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Next Big Future reports:
Liquid Piston gets more DARPA funding for 30KW engine 30 times smaller than todays engines
DARPA has awarded LiquidPiston an additional $2.5 million to continue development of its 30kW X4 rotary diesel engine prototype, bringing DARPA's total funding of the engine technology to $6 million.
When development of the fully packaged engine is complete, the 30kW X4 engine is expected to weigh just 30lbs and fit into a 10" box, while achieving 45% brake thermal efficiency – approximately an order of magnitude smaller and lighter than traditional piston diesel engines, and also 30% more efficient. The efficient, lightweight, and powerful rotary Diesel/JP-8 X4 engine offers a disruptive power solution for direct as well as hybrid electric propulsion and power generation.
Seems we get a story about a wonderous alt-energy breakthrough every week that never pans out, can the humble Diesel engine be reinvented to become the "next big thing?"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday July 05 2018, @05:01PM (40 children)
The innovation is great. The fuel source is still finite and getting continuously more difficult to find. The fuel can only become more expensive. The combustion harms the environment.
Is Diesel even more harmful to the environment or to human health?
I'm not saying they're not, but maybe DARPA should be looking for innovations in batteries and motors? Oh, wait. Trump. Nevermind.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 05 2018, @05:16PM
Bio-diesel is a thing and should be feasible forever. Just use hydroponics so you don't destroy the current agricultural land.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday July 05 2018, @05:16PM
DARPA using AI to find better chemistry for batteries and bombs [nextbigfuture.com] (2 days ago)
Take deep breaths.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Hartree on Thursday July 05 2018, @05:20PM (14 children)
The chemistry department I work for is doing lots of research for DOD on improved batteries and the EE department here at the same university is doing it for motors.
The military is (and has long been) highly driven toward this because every gallon of fuel you don't use is one you don't have to source, store and deliver to whatever remote area you're operating in.
Mankind will be running internal combustion engines for a long time yet no matter what else happens so investigating better ones seems a good idea to me.
(Score: 4, Informative) by mcgrew on Thursday July 05 2018, @06:13PM (13 children)
Mankind will be running internal combustion engines for a long time yet no matter what else happens
That depends on your definition of "a long time." If ten years is a long time (it's a really long time when you're 20), then yes, they'll be around for a long time. But I'd bet in twenty years you'd be hard pressed to buy a new vehicle that isn't electric.
Trucks especially, because of an electric motor's superior torque. In fact, railroad trains are electric using electricity from an on-board diesel generator, because no IC engine has anywhere near enough torque to haul all that weight. Electricity is better in almost every way.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 05 2018, @06:17PM (5 children)
I'd be willing to bet that the military is one of the last groups to give up their fossil fuels. Sure, they'll have alternatives, but if the hydrocarbons make for more effective logistics and battlefield effectiveness, they won't be giving it up just because crude sells for $1000/bbl.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday July 06 2018, @12:49AM (4 children)
Diesel electric? For the same reason as trains, tanks surely are better to run on diesel electric (maybe they already do?). And presumably trucks etc will just follow commercial.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 06 2018, @01:30AM
They started subs with Diesel electric in WWII, I'm sure if it was "better" they'd be using it by now.
Me, personally, I'd rather not be locked inside an armored tin can with a giant lithium ion battery while people shoot hot stuff at the can.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday July 06 2018, @04:13AM (2 children)
Whoa! 30 fucking kilowatts?! Man, that's a lot of power. Hey, wait a minute...
Wah-wah-waaaaaahhhhhh!
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday July 06 2018, @08:50AM
Not sure whether you meant to reply to my comment, but I found a better reason for tanks to use direct transmission (rather than electric generator) - that is that tanks have a clutch. I know nothing, so some cuttypastey from wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_locomotive [wikipedia.org]
> As opposed to steam and electric engines, internal combustion engines work efficiently only within
> a limited range of turning frequencies. In light vehicles, this could be overcome by a clutch. In heavy
> railway vehicles, mechanical transmission never worked well or wore out too soon.
and
> In a diesel–electric locomotive, the diesel engine drives either an electrical DC generator (generally,
> less than 3,000 horsepower (2,200 kW) net for traction)
Compared with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_2 [wikipedia.org]
> 1200 bhp (895 kW)
> Gearbox: David Brown Santasalo TN54E epicyclical transmission (6 fwd, 2 rev.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 06 2018, @04:41PM
Without knowing what engines are 30 times the size (or what is included in the 10" box: cooling system? fuel tank? starting system?), it's hard to say.
