Re: Electric Cars Not Yet Viable

I doubt they were showing 20% of EV batteries were being recycled. More likely they were looking at present lithium ion battery recycling which is mostly cell phones. Not at all a relevant number.

Did they consider the environmental damage done to mine the materials to make autos? How about petroleum? I'm sure petroleum mining is clean as the driven snow...

While you are an intelligent person and can learn all the facts of an issue, you instead prefer to only pay attention to the facts you want to hear. In some ways this is surprising, but this should be taken into account when considering your work.

You do know that Tesla already has built electric semis and is presently ro ad testing them, right?

I don't know this for a fact, but I expect one of the limitations currently is the charging infrastructure. While it is very good for taking autos on trips, they use eight charging stalls to charge a semi. They will need to build new semi charging stations. Unlike autos which will be charged main ly at home, semis will mainly be charged on the road. They will likely onl y sell semis for specific routes initially and build the charging network t o suit, expanding the routes and sales together. Or they might initially s ell to short haul markets where charging can be done overnight at the owner 's facility.

That gives me a thought. It is rather pointless to have solar cells on a c ar because the relatively small surface area doesn't impact the battery dra in much. But on a tractor trailer the surface is *much* larger. I wonder if this could be used to greatly increase the range with a lot fewer batter ies.

I would think battery swap is much more feasible with semis than with autos and even Tesla considered battery swapping with autos.

The point of battery swapping in an auto is to get the time to something co mparable to filling with gas. When a semi stops to fill the driver is also stopping to eat and likely has to rest some amount of time. So in this ca se the battery swap can take longer. The purpose is to reduce the peak ele ctrical load while charging.

At that point the ownership of the battery changes. The battery is no long er a part of the semi, but a device that is rented for the fuel content lik e a propane tank.

Yeah, that could work.

We partonize two bars that provide FREE BEER TOMORROW.

The eDumper truck has a 4.5 tonne 700kWh battery. It transports up to 65 tonnes of rock (gross weight of 123 tonnes) down a hill. It uses the energy required for braking down the hill to replenish its battery for the empty return uphill run.

Did you see the picture? Snow! This must be a time when the truck is down for maintenance.

Interesting that the vehicle still has a radiator. I guess cooling the batteries is no small task.

I wonder if it is operating in a lithium mine? lol

Sigh, the penalty for having ideas and breaking rules has haunted me my entire life. But there have been compensations. I'm drinking my hot Peets coffee in one right now.

Why not develop some Pony Express style operation. At selected stations leave the emptied tractor at the station for charging and take a fresh fully charged tractor to move the trailer to the destination.

For longer high volume routes, put the trailer on to a train or ship and then use ordinary tractors at both ends of the route.

Do you how much energy a semi-trailer will consume ?

A battery operated city bus can handle about 1 km/kWh, so it is possible to quick charge the bus at the end(s) of the line, while the driver takes a coffee/tobaco/toilet break. Alternatively, install a charging station on each bus stop and each time the bus stops on the bus stop for 5-15 seconds charge the bus.

hour charged by 5 kWh, so a city bus would run 5 km once an hour and much less for a semi-trailer.

We /all/ have our strengths and weaknesses, and being aware of our /personal/ strengths/weaknesses is valuable.

Enjoy your coffee :)

The main problem with such heavy vehicles is that they sometimes need a huge peak power. With diesels you have to install highly oversized engines to deliver that peak power. Most of the time the engine runs at light partial power, in which diesel efficiency is quite bad.

Electric motors perform well at partial power, thus using a battery or diesel electric system with large batteries allows less total consumption. Even gas turbines (which do not like power level changes) could be used in a series hybrid configuration to charge the batteries.

Rick C wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

You do know that they do not match my criteria either, right?

Rubbish. Really heavy duty locomotives used to be diesel-electric - electri c motor are better adapted to providing the necessary torque at the wheels over the wide range of rotation rates needed.

The only economic question is whether taking the electicity generation out of the train save enough - in reduced load to be shifted - to pay for the o verhead wiring along the whole lenght of the track.

Higher population densities - and thus more rail traffic along the track - makes electrification more attractive, because it is a a one-off cost, and you have to lug power generating unit along with every load you shift.

Does that make it clever?

So much for yours. The metric is the number of people per unit area who wil l pay to use the train, or shift freight on it.

