods, however they are wildly innacurate for passenger journeys. Some little used rail systems actually average worse, in terms of co2 emissions per passenger, than single people in their cars. It all comes down to how many people are using the service - Full planes are better than single people in their cars too.
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The smart way to do it is not to push the metal through the water, but to get the water moving by pumping it around. It'll then carry the barges / vehicles without any particular fanfare. When you pump water continuously from one end of a canal system to the other (which can of course be directly adjacent to one another, and for transport purposes, incorporate locks so as to make the entire system continuous), the entire canal will move continuously. Anything floating on the canal will move as well, no extra charge.
Hey, that's brilliant. Instead of moving a few hundred tons of barge through the water and deal with losses from turbulence around the few tens of meters of barge, move billions of tons of water through a canal, dealing with losses from turbulence along the hundreds of miles of the canal and support plumbing. That should be way more efficient!
Ok, maybe that was a little too snarky. Sorry about that.... Still a dumb idea, but sorry for the over-snarkage.
So (Score:5, Insightful)
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It either works as said or doesn't, and he'll either sell engines or not. That's how markets work.
Re:So (Score:4, Insightful)
He'll either convince some executive MBA somewhere without an engineering degree that it's a visionary future for their company, or he won't. That executive will run off and commit to using it in all of their 201X cars in exchange for an exclusive. That car company will then ship a series of cars that in practice will have only slightly better gas mileage than before, but will also have a fatal flaw that makes the damned cars impossible to use long-term or fix. Committed to the technology and career on the line, the car company in 202X will finally create a solid engine, by which time their reputation will have been sullied. Caught in the great vegetable speculation bubble crash of 202X, they will be bailed out and become property of their home government.
That's how markets work.
Re:So (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget all the government subsidies they surely hope to attract in the process.
In America, that's how markets work.
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Especially since they give little details as to what is so special about their engine.
"Opposing piston, opposing cylinder" is nothing new and is known for being good for improving balance and reducing vibration. See: Porsche Boxster (Flat-4?), Porsche 911 (I think most if not all 911s have a Flat-6), all Subaru engines (Flat-4 or Flat-6, called "H4 and H6" by Subaru to indicate that they are horizontally opposed engines), and nearly all modern piston aircraft engines.
There's nothing fundamentally good abo
Re:So (Score:5, Informative)
"Opposing piston, opposing cylinder" is nothing new and is known for being good for improving balance and reducing vibration. See: Porsche Boxster (Flat-4?), Porsche 911 (I think most if not all 911s have a Flat-6), all Subaru engines (Flat-4 or Flat-6, called "H4 and H6" by Subaru to indicate that they are horizontally opposed engines), and nearly all modern piston aircraft engines.
You're missing half of the picture. The engines you list are all traditional four strokes. This one has an "opposing piston" above each traditional piston, where the valve head should be, moving in opposition to the standard piston (to increase compression, I guess). It's absolutely a different design.
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Link (since you couldn't be bothered): Napier-Deltic Engine [wikipedia.org]
So, by "nothing new here", I assume you mean, "nothing new here except the use of only a single crankshaft which thereby eliminates the complexity of designing, building, implementing and synchonising THREE SEPARATE crankshafts" right?
-AC
Gravity still gets a vote (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So (Score:5, Informative)
If you go to the site he has a bit more info including a graphic rendering of the engine >> EcoMotors International [ecomotors.com]
As I understand it, "traditional" flat engine, or opposing cylinder engine technology uses multiple crankshafts and cylinders and are often based on two-stroke engine technology. Certainly none of the examples I saw or read about in the wikipedia article (Opposed-Piston Engine) seemed less complex, nor efficient. [wikipedia.org]
This engine, uses two cylinders, each containing two opposing pistons, and only a single crankshaft to obtain 4-stroke emissions benefits without the added complexity of synchronising multiple crankshafts. Also, they're proposing that multiple such powerplants could be daisy-chained together to provide additional power when it is required. In theory, 1-4 of these modules connected thusly could give you performance up to that of an 8cy car, but use as few as two cylinders when the extra horse-power isn't necessary (by "turning on" extra modules as necessary, then turning them back off again when it isn't).
