The last few years, I've been wondering about this combination:

1. 20 HP gas engine
2. Hydraulic tank, pumps, hydraulic wheel motors.

Just like my mower:

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The hydraulic hybrid is being tested in trucks for use in delivery vehicles. It uses hydraulic motors at the wheels and a pressure tank to store the energy. One stated advantage of this approach is that it can extract and store a larger percentage of the braking energy then an electric hybrid.

Also, as noted in my post #10, here's a proposal for a 170MPG fully hydraulic, 4-wheel drive, serial hybrid car. It uses a free piston, combination diesel engine compressor to charge the storage tank. All the primary braking is performed by the hydraulic motors so a very high percentage of the braking energy is returned to storage. Very innovative design.

 

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There is exactly one viable battery scenario which could be used for all electrics(it is being used in japan for a city based fleet of small delivery trucks): the batteries are "standardized" across vehicles and can be swapped out relatively quickly at "recharging" stations.

For the whole network to be feasible, the government would have to own the batteries and a vast network of charging stations. People would have to pay an annual or per-mile cost to participate. The government would also have to force the EV makers to use the standard battery blocks and make provisions to be compatible with the changing system.

It would probably cost trillions of dollars and in the end, EV's would probably never exceed 10% of total fleet of US vehicles.

But that doesn't necessarily means the democrats won't try to finance something like this....

There really is no reason to drag politics into the discussion AGAIN... I thought we were past that. Is government MANDATED standardization the only type that exists? Do we have no examples of the market coming together of its own accord to settle upon a standard? CDs, AA batteries, screw-in light bulbs, 15" wheels, soda cans, garden hose fittings, etc. I'm sure you could think of some more examples yourself. Sure, there are some variants of soda can sizes and vegetable cans, batteries other than AA size, and so forth, but that's fine, and it would be fine for EV battery pack cells as well. Sure, some standardization agency like the IEEE or NEMA or UL, or ISO or independent agency would emerge, whose stamp of approval world guarantee acceptance in the market, and that's fine, expected, and welcome. So what's your beef?

 

I think "Cruts" has it, we need something that uses energy efficiently. Taking the Energy from Creation directly to Destination in this case a "Hydraulic Motor" in the most energy efficient way.

I'm just not sold on EV cars yet. I'm looking into "NG" cars, it's cheap where I live. Equal to 87cents a gallon of Gas, the only problem is our current Administration will be looking to tax me for that (Carbon Footprint), driving the prices back up.

Edit: Now a "NG" Hydraulic car would be something. 170 miles on 87cents. Not bad.

 

Is government MANDATED standardization the only type that exists?

No, and that would be a fatal mistake for a technology just entering its "S curve" of adoption. Freezing innovation could delay wider adoption. Think how computer parts are "standard" and yet still advance quickly, like USB to USB2 and 3. Like hard drive interfaces from SATA to eSATA and so forth. And computers are a relatively mature market compared to EVs. Locking into any one technology too early would slow down innovation. Anything written into law is necessarily going to make it slow and hard to advance beyond.

 

No, and that would be a fatal mistake for a technology just entering its "S curve" of adoption. Freezing innovation could delay wider adoption. Think how computer parts are "standard" and yet still advance quickly, like USB to USB2 and 3. Like hard drive interfaces from SATA to eSATA and so forth. And computers are a relatively mature market compared to EVs. Locking into any one technology too early would slow down innovation. Anything written into law is necessarily going to make it slow and hard to advance beyond.

Exactly. Manufacturers would do well to standardize on form factors perhaps for future upgrades. Just as there are a wide range of mAH available for AA batteries, new chemistry has come out and they can pack a lot more energy into the same package. I can put new rechargeable batteries in my 20y/o flashlight with double the capacity. I'm glad they standardized (of their own accord) on the form factor or my flashlight would be obsolete now. If I were going to start manufacturing an EV right now, I would probably copy Toyota's cells - that would save me the hassle of developing the battery technology, AND broaden the market for 3rd party battery manufacturers. Just like I can open the Jegs catalog and get an awesome Edelbrock 4bbl carb for my Chevy (that also works on a ford). I don't see Edelbrock or Jegs as a competitor; no, they are working in parallel with me, and I might end up using what they develop in my own cars. One day there will be a market for performance 3rd party upgrades for EVs and hybrids. By standardizing on Toyota's form factor I also save these guys some work. My cars will appeal more to the tuner crowd if they know they can look in the catalog and see that the same mods available for Toyota work on my cars too. This also should drive the cost down. The more of a certain product in production, the less it costs to manufacture.

 

I would like to present a different perspective looking outside the box.

In the past 50 years we have come to have certain expectations with regards to personal travel.
It is not uncommon to drive 1000km (600 miles) or more in a single day. Or to fly cross-continent or across the ocean in a matter of 5 to 7 hours. These traveling distances and times were not possible 100 years ago.