I'd assume they're talking about car engines, so since few of those are anywhere close to 40hp * 30 = 1200 hp, that still seems pretty impressive, no?
Or, depending which parts need to "fit into a 10" box", comparable-sized engines today would mostly be 10hp lawn-mower engines.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 05 2018, @07:49PM
Except for that storage thing... and, while you can transmit it "conveniently" on metal wires, wires aren't as efficient as tankers either. Then there's the whole "deadly if you touch it" thing.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by jmorris on Thursday July 05 2018, @08:11PM (3 children)
Eh? Trains ARE run on diesel, you said so yourself. You are simply ignorant of the theory of operation of a diesel electric locomotive, they use the electric drive as a more efficient TRANSMISSION, not as the primary motive force. It turns out that, as you note, locomotives require a lot of low end torque to start moving and that a mechanical transmission to accomplish that conversion was a lot bigger, heavier, more expensive, had higher insertion loss and higher maintenance costs than a simple conversion to electricity driving an electric motor. But the source of the motive power is still diesel fuel, there are no batteries aboard a locomotive beyond a small one to crank the engine.
And the cost to move a ton of cargo by train is so low that it is doubtful any competitor is going to displace the sunk costs of the existing rolling stock before it is all retired at end of life, and they are commissioning new locomotives now so they will be rolling for a very long time.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Friday July 06 2018, @04:59AM
The counterpoint to that, of course, it what happened to steam. Once the tech behind diesel had matured, the railroads saw the advantage and all converted to diesel-electric almost overnight. A lot of relatively new steam engines ended up hitting the scrap heap because no one wanted them.
That's not to say that we will get a repeat, but the railroads are going to do the math and do what makes the most sense.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Saturday July 07 2018, @12:55AM (1 child)
Hmm, you know, that makes me think of a great application for such comparatively tiny generators - hybrid electric cars.
Efficiency would be a consideration, but if you gave a car just enough expensive batteries to handle daily driving (20 miles? 40?), along with a gas tank and cheap generator for those longer road trips you could have a real winner on your hands. Google suggests a Tesla cruising at highway speeds averages about 16kW, so this could easily be recharging the battery on the road almost as fast as it would otherwise deplete - throw a "recharge" toggle switch on the dash and let the driver decide when to consume gas. Plugging in is cheaper, so most people would do it when they could, but you'd always have serious power in your back pocket whenever you need it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @03:23AM
Or, you know, you could buy a Chevy Volt which already does this (plug-in hybrid). I think there is a similar Prius model also.
(Score: 2) by mobydisk on Thursday July 05 2018, @10:13PM (1 child)
Diesel generators are IC engines.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 18 2018, @05:08PM
Yes, but not enough torque to pull a train. The diesel engine runs a generator that powers electric motors.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday July 05 2018, @05:27PM (7 children)
> The fuel source is still finite and getting continuously more difficult to find.
With a finite and shrinking fuel source, increasing efficiency is a good thing, no?
> maybe DARPA should be looking for innovations in batteries and motors?
Arpa-E has put piles of money into those technologies as well. e.g. partnering with MIT on grid-scale batteries [energy.gov].
We've made fantastic advances in battery technology, and I sincerely hope they continue. That said, there is a demand for portable power systems today that batteries cannot match yet. It's down to energy density. Diesel is 38-48 MJ/kilo, LiIon is 1.8 MJ/kilo. Even with the terrible efficiencies of combustion and amazing efficiency of electrics there is still a big gap there. If I need a power supply I can trust to overwinter in the Antarctic today, it's going to be Diesel.
Bias disclosure: I've worked on a bunch of diesel trucks and owned one. I prefer diesel to gas, but hate the smell of both. Also, I use electricity and am actively trying to purchase an EV.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 05 2018, @07:53PM (4 children)
I never understood people who designed, built, or purchased live-aboard vessels with gasoline power. If I'm going to sleep on a bomb, I at least want it to be difficult to ignite (like diesel).