In theory at least, that should radically improve the available efficiencies of modern engines without needing to alter the existing fuel-distribution network, and without a loss of available horsepower when such is required. In that light, I would say it does represent "something new" (as opposed to your assertion to the contrary).
-AC
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Yeah but he is claiming this to be the future and it isn't. It's still burning up precious sources that we need to protect for future-use. We have used up all the worlds oil-reserve that took millions of years to make in 150 year. That is insane. Who knows what we can use oil for with future inventions. The future of cars really is in the renewable energy. You only have to look at the Dutch University of Twente. Where they have engines that take you 1000km to a liter fuel. Why? Well the damn thing just runs on solarpower when possible. That is the future. This is just an engine that isn't the most efficient by a long shot. He should have made this engine 40 years ago, when the small savings of oil would have made a difference. In this day and time we have technology that is just years ahead of this engine.
Fine. Halt all R&D on the ICE then. Let's keep chugging along with the fuel consumption we've got now until we reach the utopia of nuclear fusion.
opposing piston, opposing cylinder engine (Score:4, Insightful)
Now if someone would just rear-mount that in a cute little chassis, maybe one that looked kind of like a bug or something...
Re:opposing piston, opposing cylinder engine (Score:5, Funny)
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Thanks, my first Godwin on slashdot!
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I don't think it's part of the official achievements [slashdot.org] but feel free to mark it off on your score card. Good luck getting the coveted +5 Insightful post containing a goatse link though. That one's almost impossible.
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Damn, I don't think I've ever seen an n1 Godwin before!
Re:opposing piston, opposing cylinder engine (Score:5, Informative)
The VW Beetle used a horizontally-opposed engine, which is not the same thing as an opposed-piston engine. In an opposed-piston engine, each cylinder is double-ended, with a piston at each end and no head. A horizontally-opposed engine uses ordinary single-ended cylinders with a head and one piston.
No, I don't know anything about this stuff. I just know how to use Google and Wikipedia.
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No, I don't know anything about this stuff. I just know how to use Google and Wikipedia.
Which commonly results in the most insightful and well constructed arguments around these places! Well played, sir.
opposing PISTON engine (Score:3, Informative)
Now if someone would just rear-mount that in a cute little chassis, maybe one that looked kind of like a bug or something...
What do you mean? Like those cute little minesweepers [wikimedia.org] or cute little locomotives [wikimedia.org] that have been powered by opposing piston [wikimedia.org] engines?
Re:opposing piston, opposing cylinder engine (Score:5, Interesting)
The deal with lower piston speeds is all about momentum. The less momentum a piston has, the less energy is wasted trying to get it to suddenly move in the opposite direction.
Unfortunately, one of the problems with opposed-piston designs is that they really just move the problem of from one spot to another. Sure, your pistons have less momentum, but you end up attaching two of them (the outside pistons) to incredibly long and relatively fragile connecting rods. At that point you either have to limit the amount of power/cylinder you're producing (so you don't break the rod), or you need a big, thick, heavy, super-strong rod to handle high loads (power) and vibrations (rpm) - at which point you've defeated the whole purpose of reducing the rotating mass (or, alternatively, the total mass when you stack 10 of these things together) anyway.
Opposed piston engines are nothing new. In fact they're over 100 years old. And this guy hasn't given us anything radically new that would thrust an opposed-piston design to the forefront of internal combustion.
So to trot out an old meme: Nothing to see here, move along.
history downscaled (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes opposed piston is an old idea. For a time they were popular for high power density applications, and high efficiency applications (awesome axial flow properties). The reason this old creation fell out of favor is that, for the high-density extreme-efficiency uses fulfilled, there was an all around better replacement: gas turbines.
Gas turbines, however, have their own host of issues which make them unsuitable for all applications. Captone's 30kW microturbine, for example, is itself small, but has a si
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Now the 'pushrod' being discussed here is in fact a 'pull'rod. i.e, it's primary load is under *tension* not compression. (
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The problem is buckling. The metal is so flexible that a slight lateral disturbance can cause an axially loaded member to collapse. To prevent this, the member is made much thicker than you would need just to support the compression.
