A name from the past resurfaces

 

Aptera? Well, they're baaaaaack. These two guys seem to be a bit skeptical of Aptera's claims. These claims may be inflated, as there's no penalty yet, for lying. Just as long as you don't do it when it is against the law, such as marketing a product through the use of false claims.

Anyway, all of that aside, the design is highly efficient in terms of aerodynamics. It may also be highly efficient in terms of its friction against the surface. In other words, in order to roll down the highway, it may not take all that much power to keep it going. This has many advantages, and it is the reason why I think electric cars are too darned heavy.

It DOES appear that better ultra-capacitors are in the works, so if these could be employed in this kind of car, they could get something special out of it. The video also mentions that people in the Aptera community are quite devoted to it. That explains why they are back, I suppose.

How could Tesla innovate their way out of their current mess?

 

Copy the Chinese! Didn't the Chinese invent a way to swap out batteries real fast? Why not steal their ideas for a change.

Do them one better than that. Perhaps you could add a range extender in the form of a hydrogen fuel cell that you could rent. Most people drive short distances. If you install a short range battery and reduce the price, it could be a sweetner for sales. Add the convenience of battery swapping, and a hydrogen range extender, and you could make the cars more affordable to own and operate.

How big does a fuel cell have to be? Not that big, in my opinion. It could be just big enough to supply the vehicle with power and a little extra for charging the battery. On the highway, a vehicle needs only about 20 horsepower.

Stations that swap batteries could also supply range extenders. To move hydrogen into place, use ammonia, and crack the ammonia at the distribution site.

Quick Update:

Does anybody remember this? Why hasn't it been developed? Seems to me that you could make ammonia out of the bicarbonates in the sea, and then ship it all over the world. These would power their autos through the fuel cell.

6:00PM:

There's a car made by Honda that fits the description of what I was referring to, but is pretty heavy. That puzzles me. ( It doesn't have a power unit swap out capability).

Scientific American: Store Renewable Energy as Liquified Air

Scientific American: Store Renewable Energy as Liquified Air

Update:

Been there done that.  Uses too much energy, I suspect.


Comment:

This is an intriguing idea.  Instead of using a battery, atmospheric air is cooled to a liquid state.  When it warms, it expands enough to drive a turbine that can produce electricity.  It is claimed to be about 60 percent efficient.

Now if you were to use nuclear energy to liquefy the gas, you could have a plausible means of powering an auto or a vehicle.

Feasibility for this type of application depends upon how big of a tank is required to produce the needed power.

Inconvenient truths

Comment:

The size of the proposed EV is only about 8 feet long.  Weight is minimized, which decreases the requirements for power from the battery.  As small as this thing will be, it will still be too heavy for its size. (  Physics:  In my opinion, that is the flaw of battery-powered EV's. )

There may be multiple solutions to the problem of range anxiety.  It is technically feasible to do EV's.  The question is whether or not it actually makes any sense economically.  For the excuse to impose these technologies, proponents need to sell the AGW theory.  This little car is still relatively expensive.  ( Economics:  But I don't buy AGW, nor would anybody else without compulsion. )

Reality is a bitch.  ( Oops, I might get in trouble for using that word.  Which one?  Maybe both words these days.  PC is the real bitch. )

Think physics and economics: To go big on EVs, Japanese car makers think super-small https://t.co/3F4wEc0GzA

— Greg Meadows (@BootsandOilBlog) October 23, 2019

High temperature steam electrolysis

It is said to be more efficient than at lower temperatures.  If a kilogram of hydrogen can be produced for 225 megajoules, and a gallon of gasoline ( which is equivalent to about a kilogram of hydrogen in terms of energy ) yields about 126 megajoules.

Obviously, you lose something in the conversion.  Thus, you lose about 100 megajoules this way.  To produce gasoline from the hydrogen thus obtained would not be very efficient at all.

The thought I had was not to make carbon based fuels, but ammonia instead.  You might even do some cogeneration in order to make the energy conversions more efficient.  Ammonia could be made this way, and can be used as a hydrogen carrier to boot.

One objection to fuel cells as a power source, in comparison with batteries, was the relatively lower efficiency rate.  One reason for this was the necessity for compression or liquifaction of the hydrogen.   To do this requires a lot of energy, and these losses degrades efficiency, thereby adding to the problem.   Fuel cells are still more efficient than gasoline powered ICE engines.

To beat batteries, I suggest making ammonia, and then cracking it on an as-needed basis.  The ammonia will be the hydrogen carrier, thus alleviating the necessity to achieve cryogenic temperatures, and high pressures.  Ammonia crackers can possibly be put on a car, and the weight penalty might not be too bad.  Less than that of batteries, I suspect.  Batteries add a tremendous weight penalty.