In looking at what would become a viable alternative to gasoline powered automobiles we have to look outside the box and ask what are consumers' expectations.

Energy systems of the future for automobiles have to have measurable energy in a box, much the same way we can measure the amount of fuel in a gas tank. I predict that this revolution will only happen when scientists discover superconductivity at temperatures at and above room temperatures.

In the meantime, how do we put a price on diminishing fossil fuel and a collapse of the biosphere?

What monetary value do we place on the last tree standing on Christmas Island before it was cut down and consumed as firewood?

Here are facts.

Today the global oil consumption is 85 billion barrels per day of which the U.S. accounts for 25% of the total.

The global carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion for the year 2010 was 32,000 mega tons.

Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has risen from 282ppm in the year 1860 to 398ppm in summer 2013.

I believe that what has to change is not the development of a high-tech low-carbon automobile but our expectations for personal travel in the modern world.

Without a dramatic change in expectations and lifestyle we are all doomed as were the inhabitants of Christmas Island.

 

The hydraulic hybrid is being tested in trucks for use in delivery vehicles. It uses hydraulic motors at the wheels and a pressure tank to store the energy. One stated advantage of this approach is that it can extract and store a larger percentage of the braking energy then an electric hybrid.

Also, as noted in my post #10, here's a proposal for a 170MPG fully hydraulic, 4-wheel drive, serial hybrid car. It uses a free piston, combination diesel engine compressor to charge the storage tank. All the primary braking is performed by the hydraulic motors so a very high percentage of the braking energy is returned to storage. Very innovative design.

INDOCAR:

The INGOCAR offers the same roominess as a typical 5 seat passenger car, but noticeable improvements are achieved in the important areas of:

1. Fuel consumption & emissions

170 mpg - instead of 27 mpg - and more than a comparable reduction in emissions.
2. Safety

Active bumpers at the front, rear and both sides absorb the entire crash from a 25 mph impact. The forces the passenger is exposed to are significantly reduced and damage to the car body is basically eliminated.

Individual control of power of each wheel improves the road holding characteristic.
3. Driving comfort

The active suspension absorbs most of the road bumps and basically eliminates banking. The lower center of gravity improves the handling.
4. Performance

The high power of the wheelmotors provide outstanding acceleration. 0-60 mph in 5 sec.
5. Cost

The operating costs are significantly reduced. In long terms, the production costs of the new car will not exceed those of conventional cars.


Very impressive, indeed!

 

In looking at what would become a viable alternative to gasoline powered automobiles we have to look outside the box and ask what are consumers' expectations.

That question is answered daily by the shuffle of consumer's feet as they walk past the Leaf and the Volt and up to F-350's and Shelby Mustangs. No company will ever make a dime telling consumers how they need to change their expectations and buy the crappy product they are selling which does not meet them. They need to come up with feasible, viable, alternatives that meet the needs and expectations of the majority of consumers and then they will buy them.

Interesting how the Big 3 car makers in the US nearly fell into bankruptcy not listening to what consumers were asking for.... and building what they thought they wanted.

"Those who do not learn from history are condemned to relive it."

 

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There really is no reason to drag politics into the discussion AGAIN.../// So what's your beef?

OK, let's keep the discussion 100% fantasy based then, I will disconnect and leave you to carry on.

As to answer your last question: I already did. My main beef is using my tax $$$ to pay corporate welfare to non viable technologies that have no future for any kind of meaningful contribution to an energy solution. They are just throwing tons of money at it to "look green". And I wish I could stop the waste. And I don't see why my taxes should have to be used to bribe people to buy hybrids and EVs.

Does Solyndra ring a bell?

 

Give it a rest guys, please. If politics comes up again, I'll personally request this thread be put out of it's misery. Can anybody recommend another forum where this might be discussed from a purely technical aspect?

 

No, because this is not a technical issue alone. It is also a sociological and environmental problem.

 

Electric (includes Plugin Hybrids) or other zero emission vehicles allow some very neat solutions.

Recovery of or bypassing surface acreage and developments while increasing road capacity by putting roads underground. That does not work very well with Carbon Dioxide emitters.

Being able to go underground for even half a mile with zero emissions would clear up large amounts of gridlock in so many locations.

Ventilation of tunnels for ICE vehicles is a huge added expense. To remove Carbon Dioxide it needs a combination of positive pressure inflows and negative pressure exhausts. If you could designate tunnels as for electric powered vehicles only, they could travel much longer spans underground before ventilation is an issue.

