Dump Your Deezel

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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by CitroJim »

Mandrake wrote:
white exec wrote:Black cabs are heavy lumps - unnecessarily so - and so are their militant and well-organised drivers.
This made me laugh out loud on the train. :rofl2:
Yes, the only part of their body that gets any exercise at all is their jaws :twisted: :lol:
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by Gibbo2286 »

This page and the links away from it are very informative for anyone needing to understand better the emissions story.

https://www.dieselnet.com/tech/dpf.php#principle
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by CitroJim »

One thing that occurred to me riding home last evening... Cars these days are very heavy and thus need large, powerful engines to perform and due to their size and power output the pollution they generate I would believe would be all the greater.

In the world of bikes the goal is to make them as light and as aerodynamic as possible by the use of composites and so on. It would seem to me that if they did the same with cars they could employ much smaller engines and both be much cleaner and economical without undue loss of performance...

After all, it worked well for the likes of the GS and most of the Panhard models of years ago.. Light aerodynamic cars that gave great performance with quite small engines...

Safety need not be compromised... F1 technology proves that...

I'd love to see the end of the current trend for lardy, bulky obese vehicles and the return of nice svelte, lithe models...
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by Homer »

lexi wrote:2K is ok IF you were buying a new car anyway. To me, that is the depreciation on purchase as you leave the dealers. The diesels are horrible. My Donk C5 emits a noxious smell under the carport on idle, yet looks clean running through the exhaust. No plans to sell mind you..........bangerenomics!
What happened last time was it pushed the price of bangers up as people bought them in order to get the scrappage discount off a new car.

So if you actually wanted an old car to run then you were priced out of the market. Not to mention the number of perfectly healthy cars which might now have been classics which went to the crusher.
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

CitroJim wrote:One thing that occurred to me riding home last evening... Cars these days are very heavy and thus need large, powerful engines to perform and due to their size and power output the pollution they generate I would believe would be all the greater.

In the world of bikes the goal is to make them as light and as aerodynamic as possible by the use of composites and so on. It would seem to me that if they did the same with cars they could employ much smaller engines and both be much cleaner and economical without undue loss of performance...
I'd love to see the end of the current trend for lardy, bulky obese vehicles and the return of nice svelte, lithe models...
An outfit from Llandrindod Wells are totally in tune with those thoughts, and are attempting to bring a fuel cell hydrogen vehicle into production and subject of the thread on this very forum entitled....

WelshCarChat-Riversimple

To be successful I feel they are going to have to create their own Hydrogen supply chain to their potential customers, because all the "current energy" (for want of a better phrase) is going into Battery Electric Vehicles, and the support charging networks for them.

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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by CitroJim »

Excellent! The Riversimple, barring its rather odd looks, is really just about exactly what I'd see as a very promising small car for the future and embodies exactly my lightweight and efficient thinking :)

Somehow it reminds me of a Citroen Bijou!

I think if they can get the styling right and a decent hydrogen distribution network going the they're on to a winner...

That Toyota are looking at fuel cells too will be a huge benefit...

I see fuel cells as far more promising than battery electric in the long-term. I see battery electric as a purely interim measure and somewhat of a dead-end.
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by Hell Razor5543 »

I remember several years ago James May tested a hydrogen fuel cell car (a Honda) in USA (maybe California), and he stated that he believed he was driving the car of the future. It drove like a normal car, it did not take ages to top it up (unlike an electric car), it had zero emissions (well, OK, water), and it was not hideously expensive. The only issue was the fuel itself; hydrogen, and setting up refuelling stations.
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by CitroJim »

Hell Razor5543 wrote:I remember several years ago James May tested a hydrogen fuel cell car (a Honda) in USA (maybe California), and he stated that he believed he was driving the car of the future. It drove like a normal car, it did not take ages to top it up (unlike an electric car), it had zero emissions (well, OK, water), and it was not hideously expensive. The only issue was the fuel itself; hydrogen, and setting up refuelling stations.
I remember that piece well James as I was rather inspired by it... Was it in an episode of Top Gear?
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by Hell Razor5543 »

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Re: RE: Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by mickeymoon »

CitroJim wrote:
Safety need not be compromised... F1 technology proves that...

I'd love to see the end of the current trend for lardy, bulky obese vehicles and the return of nice svelte, lithe models...
I think, cost wise and weight wise, a road car is streets ahead of an F1 car.

Consider the fact a 2017 F1 car will weigh 725kg. It'll protect 1 person, but even that requires them to wear a helmet and be strapped in super-tightly. It also costs millions each year for each chassis to be developed and crash tested.