Now, can we get the hydrogen source from a means that would increase efficiency so that the cost of operating a fuel cell car may be comparable to a gasoline powered ICE vehicle?  Perhaps not, but it might not matter if the energy source is cheaper.

Let's go back to the production of hydrogen seen earlier.  If it was to be produced with a molten-salt reactor, which is cheaper than coal to begin with, and if it utilized steam electrolysis to produce the the hydrogen and then ammonia, it would have to get back that 100 megajoules mentioned above in order to compete on efficiency.  But, you could do that ( on the basis of price ) if the energy source is cheaper, as is the case with molten-salt reactors.  With a higher efficiency than ICE engines, a fuel cell power source would get back more, if not all, of that efficiency penalty, and the rest could be made up by the lower price of the molten-salt reactor derived energy.

In the end, could it be cheaper than gasoline if you were to use this method?  I think that it may be possible.  Better than batteries?  Maybe not in terms of efficiency, but once again, molten-salt reactor tech wins on price.


Update:

After digging in a little deeper, I found something that may throw a money wrench into this idea.  If it takes 389 kilojoules of energy to break just one of the nh3 bonds, then that's the monkey wrench.  In other words, the idea of using ammonia as a hydrogen carrier may be flawed.  Too inefficient.

I'm gobsmacked.

The Truth about hydrogen

This is a fairly comprehensive critique of energy efficiencies of hydrogen versus battery electric.

Sure, battery electric appears more efficient, but they are using grid electricity, not solar panels or wind turbines.

Believe me, I've studied the topic.  The best combination in terms of efficiency might well be nuclear and battery electric.  But battery electric has its issues as well.  It's too darned heavy and too darned slow to charge.  The author is probably a bit biased in favor of battery electric.

Note:  There is a plug on the video for skillshare.  That is an interesting idea in itself.

Tesla may be in big trouble

This write up by the Coyote Blog tells a troubling story.  I never did like the Tesla model,
conceptually, but given Musk's reputation, maybe he could make it work.

Reading through this article gives the strong impression that Tesla will fold, and it will
happen fairly soon.

What happens to Musk's reputation after that, is the thing that troubles me. 

Skeleton Ultracapacitors

Looks like great tech, but the price is a bit high.  More than a bit.

Something like this could be used in regenerative braking for hybrid auto applications.  There are other applications mentioned, but this one is the one that interests me.

Still say that a Stirling electric hybrid auto is a doable project, and if combined with these, can minimize the size of the the battery and the engine that charges it.

An idea for an carbon neutral car

This is a compromise of sorts for the greenie types.  They want a carbon-free car,
not just a carbon-neutral car.  Perhaps they would settle for this.  Lots of luck
with that.

Anyway, the idea is to use molten-salt reactors of the type that Thorcon is going
to make.  This should be scalable, so that many reactors could be made, thus
lowering the cost.  Not to mention, it is a much cheaper nuclear reactor than the
solid-fueled water-cooled conventional reactors.

You could even run it on waste from nuclear power plants, which would kill two
birds with one stone.  Maybe the PETA people would object to killing birds.

There was already an idea discussed in a video I once posted somewhere, which
proposed to use molten-salt reactors to make jet fuel.

It so happens that seawater has 100 times more carbon dioxide in it than the
atmosphere.  There may be enough to make this economically feasible, provided
that the costs can kept as low as possible.

The idea is nuclear methanol.  The idea of using nuclear power to make methanol was
discussed on my blogs as well.  This was a Japanese study , however the
price for methanol thus produced may be a bit higher than market prices.  Of
course, molten-salt reactor technology should be cheaper, and mass production
of Thorcon reactors cheaper still.

Of course, if you just use hydrogen, it may be better.  Why?  Hydrogen is the
best for rockets because it burns hotter.  The same principle could be applied
to Stirling engines.  That is to say, the hotter the Stirling, gets the more
efficient it is.   Make the engine small and compact.

In order to obtain the hydrogen, we can make ammonia instead of methanol.  Ship
the ammonia to the point of sale, and crack it to make hydrogen.  There would
be no carbon at all.  Maybe that would make the greenies happy after all.

Provided that nuclear hurdle can be surpassed, which may be possible, the second
part of the system involves Stirling-electric hybrids.  Stirling engines have
some setbacks as an automotive power plant, but if they are small, then they
should work in cars.  In addition to making them about 25 kilowatts or so, the
batteries can be smaller as well.

The batteries add to the weight of the car, so they should be minimized.  You
could use ultracapacitors for quick bursts of power as well.  The ultracapacitors
will last the lifetime of the car, most likely.  Batteries have to be replaced
often, and those aren't cheap.