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday July 06 2018, @04:10AM (3 children)
Well, you're still pretty safe in craft like airplanes in which the wings are fuel tanks: Fuel tanks are flooded with nitrogen, so even if some magical spark somehow ended up in there, the fuel wouldn't ignite. You got a safe fuel storage system and everything else is just goddamn peachy, as the energy density of hydrocarbon fuel leaves room for a lot more leisure.
At this point I'd be more afraid of living on top of a LiION system that can experience nasty toxic fire at a relatively low barrier for catastrophic temparature runaways.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 06 2018, @11:11AM (2 children)
Whose fuel tanks? Where does this oxygen free nitrogen come from? The stuff I'm surrounded by all day long is ~20% oxygen, which is plenty to spark up with gasoline vapor and go boom, whereas diesel needs higher than atmospheric pressure to sustain an explosive flamefront.
For me the distinction is: sleeping. While I'm on a small plane, or in a car, there's a good chance to notice that something is wrong, and the whole trip usually lasts less than an hour (o.k. commercial flights go longer, but... they're powered by basically kerosene which is closer to diesel again - which: I've actually flown a 3+ hour trip watching fuel spray out from a crack in the wing skin, in the air it was just a wet streak, but after we landed great splashes of clear liquid were coming out as the wing bounced up and down while we taxied to the gate. For that matter, I used to live under the MIA climbout pattern and once in awhile we'd get jet-fuel rain from a passing plane, not every day, but probably once every couple of years - enough to keep brown spots on the leaves that faced the sky.
So, now, picture a liveaboard boat. What's the maintenance schedule like? I don't see any N2 systems covering the fuel tanks on any boats I've ever considered purchasing. Then there's the opportunity for leaky fittings, a house worth of electrical not-so-greatness, and the whole: 8 hours unconscious trusting this thing night after night. Clumsy evac routes, most of which put you swimming on water that's most likely going to have a skim-coat of fuel if the shit recently hit the fan...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday July 06 2018, @10:22PM (1 child)
There are systems specifically designed to flood the unoccupied regions of fuel tanks with pure nitrogen rather than standard air. Those systems may not be in all aircraft, but they are in larger ones.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 06 2018, @10:50PM
And, I'm cool with flying in smaller, gasoline powered, aircraft for the aforementioned reasons, even if their wings may go boom when something unfortunate happens. I also think that gas powered speedboats are fun, lots of fun, and not any more scary than gas powered cars.
I'm just not cool with the idea of sleeping on a bomb with such a low ignition threshold, especially in a marine environment with all the attendant corrosion, mechanical stresses, etc. Especially when diesel is such a readily available alternative.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 05 2018, @09:03PM
There are hundreds for sale on craigslist. Some for under $2000. Just do it.
(Score: 4, Informative) by mobydisk on Thursday July 05 2018, @10:15PM
Not according to Jevon's Paradox [wikipedia.org] which observes that greater efficiency increases consumption, rather than decreases it. Interesting, yah?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Unixnut on Thursday July 05 2018, @05:35PM (8 children)
> The innovation is great.
Agreed.
> The fuel source is still finite and getting continuously more difficult to find.
Nope. Diesel originally designed his engine to run on peanut oil, it will run on pretty much anything that can be sprayed into a fine mist and will combust at the right temperature. Just happens that distilled petroleum is the cheapest of the lot (even with all the drilling/extraction/transport cost, and punitive taxes put on it).
For a long time round my area, people were filing their diesel cars with old cooking oil, as it used to be so unwanted that the local chip shops would have to pay people to get rid of it (so having people willing to take it away for free was quite a change for them).
> The fuel can only become more expensive.
Nope, again, it will level out with supply/demand.
> The combustion harms the environment.
There is an issue of particulate matter which is specific to Diesels. That has been solved with particulate filters. Another issue is NOx emissions, which is harder to deal with, the issue being the more lean/efficient your burn, the more NOx emissions. Current best solution is "adblue", a marketing name for urea and pure h2o (basically, piss and water), which deals with those emissions.
You are then left with CO2 emissions, but I don't consider that a problem as such. More a byproduct of existence (and everything we do produces CO2 at some point, even breathing).