Room for improvement. (Score:5, Informative)
There is still room for improvement of the internal combustion engine, one is variable compression.
However - a very limiting factor is that consumers aren't willing to pay for the technology, especially in the US where gasoline is dead cheap compared to many other places in the world.
Just look at technologies that have been created earlier - the Alvar Engine (variable compression with a small piston that rotates phase-adjusted to the camshaft, and is actually a assymetrical counter-piston engine), Smokey Yunick's Hot Vapor engine (heating the fuel beyond boiling point before injection) etc.
Diesel engines are also one of the more fuel efficient engines around at the moment. Efficiency up to 55%.
But what really consumes fuel in many cases is the stop&go traffic in cities. Even a short term accumulation of energy in a capacitor bank would help to keep that down. And vehicle weight is also an important factor. Aerodynamic drag is of course important, but only at highway speeds. In a city you can do fine with a shoe box.
So the future for cars is probably a combination of solutions.
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It's sort of inherent to the design. The big problem with a (wankel) rotary's emissions is that the combustion chamber is relatively long and flat (think of a really thin banana), which means that the flame front(s) have to travel farther and faster in order to completely burn everything. Since this is easier to do in a cylinder (ie: piston-engine), a rotary tends to put out more unburned and partially combusted gasses - the bad stuff.
That said, you can fix anything by throwing enough money at it. Most rota
Titanium horseshoes (Score:4, Informative)
History repeats itself. What's old is new again.
And why are we beating the dead horse that is ICE engines when we could be advancing other technologies? I wrote in a previous comment how it's very similar to new titanium horseshoes... great, but why?
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I seem to recall opposed pistons a little bit earlier than the 1940's...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radial_engine
Nothing revolutinary? (Score:2, Insightful)
I see a lot of buzzwords, but the few words with some real content in it makes it seem like this is just a two-stroke boxer engine.
More efficient? No shit Sherlock, that's always been the province of the two-stroke. The problem was how to keep the lubricants out of the combustion chamber so that it wouldn't be so damn polluting.
Mart
Re:Nothing revolutinary? (Score:4, Informative)
the few words with some real content in it makes it seem like this is just a two-stroke boxer engine.
You should watch the video linked in the article, it really is not just a 2 stroke. It's an opposed piston/opposed cylinder design - think a regular flat twin, but imagine a second pair of pistons moving where the valve head usually is. You can't easily see it in the picture in the article, but it is a neat idea. If it works, it could be cool. If it works.
Diesel (Score:2)
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VW is already doing this (Score:2)
Slashvertisement (Score:5, Interesting)
Maker of supposedly cleaner engines thinks that cleaner engines is a better idea than electric vehicles. In other news, maker of windmills thinks wind energy is better than solar. Manufacturer of solar cells disagrees. BP thinks they're all full of shit.
Worse, take a look at the submitter's profile - very few posts (though going back a ways) and a whole lot of story submissions pimping some company or other. I'm catching a whiff of an ad campaign here.
Sure, why not (Score:2)
It's perfectly possibly that the future of cheap, clean and geostrategically independent energy passes trough new and improved engines, maybe together with things like biofuels.
Then again it's perfectly possible that electric cars are the way of the future.
Who knows?
No reason to limited ourselves to only one or the other approach though.
That said, this specific gentleman would much rather that more money is invested in "his way" since he stands to make a lot of money if lots of people throw money at it, eve
Doesn't solve the biggest problem (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know the limit of efficiency that this new engine design will deliver, but at any sane value this does not solve our biggest problem here in the United States (and probably other nations as well.)
Everything we do is regulated by oil. Our food distribution runs on diesel, our manufacturing runs on diesel. Our military runs on diesel. Our workforce requires gas to get to work. Every facet of American life is dependent on oil based fuels without which our economy, our military, our industry, our agriculture and our commerce will fail. Even with extreme improvement in our ability to harness these fuels, it is extraordinarily unlikely that we can produce enough fuel to be self-sufficient. In short our national security and our very survival are in the hands of foreign powers.