 

The cost of boring any tunnel is huge, particularly underground tunnels (as opposed to tunnels whose ends are the lowest points and are above grade) due to drainage requirements. The idea of putting any significant fraction of the roadways underground is cost prohibitive, particularly in urban areas that are already built up if, for no other reason, the amount of existing subsurface infrastructure (much of it no longer represented on maps). And while the ventilation issue is lessened, but not all that much. You will have to put in air handlers at about the same point (remember, humans are CO2 emitters and O2 consumers, too) and, once you have to put them in at all, the cost of handling 1 unit of air per second and 100 units of air per second are not that overwhelming. Significant and a factor, yes, but unlikely to be the make/break issue on whether a project is viable.

Another thing to consider is the issue of safety as you scale up underground roadways. You WILL have bad accidents and people WILL die because they are trapped in a tunnel when, had they not been in a tunnel, they would have lived. That happens now. But the absolute occurance rate is low enough that each time it happens the impact tends to be local and transient. But if you increase the number of miles that people spend driving in tunnels by 1000, then you increase the absolute occurance rate to a level that is going to have it constantly being put into the front part of people's brains, even if the relative rate is reduced.

Having said all that, I've often envisioned a system in which a downtown area had multistory parking structures (above or below ground) at the periphery. Consider a downtown area that was five miles on a side. That gives it a periphery of 20 miles and a single ring of right-angle parking spaces could easily accommodate 10,000 cars. If you simply put in ten aisles with a total width of 60 feet for the aisle and the two rings of parking spaces on either side of it, then you've got parking spaces for 200,000 cars. And that's one just one level. Then there would be two levels of long-line mass transit, one going east-west and the other going north-south. At one mile intervals there would be trains and at four block intervals there would be moving sidewalks. Thus, from where you park your car you are at most two blocks from a moving sidewalk. You have to ride that sidewalk for at most a half-mile before you can get on a train. You have to make at most one stop delay before you get to the stop where you get off, at which point you can get right onto another train or sidewalk going orthogonal. You then have at most another one stop delay before you can get right on a sidewalk that will take you to within two blocks of your destination (I'm assuming that you don't park on the far side of the downtown area when you want to go to a destination on the other side, but even that wouldn't add much).

It would be a simple matter to design the train bed so that heavy trucks can also use it on a scheduled basis for large deliveries or maintenance/repair/renovation purposes. You could also put delivery points at the periphery at the ends of some of the train lines so that incoming/outgoing shipments are processed through that point and loaded onto cargo cars that operate in conjunction with the normal trains. They can be routed onto a siding to be loaded/unloaded and perhaps placed on the orthogonal track.

 

No, because this is not a technical issue alone. It is also a sociological and environmental problem.

Yes, that's like trying to say to discuss something.....without politics.

If a dime is to be spent, it will become political, quickly.

That's how those bloodsuckers make their living.

Everything is political, in one form or another.

 

Everything is political, in one form or another.

Agreed. And it is maddening that I cannot join in these discussions to the extent that I'd like without risking excommunication!

 

Agreed. And it is maddening that I cannot join in these discussions to the extent that I'd like without risking excommunication!

Agreed, again. There have been some things come up in this discussion I would love to debate, but at the risk of my thread being closed. So I bit my tongue because what I'm really here for is to discuss the technical aspect. I know that I sometimes let my my political feelings seep into my posts, but I generally try to keep that confined to the off-topic forum. That's why I posted this in the technical forum, to keep it technical. As I mentioned, I DO HAVE another hybrid vehicle thread going in the off-topic forum; the title is something like "I bought a Prius, -50 man points." If you want to get political, I request you do it there; I don't really care if that thread gets axed.

What would be cool is if the forum allowed political discussion, but had an option button to make you choose whether your post has political content or not, and then each user can filter what they see; if they don't want to see political posts, they don't have to. Then our rants can go unpunished and people's feelings don't have to get hurt unless they choose to.
But I bet that would work about as well as enforcing the "absolutely no politics, ever" rule.

 

I'm just a hard core believer in Free Speech, in any and all forms.

Exercise it, or lose it.

 

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What would be cool is if the forum allowed political discussion...

Or, better, a political sub-forum where politics can be discussed (with respect to engineering/technical issues, perhaps).

In my experience, technically oriented and/or trained people, in general, don't have a firm grasp of the nuances of political/economic issues and the Law of Unintended Consequences. Such a forum, I believe, would be invaluable in helping to broaden all of our aspects of life, and, in the end, maybe even make us better engineers/technicians.

 

Technologically the ventilation required for people and for vehicles are many magnitudes larger.

The metabolic rate and oxygen requirements of a human are at the scale of 100watts. A car that is idling along through the tunnel will typically still need at least 4HP which is 3000Watts. If that is an ICE then that is a lot of carbon dioxide to ventilate.

I think that the internal volume of a car cabin carries enough oxygen for at least 10 minutes of occupant safety. As long as traffic doesn't gridlock, zero emmision vehicles travelling through the tunnel at a mile a minute will carry all the ventilation needed for a ten mile tunnel span!

 

...As long as traffic doesn't gridlock...

And this is why we engineers are trained not to design based on "typical" parameters...