> I'm not saying they're not, but maybe DARPA should be looking for innovations in batteries and motors? Oh, wait. Trump. Nevermind.
Meh, batteries will never reach the energy density of chemical fuels, because the energy is stored on a molecular level , which will always be more dense than batteries.
Perhaps if we really invest a lot of money in nanoproduction, etc... we may be able to reach the density of chemical fuels, but then you spent a lot of time and effort to reach something you already had, but with the downsides of charging time, etc...
Personally, for me the whole "battery electric" concept is one big malinvestment. Electric cars came into being the same time as IC cars did (in fact I think a bit earlier), so the tech is about as old as IC engines, yet 100+ years later, it still is nowhere near as good as IC. Electric motors are good, and very efficient, but the inefficiency is in the whole system, including generation losses, transmission losses, charging losses, battery losses, controller/electronic losses, etc... means overall you are not that much more efficient.
For me it would make more sense to work on developing technology to generate biofuel, people have been working on using sunlight and carbon to trap energy in liquid fuels, that can be used in existing engines or put to use with electric drive trains. Once the fuel cycle is closed-carbon, there is no problem with increasing CO2 output levels.
Not sure why you brought Trump into it (or politics at all), DARPA (and indeed every other army) runs on Diesel, and will do so for a very very long time (because of reasons I stated above), so it makes sense for them to work on increasing efficiency of engines.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Immerman on Thursday July 05 2018, @06:01PM (7 children)
CO2 itself isn't a problem - as you say, even breathing generates CO2.
The problem is where you source your carbon - if you're burning alcohol, cooking oil, food (in the case of breathing), etc. then you're just pushing CO2 around the ecological carbon cycle, which is no big deal - human emissions are a drop in the bucket there, and every ounce of CO2 you release comes from an ounce of CO2 removed from the atmosphere by the growing the plants your fuel originally came from.
If however you're burning fossil fuels then you're partaking in the geological carbon cycle, which is normally far, far slower - to the point that human use dominates the cycle, and causes a large net transfer of carbon from geologically sequestered sources into the atmosphere, and thence the ecological carbon cycle. And unfortunately, the ecological cycle has proven incapable of sequestering carbon as quickly as we're releasing it, so that it's steadily building up in the environment and causing global warming, ocean acidification, etc.
The fact that we're releasing geologic carbon into the atmosphere faster than it's accumulating is pretty solid evidence that our own activities are responsible - if you have several streams flowing into and out of a pond, including your garden hose, and the pond is filling at a rate slower your garden hose is adding water, then you know that your garden hose is tipping the balance, and the water level would be dropping without your contribution.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday July 05 2018, @07:05PM (6 children)
No, I fully agree with you. I call it the "open carbon cycle", because we are pulling carbon out of the ground and burning it.
I mean, even then, it is a closed cycle, but on such a long scale as far as we are concerned it can be considered open. We are just releasing carbon that was once in the atmosphere, except we are probably releasing it faster than other processes would (barring volcanoes, those really spew out like crazy). Eventually it will be sequestered again, although we are talking geological timescales.
However I think it would be wiser to invest in closing the carbon cycle, if we can generate our fuel without having to pull it out of the ground and burn it, at least we can then stop adding extra CO2 to the cycle.
Liquid fuel is not an energy source, it is an energy storage medium. Its source is the sun, like (almost) everything else on this planet, It is not inherently bad. If we can find a way to skip the slow steps of turning sunlight into oil and do it at scale, we would have a very dense and flexible fuel storage system, that would be a drop-in replacement for the current one, with minimal infrastructure investment/changes.
If we can get biofuels up and running, it would be a game changer. We could switch over all existing engines to a carbon neutral output in a really short timeframe, and without the massive investment in infrastructure and battery production that would be necessary for a battery-electric future. With more work on things like fuel cells, we could have the refill and range benefits of liquid fuel, with the efficiency of electric propulsion, all the while allowing all the existing IC engines to run in a carbon neutral way (because as someone else mentioned, IC engines are going to be with us for a long long time).