In the best of circumstances this would be worrying, depending on close allies for your ability to survive is harrowing, but sustainable. We are not in the best of circumstances, The nations that produce the majority of oil are not staunch allies, but nations with populaces that are predominantly anti-US. At any time the structure in these countries could break down and we could find ourselves at war with them. This would be a war that even if we win could destroy us as a nation. If we conserve all our fuel resources for the War effort, which we would have to do if we want to win with conventional weapons, we would find ourselves bereft of fuel and the fuel production infrastructure itself most likely in shambles due to the war. Our way of life would be over just as surely as if we had been conquered by a foreign power.
We need to switch to electric not because it is more efficient (although it is) not because it will create jobs (though it will) not because it can be more environmentally sound (although it could be); we need to switch to electrical power because it keeps our vital infrastructure requirements in our own hands. It is a matter of national security, no nation can prosper if it id dependent on unfriendly nations for its very survival.
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Everything we do is regulated by oil. Our food distribution runs on diesel, our manufacturing runs on diesel. Our military runs on diesel. Our workforce requires gas to get to work. Every facet of American life is dependent on oil based fuels without which our economy, our military, our industry, our agriculture and our commerce will fail. Even with extreme improvement in our ability to harness these fuels, it is extraordinarily unlikely that we can produce enough fuel to be self-sufficient. In short our national security and our very survival are in the hands of foreign powers.
And the US economy was almost brought down by oil two years ago. No wait, that was easy credit, lax enforcement of law, and rent-seeking. Despite the near fundamental role of oil in the US economy, I consider the real weakness of the US to be the increasingly centralized control apparatus for the US economy.
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To make matters worse, we no longer break up companies that are too large. For all of these companies that we bailed out, we
Nice video interview with developer (Score:5, Informative)
Tried to figure out how this thing worked and I found this video here: http://www.engineeringtv.com/video/Opposed-Piston-Opposed-Cylinder [engineeringtv.com]
Some good technical questions and answers, as well as a working illustrative model of the engine.
How bout both? (Score:2)
Why does this become some conservative v liberal thing. Us v them.
For short trips I don't see why I can't leverage the natural gas, nuclear, coal, wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric grid that we have.
For long trips I can use gas(natural or synthetic), natural gas, hydrogen, or whatever makes sense for my region.
I think the battery is largely for energy recapture (braking,idling,etc) and for a quick charge.
As for gas as a fuel source it seems silly to me to keep going to exotic places(mile under water, m
It's just a Bourke engine rebranded (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourke_engine [wikipedia.org]
plus the option of having a hybrid system. The Bourke is the cold fusion of the automotive world. We've been hearing how magical and amazingly efficient it is since it was invented in the 1920s and yet no one has managed to build one that is actually more than slightly better than a normal 4 cycle.
Burning Coal is the problem, not the machine (Score:4, Insightful)
Again, burning fuel is always going to be the less than ideal solution, no matter what the power is used for.
Clean, renewable energy is the way of the future.
Please explain (Score:2)
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Summary (Score:5, Informative)
The article is light on details, but there's details elsewhere.
The OPOC engine is a horizontally opposed two cylinder two-stroke engine. As a cylinder in a two-stroke engine has a power stroke on every revolution instead of every second revolution, this engine has very high power density compared to a four-stroke engine of the same size.
Traditionally, two-stroke engines have had very poor emissions. Since the exhaust and intake strokes are not separate, the intake mixes with the exhaust to some degree. This means that some of the intake fuel goes out the exhaust unburned, and some of the exhaust remains in the cylinder with the intake charge, reducing peak temperature. This engine, however, uses assisted HCCI [wikipedia.org] with a diesel injection system, meaning the fuel is introduced during compression instead of intake, so unburned intake fuel does not cross over to the exhaust. (I'm not clear what the "assisted" part is in the assisted HCCI. Perhaps there's a spark plug that's only used during low-power, lean burn conditions?)
The cylinder pairs are intended to be balanced and stackable, so that multiples can be connected together for higher output. TFA suggests that it might even be stacked with an electric motor for low-speed operation.