You don't need large powerful engines.  A car can cruise down the highway on
25 kilowatts of power from a Stirling electric engine.  A little more power
for passing and going up hills can come from the batteries and the capacitors.
One problem for Stirling electric is that they need to warm up.  The warm up
period can be electric only.

Perhaps this idea would a lot like the existing hybrids of today.  However, no
existing hybrid that I know of uses Stirling engines.  They still use internal
combustion engines, which aren't as efficient as Stirling engines.  So, the
higher priced fuel can be partially offset by increased efficiency.

So there you have it.  If the economics can be made to work, then the car concept
could be marketable.  The economics of cheaper energy from molten-salt reactors
and efficiency of Stirling electric engines may make this idea economically feasible.

Tesla

One thing that I wish I could be is a guy like Elon Musk, and have the name and the money in order to put my version of an electric car on the road.

If I could, it wouldn't be a battery powered machine like his.  It would be a fuel cell car.

However, there's a good reason why fuel cells won't work.  The reason is because of the fuel problem.

The criticism against fuel cells that you hear out there is that there's no infrastructure.  No, infrastructure is not the problem.  You can transport hydrogen via ammonia.  Ammonia already has an infrastructure, so you can use that infrastructure to move the hydrogen around.

Another criticism you hear is the cost of the fuel cells themselves.  But that is not the problem either.  There is somebody who has already made fuel cell cars, and says you can make fuel cells comparably priced with respect to internal combustion engines.

I think the problem is that fuel cells make no sense unless the energy is supplied by nuclear power.  Nuclear power is out of favor, so that leaves fuel cells in the cold.

Using carbon based fuels for fuel cells is inefficient.  Most of the energy from fossil fuels is from oxidizing carbon.  If you take away the carbon, you lose a lot of the energy.  That means the cost of the energy must be higher in order to offset this loss.  Economically, it won't make sense.  However, nuclear power can be cheaper than coal, but is being regulated out of existence.

Nuclear power need not be out of favor.  But that is the way things are right now.  If that can be changed, then electric cars can succeed.  Tesla is not likely to succeed, so I have seen.

I could have said I told you so, but I didn't say I told you, so I can't say that.  But I suspected it, for whatever that is worth.

SpaceX's news

This one goes down the pipeline and back again.

Here's what I mean.

I link from here to Instapundit, which is the link above.  After posting this, I am going to link it up to my Facebook page.  From the Facebook page it could easily end up back here.  Or will it?

Anyway, if the story gets out, it's all to the better.

Elon Musk has some problems right now.  Hopefully, that won't mess this up.   Because reusable rockets are a big deal.  Battery powered cars???  Meh.

I have written about this subject.  Lots of the posts are imported to this blog.  To find them, click on Green, Clean, Mean Driving Machines topic.

Oopsie!  Haven't got that set up yet on this here blog,  But it is on the other.

Wireless power that is 97 percent efficient could revolutionize highway transportation

nextbigfuture.com

Highway recharging may be too ambitious, but this idea could find a useful application for parked vehicles.



A couple more intriguing videos which I found via Next Big Future:
21st Century Job: Asteroid Miner
A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors

Highly efficient oxygen catalyst found

Rechargeable batteries and hydrogen-fuel production could benefit

excerpt:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 28, 2011) — A team of researchers at MIT has found one of the most effective catalysts ever discovered for splitting oxygen atoms from water molecules

Comment:

I found this from the comment section of the Nuclear Ammonia post referred to in an earlier post.  Here's a reference to a pdf file which describes Nuclear Ammonia as a killer app.  The final cost over a 30 year period would not be insubstantial.  However, it should be kept in mind that the cost of what we are doing now may be an order of magnitude higher.  In other words, this would be cost effective, not to mention, cleaner.

The Thorium technology and ammonia ideas are not new.  Thorium fuel cycles were experimented with decades ago.  The same is true of the an ammonia powered auto, in which an updated version can be seen in this video below:

Nuclear Cement

Energy From Thorium

excerpts:

• In the recent Nuclear Ammonia article post, ammonia was illustrated as a fuel that could propel vehicles in a zero carbon era.
• Using nuclear heat and power, chemical engineers can design plants to synthesize CHx fuels from any carbon source.
• Project Green Freedom is conceived by Jeffrey Martin and William Kubic of Los Alamos National Laboratory. The idea is to use a nuclear power plant to provide the energy to synthesize fuel, and use the air flow of the cooling towers as a source for carbon from CO2 that makes up about 0.035% of the atmosphere.
• The lime cycle has been used to make mortar for construction for millennia.
• This process is the conception of Darryl Siemer, a retired nuclear chemist from Idaho National Labs. Heat from a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) would be transferred to the kilns to heat the sand and limestone.
• The process would be carbon neutral, because the fuel synthesized and eventually burned would release CO2 into the atmosphere that would be absorbed by cement hardening as it is used in construction.