A win all round IMO (Except for those who invested in rare-earth metals in the hope to make a killing on future battery-based demand).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday July 05 2018, @07:55PM (5 children)
Actually, the USGS estimates total global volcano emissions, on land and undersea, average about 200 million tons of CO2 per year, while industrial and automotive activity emits 24 billion tons. (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcanoes-or-humans/) Volcanoes produce less than 1% of what we do - we absolutely dominate the geological carbon cycle.
>Liquid fuel is not an energy source
Yes and no - the problem is that as far as we are concerned fossil fuels *are* an energy source - the energy was stored millions of years before humans existed and it's practically free to extract, at least compared to actually generating that energy some other way, and then converting it to liquid fuel. But yes, if we can develop an efficient synthetic or biological way to produce liquid fuels then batteries will indeed be far less appealing. Though a fuel cell and electric motor with a battery or ultra-capacitor buffer (for regenerative braking, quick power boosts, etc.) is likely to still render internal combustion engines obsolete for most purposes.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday July 05 2018, @08:31PM (4 children)
> Actually, the USGS estimates total global volcano emissions, on land and undersea, average about 200 million tons of CO2 per year, while industrial and automotive activity emits 24 billion tons. (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcanoes-or-humans/) Volcanoes produce less than 1% of what we do - we absolutely dominate the geological carbon cycle.
Woah, that is one hell of a difference. Thanks for setting me straight on the matter :)
> Yes and no - the problem is that as far as we are concerned fossil fuels *are* an energy source - the energy was stored millions of years before humans existed and it's practically free to extract, at least compared to actually generating that energy some other way, and then converting it to liquid fuel. But yes, if we can develop an efficient synthetic or biological way to produce liquid fuels then batteries will indeed be far less appealing. Though a fuel cell and electric motor with a battery or ultra-capacitor buffer (for regenerative braking, quick power boosts, etc.) is likely to still render internal combustion engines obsolete for most purposes.
I pretty much agree on all counts as well. The IC engine has its use cases where it makes sense, sitting in stop and go rush hour traffic is not one of them (which is where most of them are right now). Just that a switch to compatible liquid fuels means we can immediately transition all existing IC engines to a closed carbon cycle, while also allowing for new fuel-electric vehicles to use the existing fuel + infrastructure with minimum disruption and investment.
The alternative of pushing plug-in battery electric, is that we will have a huge stock of vehicles invested in IC engines, which may well be around for decades to come, during that time we would have to maintain the existing fueling infrastructure, all the while having to build out one hell of electric generating capacity, a huge electric infrastructure to transmit that power to where it is needed, work out a way to increase battery capacity to be equivalent in range to current vehicles, be able to quickly charge the batteries, and a way to make sure the batteries don't degrade with use (at this point, batteries can be considered consumable items, whereas a fuel tank will always hold the same amount of fuel as when new). All this time we will still be putting out CO2 from the existing systems, and producing a lot more building out the new infrastructure.
At this point, hybrids seem to be a decent transition point, giving the benefit of both worlds, but I still think the better future would be what you mentioned, a hybrid fuel-cell and battery/ultracap is the answer.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday July 05 2018, @08:50PM (3 children)
Well, we couldn't immediately switch - building the infrastructure to generate the fuel would likely be comparably expensive and time consuming as upgrading the grid to support distributed charging. And you'd likely have to build out a comparable energy-generating infrastructure either way. Even a highly efficient, minimally processed biofuel suffers from the fact that photosynthesis is mostly terribly inefficient compared to solar cells, and pretty much all arable land is already being used to grow food.
The vision of transitioning existing, affordable vehicles is good though.
So, have you heard of any particularly promising fuel-generating technologies? Ethanol seems to be the only one with any traction, and the efficiency is pretty horrible. Not to mention high concentrations of ethanol tend to do bad things to a lot of common ICE components. Developing a system to produce a decently compatible fuel will add a whole additional level of challenge atop an already daunting task.
About the only thing I've heard of with great promise is the idea of growing lipid-rich algae in sealed bioreactors, which could be located in relatively inhospitable locations so long as an adequate flow of water to convert to hydrocarbons was available. Unfortunately, "land with an adequate flow of water available" seems to be almost synonymous with "arable land used for food crops"
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday July 06 2018, @07:48AM (2 children)
> Well, we couldn't immediately switch
Ok, I guess I should have said "We can immediately start switching". Yes, it won't be an overnight thing, but it would be a lot faster than waiting for every since ICE engine to disappear of its own accord, or until we have an equivalent electric infrastructure in place.