I imagine these would be very useful for a hybrid, despite the summary title. Unassisted HCCI engines have a small power range, but this would be perfectly fine for a series hybrid generator motor running at a fixed RPM for charging.
Two stroke diesel engine (Score:5, Interesting)
The only reason IC engines are even competitive with the electric motor is because of the high energy density of the fuel carried on board. If you solve the energy storage problem for the electric motor, there is no way IC engines could compete. Not on efficiency, not on torque, not on emissions, not on noise pollution, nothing. You are held hostage by the fuel tank. Not the IC engine.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The only reason IC engines are even competitive with the electric motor is because of the high energy density of the fuel carried on board. If you solve the energy storage problem for the electric motor, there is no way IC engines could compete. Not on efficiency, not on torque, not on emissions, not on noise pollution, nothing. You are held hostage by the fuel tank. Not the IC engine.
Of course, but that's been the case since the advent of horseless carriages, and shows no signs of changing any time soon ...
Re:why not both? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't this basically a boxer motor? Granted, from the picture, it loosk quite a bit smaller than most boxers, but boxer motors are, as they say, a real bitch to mount.
These have been around for a long time, and would have a number of problems all their own.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not quite. This engine uses 2 pistons per cylinder. Basically, take a boxer, remove the heads, and link the cylinders into one, with a single spark. Both cylinders get moved simultaneously rather than alternately as a boxer does.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Your futurology, like your sig. Does not make sense.
Once you have a suitable storage system (battery) there is no point having the extra complexity and weight of a mechanical engine in the car.
It's down to the batteries. If they become small and light enough to give good range on a car, we will go full electric over the following decades. The economies of scale for fixed electric generation will ensure this.
Re:why not both? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:why not both? (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, very soon my super tanker mobile charging station of tesla coils will be realized.
Vehicles will merely pull along side one of the many banks of tesla coils for a quick charge and all without stopping their vehicles.
Who will charge the rechargers you might ask?
An even larger super tanker platform of tesla coils of course...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Short term, I see engine designs and hybridization (why run a gas engine at a stop light?). I also see E85 coming from other sources than corn, which will slow down the need for overseas dino juice. Better our vehicles be drunkards than carnivores.
Medium term, I see nuclear power allowing for use of thermal depolymerization and technologies to suck CO2 from the air to combine it with water and make crude oil, thus allowing for gasoline to be produced and existing infrastructure kept. Why nuclear power?
Re:why not both? (Score:5, Informative)
Nitpick: railroad serial hybrids don't use battery power storage for propulsion. They use a motor-generator fed from a diesel. The diesel is governed at a constant RPM where it has peak efficiency. The motor-gen set acts as a gearbox and clutch -- all electrically controlled. The motors can be installed directly on the bogeys -- you then don't have universal joints to maintain.
Re:why not both? (Score:5, Insightful)
What you described is a standard diesel-electric engine, which is essentially a diesel engine with an electric transmission. The engine was not always constant RPM; in most models, you actually controlled your speed with the throttle to the gas engine; forward, reverse and neutral were controlled by electrical switches. That configuration was invented almost a hundred years ago because it was physically impossible to build a 55,000 horsepower mechanical transmission. Battery-based hybrid locomotives have come into vogue in the last 20 years for yard switching, and more recently as long-haul engines, and were an obvious extension of the diesel-electric concept.
I used to wonder like the GP about the absence of all-electric-drive hybrids. The reason why hybrid cars like the Prius and the Volt use an electric-mechanical combination transmission is because it is more efficient for the gas engine to power the wheels directly when you're going 70mph, since it's close to peak efficiency there anyways. Then you don't need a larger, more expensive electric motor, and avoid losses in the electric transmission whenever possible. On the scale of a locomotive, this is physically impossible, but in an automobile it is the desired configuration.
Re:why not both? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not in Europe, anyway. Here its typically 750RPM when idling, 1500RPM when applying power. No other speeds are really useable because all the gas flow is in resonant pipes.
In reality, most trucks here are similar too - but there is a slight power band and by having 12 to 24 gears, you can stay in a fairly narrow power band.
Incidentlally, the received wisdom is that you improve MPG 10% for each additional gear you have because of being able to stay in a narrower power band (assuming the power band is narrowed to suit the range of gears as well).