Comment:  This reminds me of what I wrote about before.  You can do better than carbon neutral with this, you can go carbon negative if you can recapture the carbon and recycle it.  Thus you will close the carbon cycle and be more efficient in the use of energy as well.

I'll have to look up the post on nuclear ammonia.  I wrote about using ammonia in fuel cells as well.

Update:



Here's another video with Kirk Sorensen discussing a lot of the history of nuclear power and Thorium's place in it. He explains what went wrong and how it might be corrected.

The title of it is called "LFTR in 5 Minutes - THORIUM REMIX 2011", but it is about 2 hours long, so watch the first 5 minutes if you are in a hurry. On the other hand, if you have the time, it is well worth watching the entirety of the video.

Electric bus charges wirelessly at University of Utah

 ksl.com

excerpt:

A new transit route through the heart of the campus will feature a full-size city bus, operated with an electric motor. But it will never need to be plugged in. Instead, it will get its energy wirelessly thanks to a magnetic field emanating from the pavement.

 Comment: This technology appears to have advanced greatly over the last several years.  With this much progress, it bears watching.  The significance of electricity is not only in its cleanliness and quiet operation.  Electrical motors are much more efficient than internal combustion engines.   Even if the electricity is produced using fossil fuels, economies of scale and the superior efficiency should make the concept economically worthwhile as well.

Tesla Motors presents the 3rd Millennium electric sedan- MODEL S

Tesla Motors presents the 3rd Millennium electric sedan- MODEL S

excerpts:

• Tesla Model S offers the responsiveness and agility expected from world’s best sports cars while providing the ride quality of a sedan.
• Tesla’s uniquely quiet powertrain have been combined with scrupulous noise engineering to obtain the sound dynamics of a recording studio.
• Assume average energy usage per mile is approximately 300Wh/mile (188Wh/km).
• can bring tough competition for cars such as the BMW 5-series
• 3,825 pounds (1,735 kg) 
•  0–60 mph (97 km/h) in 5.6 seconds
• base price of US$57,400 

This article could have been better written.  It is hard to tell from reading it what its actual range is.  It may be up to 300 miles.

Model S offers pioneering architecture with three battery option each achieving unprecedented range of 160 miles (standard) when fully charged using a 42 kW·h battery pack (24 kW·h/100 mi, 108 mpg) and battery pack will contain 5,000 lithium-ion cells, 230 miles and 300 miles. [comment: Huh?  Is it 160, 230, or 300?  Maybe it is an option, but that could have been made clearer here.] 

Electric cars are still no bargain.  But it appears that Tesla is approaching the market with a strategy that makes sense.  But this won't make much of a dent in the demand for oil.

Nissan fuel cell stack with 250% of the energy density versus 2005 version

Next Big Future

The Nissan Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle (FCEV) is ready to go. They just need the hydrogen distribution network.

Comment:  But that shouldn't be a show stopper.  You can reform hydrocarbons for the hydrogen.  Someone mentioned sulfur poisoning.  If that's the last remaining hurdle, we may see hydrogen powered vehicles soon.

 

Graphene-Based Supercapacitors

with energy density of nickel hydride batteries (NextBigFuture)

excerpt:

Among the many industrial applications of capacitors, the new capacitors developed in this research offer promises as power sources for electric and hybrid vehicles, which require high energy density.

If this holds up, you can forget about hybrids. Capacitors have an infinite number of charge/discharge cycles and can be charged/discharged fast. The key may be in figuring out how to exploit this capability.

2012 Chrysler 300, Dodge Charger get 31 mpg thanks to 8-speed trans

AutoBlogGreen

That Highway mileage.  City mileage is 19.

That's a German automatic transmission licensed to be built in house.

New charging stations will soon give electric cars freedom to roam

by Bill Sheets, Herald Writer

• While more than 50 charging stations are available to the public in the Seattle-Tacoma area, only a handful are up and running in areas north
• By the end of the year, the Schnells or anyone else with a chargeable vehicle will be able to drive an "electric highway" to Canada, Oregon or across Stevens Pass without having to worry about running out of juice.
• The state's new stations will be located 40 to 60 miles apart.
• ECOtality has built more than 400 charging stations so far in people's homes in the central Puget Sound area, in addition to the 50-plus public outlets, said Rich Feldman, Pacific Northwest regional manager for ECOtality.
• Most of the stations will be located at private retail locations such as shopping malls, where users sometimes may shop, eat or have coffee while charging up
• Almost all of the public stations operating now are free of charge.
• How to find charging stations

The free electricity part ought to get somebody's attention.  These type of vehicle work best in mild climates, such as in Seattle, Washington.  Houston gets pretty hot, and the air conditioner would run the battery down too fast.