People where I live have been switching eagerly to bioethanol and biodiesel, so once provided, especially if you increase the cost of the fossil equivalent, you will have no trouble getting people to switch.
> building the infrastructure to generate the fuel would likely be comparably expensive and time consuming as upgrading the grid to support distributed charging.
I am not so sure, precisely because the fuel generation could be centralised, allowing for economies of scale, while charging systems would by their very nature need to be distributed. Distributed systems are always more expensive to build and manage, which is why everything from human societies to the internet eventually end up centralised. Once fuel generation is set up, the distribution would follow the same system it does now.
Also, due to the lower range of Battery EVs (BEVs), and long recharge time, the charging infrastructure will have to be much larger than fuel infrastructure. For example, if an average BEV has half the range of a ICE vehicle, and takes 144x times as long to "fill up" (5min refill vs 12 or so hour charge), you will need twice as many charging stations per mile as a fuel stops, and you would need far more space for each.
If the average fill-up time for a fuel vehicle is 5 mins till full, that means one bay in a fuel stop can service 12 cars an hour, or 288 cars in a 24 hour period.
If the average fill-up time for a Battery EV is 12 hours till full, it means one bay in a charge point can service 1/12 a car in hour, or 2 cars in a 24 hour period.
if the area served by a station has 10,000 cars, and they were all fuel powered, they could all be serviced each day by 34 bays in a fuel stop. However if all 10,000 cars were BEV, you would need 5,000 charge bays to be able to service all of them in a day.
Note that the above assumes both BEV and fuel cars have the same range. Assuming a BEV currently has about half the range when new (and we don't take into account "older" BEVs which have degraded batteries and lower capacity), you would need 10,000 bays for 10,000 cars, or a car per bay, not to mention facilities for all the people sitting around waiting for their cars to charge.
This is just not scalable. Even "supercharging" as they call it isn't the solution, because even then, you can fill-up a car in 3-6 hours, but at the expense of degrading the battery capacity, meaning you will end up recharging more and more often as your range decreases. Not to mention that supercharging stations would need far more power than the standard, and as a result would be less efficient.
BEV proponents say "Well then just charge overnight at home, or at work". However BEVs make the most sense in dense urban environments, like cities. Generally there you have high rise apartment blocks, and land is expensive. The idea of having a driveway or garage is a dream for most there, so they don't have anywhere to charge their BEVs. You can't just string an extension cable from your window to your car, and if everyone did that, you would overload the electric grid. Indeed, due to land cost, even workplaces don't have car parking except for select few people, so you would not be able to charge at work either.
Then comes the idea of having to upgrade the electric grid to support all this. The most expensive place to upgrade the grid is urban environments, because there is a lot in the ground already, and much concrete/foundation, etc.. to avoid or reinforce. Whereas fuel based systems just need to be transported by truck to where they are needed.
Then on long trips, you would need to build charge stations twice as often as fuel stops (possibly more to accommodate older BEVs who have lower range due to degradation, or because range on BEVs varies with environmental factors like outside temperature). Coupled with needing more bays and facilities, this results in a lot more green land being concreted over. Then you get the issue of somehow getting the energy out to every single charge stop, for all those cars, without too much transmission loss (unlike fuel, you can't condense the energy into a dense physical form and ship it out to the stops, but have to run actual cable to each and every one).
While I have not run the exact numbers, just as a thought experiment it seems that to replace current vehicles with BEVs would be a lot more expensive an a system, and it would me much cheaper to concentrate on biofuel replacement.
> And you'd likely have to build out a comparable energy-generating infrastructure either way.
Most likely. We had a sweet ride basically extracting pre-stored energy. Now we will have to start generating that energy. I suspect there will be a reduction in energy usage for transport no matter what system we use, because prices will go up as we will have to generate the energy we use.
(Continued in next post)
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday July 06 2018, @07:50AM (1 child)
> Even a highly efficient, minimally processed biofuel suffers from the fact that photosynthesis is mostly terribly inefficient compared to solar cells,
Possibly, but there is room for improvement. However there is more to efficiency than the conversion of light to energy. Yes, solar cells are more efficient at the conversion. However once processed the biofuel has very little transport loss and can be used directly, whereas the energy from the solar cells must go through multiple stages of conversion, transmission, and storage, all compounding losses at each stage.
