Lory Memane
Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.
Another important post - this motors in wheel hubs concept started me thinking about how to convert smaller cars to hybrids.
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Electric Haulpak Wheels and Dutch Ingenuity
Hey the Dutch are developing a radical new concept - a wheel with an electric motor built in, so that it needs nothing else but a place to screw it into the chassis and a voltage. Now I'm all for innovation but this is hardly radical, mining companies will bear me out on this. What's surprising is the length of time it tookl before the technology made it into the mainstream.
Yep, that's right. For at least 17 years that I know of, mining companies have been using effing huge dump trucks with a centrally placed diesel generator and hub motors in the wheels. It saves having to leave space for a drive train and drive shaft and differential and leaves more for the money-spinner, which is the ore. Seventeen years or more, there have been trucks capable of carrying 200 tons driving around on hybrid diesel-electric power using an in-wheel electric motor on each rear wheel...
Have we been ripped off or what? Of course, cos that's how the money goes around longer. Also, those trucks were designed for brute hauling ability not for fuel economy - they really would suck over distances when compared to a few road trains hauling 200 tons between them.
But - the technology on a smaller scale is far better. There are things you can do besides adding thicker cables and bigger generators. And THAT'S where, if they play their cards right, those Nederlanders could score bigtime.
Instead of running the motors on a lower voltage, 240 - 440 volts sounds about right. Thinner cables can be used to the motors at higher voltages, saving a lot on construction costs. Charging that much battery would be much easier if you used a polyphase generator with each phase across a small subset of the batteries. That way you can also use solar panels without having to go to crazy lengths...
While you're at it guys, make the centre have three separate and independent sets of windings so that one failure won't cripple a wheel, and add decent position feedback and three computer drive controllers. Oh yeah - because we are using higher voltage and less current, our switching MOSFETs can be more efficient too.
It's important to have a computer which can tell at any instant just how many degrees the wheel has gone through, and which can put the wheel into different modes depending on what's happening - once you're cruising, why fire all three windings at once, why not just fire them in turn once every three revolutions just to keep the speed up? Or when moving slowly, use all three windings for smoothness and torque? and so forth?
'And of course if you're going to go electric and ecological you don't want air conditioning, do you?' Lemme tell you something sport, when it's 40 degrees celsius outside I damn well want an aircon alright! So the question is how would we achieve airconditioning given that we're on an energy budget?
Well there's an old idea that's been around for decades too - solar roof. In that, you mount a somewhat insualting roof about 2cm above the car roof and it keeps the roof of the car from reaching temperatures of 80 to 110 degrees C. Nope, I'm not kidding, you could cook an egg on the average car roof here in WA if you leave it parked outside in the sun...
Only - why stop at a solar roof? Why not make it a 'solar solar roof'?? Add solar panels on top, and instantly you're putting that sunlight to some use, and keeping the car cooler into the bargain. Now add decent heat reflective window tinting, because that's the other thing that heats your car up. While you're at it, how about a shade for the windscreen and rear window too?
Now that the car is some 7 - 12 degrees C cooler inside thanks to all that, put the solar roof to work driving peltier diodes in the roof. Cool air sinks down into the car and you can probably take off another 7 or so degrees C for the active cooling. That's 14 degrees less than the 50 or more degrees that car interiors reach, so now a much smaller amount of airconditioning power can achieve reasonable cooling. And you can realise a lot of energy saving if you have smart control over whether you need to cool the car or not. (If you're leaving it all day then you don't need to keep the inside cool after all.)
When you're moving, the gap between the solar roof and car roof can also funnel air over a small set of turbines or some other wind harvester and convert some of that over-the-roof drag into more cooling of the peltiers. (Or heaters in winter I suppose.)
Now here's a thought. I can run a generator off a biodiesel engine - all I need for this is old oil and a few chemicals, basically. Or I could run the engine of real gas like hydrogen or methane, and for methane I can actually keep a methane digester in the vehicle provided we're talking a larger transport here.
Like a motor home, I was thinking. If you build it with ground clearance and suspension in mind, and use those adaptive wheel motors all around and a smidgen of machine intelligence, you could let your Winnebago drive you around at a sedate pace, day and night... Mind you there would need to be slow lanes all over the place but if you don't have petrol to run that HSV then you're stuck in a slow lane. If the government thinks they won't need slow lanes then they have nother think coming.
Take a motor home cruise - let the AI drive - enjoy life in a slowly moving wagon, and do it for almost zero in petrol costs. Yes machine intel is that good now and already it can see better than we can at night, gauge stopping distances and car spacings better than we can, knows where it is thanks to GPS, and will trundle there at the best economical rate for tghe road it's on.
The point is - I've thought of these things, which means anyone could think of them. It means that in all likelihood, someone already has. And the real reason it hasn't earnt them billions is that petrol still doesn't cost three dollars per litre. (Although it soon may, then maybe this technology will take off...)
I hope I live to see it.
These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.
I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.
No comments:
Post a Comment