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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 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.