> and pretty much all arable land is already being used to grow food.
Well, considering "arable land" is defined as "land used to grow food", your statement is 100% true all the time :-)
However, only around 11% of the worlds land is used for crop growing (src: https://www.wisegeek.com/how-much-land-worldwide-is-used-to-grow-crops.htm) [wisegeek.com] . There is plenty of land left over for other stuff, not to mention you don't need land to generate biofuels.
The US method of using corn for bioethanol is crazy inefficient, which is why nobody else in the world does it AFAIK.
> So, have you heard of any particularly promising fuel-generating technologies? Ethanol seems to be the only one with any traction, and the efficiency is pretty horrible. Not to mention high concentrations of ethanol tend to do bad things to a lot of common ICE components. Developing a system to produce a decently compatible fuel will add a whole additional level of challenge atop an already daunting task.
I find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butanol_fuel [wikipedia.org] particularly promising, primarily because it is a drop-in replacement for petrol. Engines can run it unmodified and without damage, it can use existing petrol pipes/storage and is not as miscible with water as ethanol.
As you stated, ethanol has the problem that you need an engine built to run it, and a fuel system that will not get damaged by it. Usually the problem is rubber seals that crack. Apart from that an ICE can run ethanol just fine (need to alter the fuel/air mix and ignition timing, but otherwise its a fuel like any other).
Some cars need a lot of work (replacement of seals and fuel lines), while others just need an ECU tweak and can use it (Turns out every Saab since the early 2000s will run on E85 just fine, they can apparently even take E100).
> About the only thing I've heard of with great promise is the idea of growing lipid-rich algae in sealed bioreactors, which could be located in relatively inhospitable locations so long as an adequate flow of water to convert to hydrocarbons was available.
Butanol can be made from Glycerol, which is a waste product in the production of Biodiesel. Also seems that there are multiple different sources of stock for generation. The wiki has some more details on it. I know that companies here in the EU are massively investing in R&D for biobutanol, precisely because it allows transitioning existing ICE machines to a closed carbon cycle. A lot of research is in using bacteria to create the butanol, rather than algae, which broadens what can be used as stock for the conversion
> Unfortunately, "land with an adequate flow of water available" seems to be almost synonymous with "arable land used for food crops"
Not all land with freshwater is arable (e.g. land with streams on steep hills is very hard to farm, but would have water). In fact a lot of arable land is water poor, which is why one of the first bits of "technology" ever devised by humans was irrigation and water transport for farming.
BioEthanol is already here, indeed it is popular round my parts. E85 is the most common blend but there is E100 too. Alas, my cars cannot take it, but almost everyone I know has been busy converting all their cars to be able to run on it. Most common one now is to convert the Chevrolet Volt, a series hybrid. You end up with a hybrid that runs on ethanol, with stupidly low fuel costs per mile, no range anxiety, and while the battery degrades, worst case scenario is you have an ICE car with electric traction.
Only downside is that I know of no fuel cell that would run on butanol, but being essentially an alcohol, I would hope that R&D to would follow to adapt ethanol fuel cells to it. Alternatively even having a small ICE isn't the end of the world, something like the 30kw engine in this article, that just charges the batteries, leaving the efficiency of the motor/regen-braking/etc.. to improve efficiency. We don't need a massive disruptive shift, switching to biofuels solves the immediate problem of carbon output, then we can slowly work on incremental efficiency improvements to make that generated fuel go further.
Another nice thing about ethanol is that its creation can be distributed. Humans have had centuries of practice making alcohol, and could brew their own fuel in their back yard if needs be. Butanol production is getting covered in patents, copyright, etc... as companies discover new ways of making it more efficiently. It will be a while before you can brew butanol easily in your backyard.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday July 06 2018, @01:17PM
Yeah, we could start faster, and the centralized economies of scale would certainly help. It would also focus the up-front costs on large corporations better able to deal with amortized investments, rather than distributing it across hundreds of millions of poor-to-middle-class individuals and their municipalities.