Now consider your Focus or Corolla that weighs 1200kgs and will protect 4 or 5 people of various sizes at the same time, with multiple airbags, restraints, ESP, ABS, and lord knows what else - yet still have climate control, ICE, nice interiors and so on. Modern passenger car safety is a technological marvel. Building a strong carbon fibre safety cell for one person with designated crumple zones is not - F1 has been doing that since 1981, with some modifications and changes admittedly..

There's very little in a current F1 car that is at all relevant to road use IMO... apart from the amazing power units and hybrid systems. Mercedes claim to be getting over 45% efficiency from their petrol internal combustion unit, and a road engine gets around 18%. To be knocking on the door of 1000bhp from a1.5 litre, fuel-flow limited petrol motor combined with a energy recovering 160bhp hybrid system, and being able to run it hard for 200 miles on limited fuel is something remarkable. They were limited to 100kgs of fuel.

Nigel Mansell's 1992 Williams Renault had around 825bhp and a fuel capacity of 220 litres to get it the same distance, considerably slower than a modern F1 car.




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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by lexi »

Don't forget that Govt. Oil Companies and big banking have the final say in all of these things. If it doesn't suit all three, then the science and research means little. Those three above, own scientists anyway.
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by harryp »

""After all, it worked well for the likes of the GS and most of the Panhard models of years ago.. Light aerodynamic cars that gave great performance with quite small engines...""

... surely Lotus in a nutshell? - and inserting and removing oneself is one for a fairly young audience. Had a good laugh/smirk watching a gent getting into his Ferrari about 3 years ago; he must have been all of 50. Took him 3 tries and about as many minutes - hey ho!
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by Mandrake »

CitroJim wrote: I think if they can get the styling right and a decent hydrogen distribution network going the they're on to a winner...

That Toyota are looking at fuel cells too will be a huge benefit...

I see fuel cells as far more promising than battery electric in the long-term. I see battery electric as a purely interim measure and somewhat of a dead-end.
Up until recently I would have been right there with you Jim regarding hydrogen fuel cells. But in the last few years my opinion has shifted.

I was a big proponent of (the theory of!) Hydrogen as a fuel for nearly 20 years, as it could be used both to power the then dominant internal combustion engine (a spark ignition petrol engine can run on Hydrogen with modest modifications to fuelling and ECU mapping, similar to an LPG conversion, and give a bit less power than petrol but more power than LPG) or with fuel cells to power electric motors.

It seemed like the ideal clean "universal" fuel since it could power both current internal combustion engines (petrol designs anyway) and electric cars via a fuel cell. Beyond cars you could also use it as a replacement for natural gas for home heating and other purposes. And the byproduct of burning the hydrogen ? Harmless water vapour. What more could you ask for ? At the time battery technology was nowhere near what it is today (I think this predates lithium ion completely) so batteries seemed like a complete non starter to me for serious electric vehicles. (In fact this remained true for nearly 20 years)

I vividly remember an article I first read around 1990 which I think was from a late 70's or early 80's edition of either Electronics Australia or ETI, (Dad literally had stacks and stacks of both!) interviewing an Australian inventor who was trying to patent a new more efficient and safer means of electrolysis and storage of hydrogen. He also had on show in the article a prototype petrol engine modified for hydrogen running, a modified gas heater and so on. I wish I could remember his name or find the article but I've so far failed.

The big problem with hydrogen was always that electrolysis was VERY inefficient, and storage was bulky and low density, because you had to store the hydrogen and oxygen in separate cylinders, or forgo the oxygen cylinder entirely but then get incomplete and not completely clean combustion since trying to use the oxygen in the air ends up trying to burn nitrogen etc, which is the same problem internal combustion engines have with NOx. In short burning Hydrogen in air instead of with pure oxygen is not nearly as clean.

The reason why electrolysis was traditionally so inefficient (we're talking about well under 30% here) is because to capture the hydrogen and oxygen separately you have to space the electrodes quite far apart so that one gas can be collected in one tube and the other case by another. We've all done that experiment in high school chemistry with the glass apparatus I'm sure! A wide electrode spacing in a very non-conductive liquid like water means very high resistance which means most of the power is wasted heating the water rather than electrolysing it.

To make electrolysis of a non conductive liquid like water even possible in the first place you have to contaminate it with something like salt, but even then the resistance is really high and efficiency is really low. Although he tried to beat around the bush a little in the article to hide what he was patenting, his "invention" was essentially the idea that you CAN capture the hydrogen and oxygen together and store them together safely using the right design of storage vessel.

If you can collect them together "pre-mixed", you can make the electrolyser MUCH more efficient by designing closely spaced and interleaved electrodes - think of the design of the plates in a car battery and you pretty much have the design of his electrolyser - very efficient because the electrode gap and thus resistance is so much lower, and there is a large surface area. The real secret of his invention though was probably the insides of the storage vessel, which I'm going to assume was some kind of honeycomb anti-explosion design which was probably novel in the 70's but not anymore.