India may have 382 people per square kilometre - alomst twice that of Germa ny - but it's average per capita income is a whole lot lower.

Of course it is, but you only have to put up the power feeds once, and they save money on every train trip. Lugging the diesel part of a diesel electr ic locomotive around costs money on every trip, and the overhead wires save that on every trip.

Idiot. Europe has a rather denser rail network than the US because it has a rather higher population density.

The example I gave of a non-electricified line in the Netherlands, from Nij megen to Maastricht, doesn't carry much traffic because most people want to get from Nijemgen or Maastricht to the area between Utrecht and Amsterdam (uusually called the Randstaat - "edge city") and the lines that cater for them are much busier, and all electricified.

It's you who hasn't thought the matter through.

Rick C wrote in news:8a558e37-4da3- snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

The purpose is and needs to be getting the driver, and his load back on the road in the same timely mannetr that a tank fill takes.

The batteries that get swapped could actually be 'slow charged' over time and solar panels at the truck stop and a few other things can make it way less costly.

So the battery a truck swaps in may have been charged a long time ago, and merely topped at the 'station' until deployed.

The time at which they perform the charging can be any time, but would likely be when the industrial loads are offline. But then THEY become 'industrial level loading' too. I'd bet that they do not get a cheaper rate.

John Larkin wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

About 35% of all bars have such a sign.

Not usually 'higher class' drinking joints like 'nightclubs'.

So the battery capacity dictates the distance between charging stations, or battery swap stations if you can't get a faster enough charge.

It's not a question of power, but rather of energy density (where hydrocarb on fuels win big-time) and what you've missed is that you can accomodate th e rather lower energy density of batteries by refuelling them more frequent ly than you would a hydrocarbon fuelled truck.

If you wanted to get enthusiastic about it, you could embedded inductive ch arging loops in particularly heavily used bits of highway, and let the truc ks recharge themselves on the run. You'd end up with something equivalent t o an electrified railwtya system, as discussed earlier.

There are bus systems that are playing with this technology already.

You do have an unfortunate habit of missing the fundamental points in these discussions. Try to think a bit harder and longer before you post.

As long as you don't limit yourself by assuming that you can't or shouldn't do something, or that it can't be done because experts don't already do it.

Electronic design engineers tend to work a lot, so don't waste money on silly stuff, and tend to marry stable women who have good jobs. The combination makes for a good upper-middle-class life.

Peet was Dutch, and started roasting coffee in Berkeley, back when americans were drinking weak swill. Peets spun off Starbucks, which partly regressed to swill. Peets coffee is still great.

Rick C wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

More like cooling during the regenerative brake motor phase. They likely get a lot hotter slowing the vehicle on a decline than it does powering the empty truck back up the hill, which also likely happens at a very slow drive speed so does not generate nearly as much heat as slowing a huge load does, Ideally, a regen motor would have perm magnet fields instead of energized field coils.

A lot to ponder.

I wanted to make a bicycle pancake motor that has a large torque arm by placing the magnets near the rim of the wheel, instead of at the hub itself. And the drive fields are in the 'stator' which arcs off of the forks across the top portion of the wheel, acting as both a fender and the motor stator.

The process of adopting a new technology and getting into wide use isn't any kind of "evolution".

It's more a case of intelligent design. We know what the technology can do, what it costs, and what it can save us.

"Evolution" menas un-folding. You can't see what you are going to get until you have unfolded the package and laid it all out where you can see it.

Once you have the technology, putting it into place is just planning and logistics, and of course raising the capital to invest in the new equipment (which doesn't grow on trees).

It implied that we didn't know where we needed to go.

Wow. You want to put yourself in the same box as Cursitor Doom?

I've been in the technical advice business for long enough - a couple of decades - to know that being diplomatic wastes time.

People have to be told that they have got something wrong very clearly and unambiguously. Anything less and they are remarkably good at missing the message.

Whence "charging stations or battery swap stations".

Rick C keeps on telling us that he can recharge his Telsa in the time that it takes him to buy and drink a cup of coffee. That's not overnight.

Truck batteries are just a lot of Tesla batteries in parallel. If you want to recharge a truck that fast, you can build the charging stationt that will do it.

You really seem to know nothing about battery charging.

What makes you think that?