IF there were ubiquitous curb-side charging, then it's not clear that charging stations would actually need much capacity - most people most of the time drive well within the range of an overnight trickle charge, but as you point out, that's a lot of new infrastructure to lay.
The definition of arable land though also includes land *suitable* for growing food - roughly synonymous with suitable for farming anything. And we're farming much of it already. Most land area just really isn't suitable for the purpose. Growing on hills would require bioreactors or other new artificial-environment farming technology, but perhaps we could swing that with enough incentive. Terraced farms have historically been used the world over, but provide serious new challenges for industrial farming. Efficiency is going to be rough though - typical photosynthesis efficiency is only 3-6%, about 3-4x lower than typical solar panels, meaning that even with a magical 100% conversion of biomass without any further energy input, you'd still need to farm 3-4x the surface area as you would cover with solar panels to provide the same amount of energy.
Ethanol does make a lot of sense for it's ease of distributed production, but on the flip side the regulatory issues can present problems. Pretty much the entire world strictly regulates and taxes the production and distribution of ethanol for human consumption, going so far as to require industrial-purpose ethanol to be intentionally contaminated with some pretty toxic stuff to discourage drinking it. Stuff that would probably not be good for a fuel cell either, though an ICE might not have a problem. We're likely going to have to change some long-standing attitudes about alcohol before distributed production can really take off. There's a heck of a difference between making a few gallons of beer or wine, and dozens of gallons of high-purity moonshine to power your car.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 05 2018, @06:15PM
Something like this, this small and lightweight, will have special purpose applications pollution notwithstanding. Even if it only runs 20 hours between major overhauls, a powerplant like that makes prop-driven cruise missiles even more practical, among other things.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday July 05 2018, @06:19PM
>The fuel source is still finite and getting continuously more difficult to find. The fuel can only become more expensive. The combustion harms the environment.
Not really - it's easy to make hydrocarbon fuels from all sorts of ecological sources - methane, alcohol, biodiesel, etc., in which case you're producing no net CO2 emissions. And if your combustion is highly efficient, then the only byproducts are CO2 and water, which don't cause any localized harm.
The problem is that currently it's considerably cheaper to mine fossil fuels than generate biofuels. However, as the costs of fossil fuels increase, due to depletion, taxation, regulation, or social stigma, biofuels become more competitive. It's a safe bet that the cost of your fuel will never exceed the cost of compatible biofuel - unless you intentionally choose to pay more for fossil fuels for some reason.
And for now at least, hydrocarbon fuels are by far the densest energy source available to us, by both weight and volume, while containment is trivial. While fossil fuels will hopefully be abandoned soon, internal combustion engines are likely to be around for a long time to come in any application where energy density of the fuel is a concern. Currently Li-Ion batteries are about 100x less energy dense by mass, and about 30x less energy dense by volume - it'll take some massive breakthroughs in battery technology to make them competitive.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Thursday July 05 2018, @06:34PM
Not really, considering it will run off of damn near anything. Dino-juice isn't going anywhere just yet, and biodiesel it renewable. Plus this is the military, they don't care how much it costs.
Depends on the emissions systems used. Modern diesel emissions are not like the soot-filled crap from 20 or 30 years ago (unless some dick-head teenager removes it all so he can run a fucking smokestack on his oversized pickup). Plus again, biodiesel is renewable and lowers the net-carbon output of these systems. That said, this is the military using it so emissions laws don't always apply. Keep in mind too, the systems these are replacing are huge, haul behind a vehicle generators. Replacing that with something that can be tossed in the back of a vehicle saves fuel and material all by itself.
They are, but right now they are not a fit for every situation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 05 2018, @06:36PM
I won't be surprised if they are too.
Which is why they are looking into biofuels too: https://www.darpa.mil/program/biofuels [darpa.mil]
It's going to take a lot more innovation to make a supersonic plane with a useful range that uses batteries and motors instead of a jet engine or similar.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday July 06 2018, @12:52AM
So far all so called green technologies simply export harm while more harmful overall. It takes more damage to the planet to create any "clean" power at least in a long term.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by coolgopher on Friday July 06 2018, @01:25AM
Eh, I dunno. What's the real difference between a Wankel engine [wikipedia.org] and a Wanker engine?