It turns out that hydrogen and oxygen don't spontaneously explode at room temperatures even when mixed in the perfect ratio as they would be straight out of an electrolyser, so as long as you keep the pressures and temperatures in a safe range and design the storage vessel correctly its no more dangerous than a tank of petrol. Because it's pre-mixed in the correct ratio you simply need to meter the flow of the gas to control the output without having to worry about balancing a mixture, and because you are not burning air you're not producing nitrogen oxides etc... all very tidy.

I don't know what ever came of his plans, I did read a few years ago that he had passed away but other than that I don't know.

Anyway that was my position up until a few years ago, but seeing practical EV's from the likes of Tesla and witnessing the staggering improvements in battery technology I now really do think that Hydrogen Fuel cell cars will be the Betamax of the car industry and will not last more than about the next 10 years and they will eventually give up on them as weight, energy density and charging times progressively improve on batteries to the point where there is no point to a fuel cell car. (If you can get 300-400 miles from a charge that takes 20 minutes, do you really need more than that ?)

Also consider that hydrogen (or hydrogen/oxygen) fuel is a physical good that has to be transported somehow just like petrol and diesel - either by pipe networks such as the national gas network (except it would have to be another separately built out network, which doesn't exist yet) or by tanker or boat as petrol and diesel are now. On the other hand we already have a national electricity grid that can transport electricity from one end of the country to the other relatively efficiently without transporting ANY physical good. It's all just electrons bouncing back and forth on stationary infrastructure, so in that sense it is always going to be more efficient than pumping or transporting a physical good somewhere.

Granted there isn't enough capacity in either generation or transmission at the moment for everyone to be suddenly using electric cars, but it won't happen over night so as the demand grows the grid will have to grow with it. Just like the demand for oil refineries, petrol tankers and petrol stations grew with the increase in petrol cars...

One final point (which was the original point I intended to make in this post before I went off rambling :lol: ) is that batteries provide one VERY important feature that EV's of today need that fuel cells do NOT provide for. And that is regeneration. What use is braking regeneration if you have nowhere to store that energy like a battery ?

In a pure fuel cell electric car you would not have regeneration and would have to throw that braking energy away as ICE cars do, dramatically reducing efficiency compared to a battery EV with regeneration. So a practical fuel cell electric car will have to have either a substantial size battery or super capacitor as a place for regeneration energy to be temporarily stored. And in fact I believe that fuel cells are not able to provide high instantaneous output for Tesla like acceleration anyway, so you need either a battery or super capacitor as a ballast for instantaneous demand from heavy acceleration anyway, with the fuel cell acting more like a continuous charger.

Once you have a hydrogen/oxygen fuel tank, a fuel cell, AND a ballast battery or super capacitor, that is a lot of space taken up in your car to make a practical system. So for the reason of regeneration alone, I think fuel cell cars will eventually fail to catch on and battery, super capacitor, or a battery super capacitor combination is the way the future will go.

Maybe I'm wrong - maybe once demand for petrol and diesel starts dropping significantly due to EV's perhaps Petrol stations, seeing the writing on the wall, will start offering hydrogen pumps, but if Hydrogen EV's have already died on the vine by then it may be too late for them...
Last edited by Mandrake on 09 Feb 2017, 12:18, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by harryp »

Reckon the next upcoming gripe on EV's will be similar to the current emissions scandal; that of concocted range figures :shock:

In any event, as I have noted somewhere before, an independent testing agency is required, maybe using the MIRA circuit to test vehicles. Even steady speed runs over a few laps at speeds up to say 80mph would reveal the true situation. The Motor (?) used to carry out such tests many rears ago '70's - 80's IIRC. What the hell, can't see it happening due to pressure from the motor industry. Why can we not have a government who does just that? Is it that difficult to find politicians with backbone?? :roll:
Please do NOT answer that one! :wink:
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Re: Dump Your Deezel

Post by Mandrake »

harryp wrote:Reckon the next upcoming gripe on EV's will be similar to the current emissions scandal; that of concocted range figures :shock:

In any event, as I have noted somewhere before, an independent testing agency is required, maybe using the MIRA circuit to test vehicles. Even steady speed runs over a few laps at speeds up to say 80mph would reveal the true situation. The Motor (?) used to carry out such tests many rears ago '70's - 80's IIRC. What the hell, can't see it happening due to pressure from the motor industry. Why can we not have a government who does just that? Is it that difficult to find politicians with backbone?? :roll:
Please do NOT answer that one! :wink:
Range figures for many EV's is grossly overstated by their manufacturer, yes.

However there is already independent testing and data available - in the US it is the EPA who provides that independent testing. There is an equivalent agency for the EU but I don't recall off hand what their name is.

So all you have to do is look at these independent tests to get the facts.
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