(May not apply to petrol engines) (in my country a "gas" engine burns natural gas, and not petrol).
Re:why not both? (Score:5, Informative)
You mean like previously discussed here? [slashdot.org]
Which was reported here. [cnet.co.uk]
It's an electric vehicle with micro-turbines powering the electric generators if the car travels past the 68 mi single charge limit... or if you want the extra boost to do 0 to 60 mph in 3.4 seconds.
Oh, and it should be capable of accepting multi-fuels, so we (in the US) don't have to wait for the lift on extremely high EtOH import tarrifs while we also subsidize our corn -> EtOH program or wait for industrial research to fund (and patent) biochemical oil reactors (i.e. algae to diesel), or any of the other promises which trivialize the three laws of thermodynamics (enthalpy, entropy, and politics).
Re:why not both? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, hybrids easily get 50-60 mpg at similar speeds though. So do small diesels (those can do even better, in fact).
You do realize these are exactly the circumstances where a hybrid drivetrain actually helps a lot, even compared to small diesel engines?
Re:why not both? (Score:4, Insightful)
hybrid is too expensive now for most uses unless you have a lead foot or you live in your car and drive 50,000 miles a year. my new 2010 CR-V has a real time miles per gallon calculator on the dashboard and i can easily go above 30mpg at 65mph and at 30mph. speed is not that big a deal in mpg ratings. the only time it drops a lot is when i accelerate which is a lot since i'm in NYC and we have a lot of traffic lights.
a lot of the SUV's have hybrid versions because most SUV's are modern versions of muscle cars. they are close to 300hp but with luxury and people buy them for the power of hitting the gas and taking off. the hybrid part helps if city driving with constant stop and go since you can get good acceleration with the engine turned off
Sounds like numbers from the 1982 VW Rabbit...
Re: (Score:2)
go back a bit further, radial engines used on most pre ww2 aircraft.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Having finally found some details, it is quite a bit different from the horizontally opposed approaches of Subaru/Porsche/VW/Textron Lycoming/Continental (the latter two are aircraft engine manufacturers).
However, it doesn't seem "simpler" to me - it appears to require three piston rods per cylinder (one for the inner piston, two for the outer - a single rod for the outer would result in some significant torque on the pistons from having an edge-mounted rod. Also, this means you have crankshaft rods going
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Subaru? A gentleman by the name of Ferdinand Porsche (perhaps you've heard of him) sold/licensed the original Boxer engine design to Subaru.
Re:opposing cylinders? (Score:5, Informative)
Like a VW, Subaru, or BMW bike? This is new?
Ok, they may be taking this to a new level, but this design has been around for quite a while.
No. I thought the same and wondered why it was different from a flat 4 layout. This has two pistons per cylinder, each pushing away from each other. It's also an advanced two-stroke. (I remember in the late 80s and early 90s when all the talk was about how two-strokes were going to be the next big thing.)
You need to watch the linked video [ecomotors.com] to see how it works. It's actually kinda cool. Each pair of opposing cylinders can act as an independent unit, so you can shut one unit down when you need less power. The guy claims significant fuel consumption savings.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What I see is: Significant increase in complexity - three piston rods per cylinder, six crankshaft attachments to rods per cylinder pair - plus piston rods on the outside of the engine block.
Good for small engines, but massive increase in complexity and size for more than one cylinder pair.
Also, much of the claimed advantage of cylinder shutdown is negated by gasoline direct injection (an alternative method to reducing pumping losses at low power levels).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What I see is: Significant increase in complexity - three piston rods per cylinder, six crankshaft attachments to rods per cylinder pair - plus piston rods on the outside of the engine block.
True, but: no camshafts, no timing belts, no valves.
Re: (Score:2)
obviously the solution is to develop plants that convert sunlight into hydrocarbons. Where's a start up that wants funding for that research? Queue up a slashdot advertisement in 3 - 2 - 1
Re:Damnit slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because some of the world's power is generated by coal, doesn't mean it all is. There are plenty of places where renewable sources make up a significant if not a majority of the power on the grid.
Re:Damnit slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
You think that the EV's are being powered by unicorn tears? No. It is coal.
Depends on where you live. Still, ironically environmentalism has pretty much killed all non-coal economic sources of electricity - as nice as it is, solar and wind are still far more expensive than then their baseload counterparts.
I'd be building nuclear plants, but you can get EVs that are 'powered' by solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc...
EVs are one of the reasons I think that 'conservation' isn't going to save us from having to build nuclear power plants. EVs get around 3 miles to the kwh. People tend to drive 12-15k miles a year. That's 4-5k kwh/year. Take a 'standard' 2 car household, that's 8-10k kwh, 667-833kwh a month. Or around 2/3rds the standard electric bill. We could save 1/3rd the electricity we currently use by using energy efficient appliances and turning off the lights and such, only to turn around and double our usage by plugging our cars in.
EVs aren't, can't be the 'only' solution for replacing oil based fuels. But they have their spot, I can say that.
Re: (Score:2)
Compared to what? Got something better for us?
Re:Damnit slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Electricity doesn't only come from coal. In some places, electricity primarily comes from coal, but in other places, it primarily comes from hydro-electricity or other sources. So, the environmental impact of electric vehicles depends on where the electricity comes from, and it's by no means as simple as saying "all electric vehicles effectively burn coal".
2. By concentrating the polluting aspects of energy-production, it is easier to control. Getting millions of cars to upgrade (or even just maintain) their catalytic converters is a non-starter. Upgrading (or properly maintaining) the scrubbers on a single power plant is more feasible. As new technology enables greener power plants, the entire fleet of electric vehicles benefit.
3. Even if electric vehicles currently rely (partially) on CO2-releasing energy sources (e.g. coal), the long-term possibility is to migrate to other kinds of electricity production. Relying on burning fossil-burns locks one into CO2-releasing infrastructure. However, electric cars immediately 'benefit' from switchovers in the energy grid, as, for instance, more solar-panel and wind-farm sources are added to the grid. Using electricity for intermediate energy storage/transmission, allows us to gradually rebuild our infrastructure to be greener, which softens the switching costs.
4. For fair comparisons, one must also include every part of the chain in both cases. For instance it is true that electric vehicles require extensive mining and manufacturing, and incur transmission losses... but of course the use of fossil fuels requires extensive drilling operations (with associated spills, etc.), refining, and requires transportation (pipelines/tankers/gas-trucks). Each of these steps have variable levels of environmental impact. The intention is of course to have the chain with the lowest impact possible. The two chains are not identical in terms of environmental impact.
Yes, there are tradeoffs, such as transmission losses and the environmental impact of mining materials for batteries. But the idea of investing in electric vehicles now, even though they are not perfect, is to migrate towards an infrastructure where our vehicles have a lesser environmental impact. The end state, where instead of having millions of separate combustion engines, we create power using higher-efficiency power plants (including many that do not generate CO2: nuclear, solar, wind, etc.), is a net gain (even taking into account the impact of transmission losses, mining, etc.).
Re:Old Tech (Score:4, Informative)
That was my first though too. "It's just a boxer."
If you watch the little video linked to from the article (and I emphasize little, what is that, 160x120?), they show you it's like a boxer but the cylinder heads (I guess) move in opposition to the pistons. It's a little like having two pistons that would hit each other on the head in the shaft, both tied to the crankshaft.
I'm a little unclear, I don't have sound on my computer so I could only watch the little animation.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So basically you made a two-stroke [wikipedia.org] flat-four. [wikipedia.org]
He didn't. Go back and watch the video. It's not a regular flat 4. It has two pistons per cylinder, each pair of cylinders acts as a unit that can be shut down when energy needs are smaller.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
They're not using the Stirling cycle because Stirling engines are very heavy (and have poor transient performance), and are thus a very poor choice for transportation applications.
They're one of several companies looking at opposed-piston (not simply a flat-four, but two pistons per cylinder) two-stroke engines (Achates Power [achatespower.com] is another significant venture-backed player), because the power-to-weight ratio advantages there are substantial, if issues with lubrication, cooling, and combustion quality can be so