Discussion > EVs - Charging / Solar Panels
Range anxiety?
More like a panic attack
- I know that feeling from my electric scooter experience, having had to push it the last 1/2 mile on a couple of occasions :-)
- as for Lithium battery fires - Lillium say they have it covered....
tomo
I see Jonathan Miller's view on things in France coincides with many of my own observations...
Back to EVs - I see DPD are now using electric Renaults for local parcels - I wonder how that's going, not exactly a predictable milk round - although they have sophisticated routing software that should ease range management. I heard gossip that British Gas had a field in Kent filled "a lot" of liveried up EV service engineer vans parked up gathering dust that had failed to perform in London.....
tomo
tomo
tomo: those "sustainable" aviation fuels appear to be mainly based on biofuels. Are they really going to turn even more food into fuel? I think most people would far prefer to see that extra harvest distributed to the starving of the world. If governments want to subsidise their farmers, that would be a far better use of the produce.
When they run planes on "SAF", I hope they will segregate the fuel and limit it to one engine. That aero engine book has made me aware of the unforeseen consequences of using fuels with different compositions, even though the main characteristics are the same. It quotes an example where the Germans dumped some excess high-grade fuel into a much larger volume of standard stuff and found, to their surprise and cost, that the blend performed worse than the standard fuel.
MikeHig
MikeHig
Mainstream commercial aircraft in the last 50 years have imho been increasingly designed around the fuel - engineering a fuel with adequate calorific value and environmental properties - and the handling of said fuel is non trivial (ie BA 777 falling out of the sky at Heathrow) - any substitutes driven by loony green fashion choices need to be extensively tested .... I'm unconvinced that mainstream fashion politics and unhinged, ignorant activism should drive engineering decisions.
"Green aviation" is driven by activism and PR/advertising - what could possibly go wrong?
I've seen assertions (from people with considerable experience ) that the substitute "zero carbon" fuels will be heinously expensive - and I'm guessing that they will in some cases struggle to meet the consumption requirements on some longer routes....
Putting the wrong fluids in aircraft has a long and sorry history.
tomo
I'll just leave this here
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/04/24/formula-e-cars-run-out-of-power/
tomo
More from Jonathan Millar about EVs in the Spectator:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-ordinary-motorists-can-learn-from-the-formula-e-catastrophe-?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=LNCH%20%2020210428%20%20House%20Ads%20%20SM+CID_d424b32cbd67f1eada9e54f689ec3570
MikeHig
MikeHig
thanks for the chuckle there ...
Jonathan is, it seems , suffering from a mild case of retail remorse...
My favorite car naming near gaffe is the Rolls-Royce Silver Mist
tomo
A bit of neology from the Ford Motor Company's marketing geniuses.
They'll sell you a "mild hybrid"
tomo
Audi e-tron GPS sends driver to non-existent charger....and more
tomo
While they hand out public funds for research.......
- they don't apparently see any need to look at what it's spent on or whether there was a result?
tomo
I've been wandering around in the spreadsheet
There's some truly weird stuff that's collared some taxpayer funding - some descriptions of the work undertaken look to be brazen piss-taking!
I'm going to pursue Innovate UK a bit more to see the details of oversight / reporting.
tomo
tomo
I'm surprised that survey has not been reported by the MSM....not!
I do just wonder how big the survey was. I followed several links to the abstract of the survey but there's no mention of sample size.
MikeHig
MikeHig
I'm no fan of opinion surveys which don't expose their sampling (and questions!) - but that one suits my bias as far as non local noodling in EVs goes - so I'll spread it ... That said, my experience with electric ("50cc wim-bim" style 4hp) scooters led me to be very careful about predicting range and getting a bit fixated on keeping the batteries fully charged.
Elsewhere:
- the hydrogen demonstrator plane ar Cranfield
“On April 29th, our R&D aircraft made a safe, off-airport landing in a field just outside the Bedfordshire airport,”
Looks like the pilot's landing assessment was off... I wonder if he had enough power to go-around? - on paper the electric motor should be up to the task...
Zero Avia are the recipients of £2.7 million in UK taxpayer largess.
tomo
It will be interesting to learn what caused the crash. One of the things I've learnt about fuel cells from comments on car forums is that they need a battery with significant capacity. It acts as a buffer since the cell does not change output at all quickly. It must be tricky to size the battery for an aircraft application because there isn't the option of just going slowly or even stopping that you have in a car.
They've had plenty of funding:
"The program is centered around hydrogen-electric technology amid the growing industry-wide sustainability targets. The business’ total private funding is now at over $53 million. Moreover, the overall funding raised since the launch of the company is now nearly $74 million." BA have pitched in $24m.
MikeHig
MikeHig
I spotted a few corporate gravy train crew in there at Zero Avia with job titles straight out of the local council job title lexicon - if BA pitched in £24 million - they likely got a number of executive gigs as a result....
I wasn't aware of the architectural tiering of cell+battery+motor but thinking about 260kW and just the Ohmic losses - it makes sense in a vehicle, especially when weight saving is factored in.
I wonder what the time to recharge is for the buffer battery system.
tomo
I wonder if the propulsion system had a beta pitch facility....
tomo
Recharge time was what I was pondering when I read about that crash: had all the "boost" been used and the fuel cell output on its own at that moment was insufficient.
Nothing like a bit of very slightly informed speculation to warm the grey cells on a miserable evening!
OK. A quick look at the Toyota Mirai suggests it wasn't a factor. That car has a 128 KW fuel cell stack and the battery is only about 5 KWh so the fuel cell response time must be fairly good.
MikeHig
MikeHig
It seems likely that it was a misjudgment at some level from the pilot - brakes do fail - but more often as I understand it tailwind, mismanaging the approach and planting the plane too far down the runway are what customarily precipitate going through the fence and into the undergrowth :-)
TOGA power would I'd have thought been an option - but this is a prototype.... maybe the driver fluffed the approach.
That said - it's caused me to think about the power draw required for the onboard environmental systems >> heaters and a pressurization system. It gets colder as you go up in altitude etc. etc... It seems likely that electric aircraft are going to struggle with the arithmetic of going higher and faster and icing condition equipment that is required on commercial flights....
There will be an investigation - although the press release from Zero Avia makes it look like they're intent on investigating themselves! (hinting that they have a few bureaucrats on board!)
tomo
First comment on the AVWeb article:
‘Sustained some damage’
And the Hindenburg suffered an overheating issue.
tomo
tomo
The Roadster is an old car now. I saw 3 of them at Goodwood years ago. They were there as technology demonstrators. The idea was for them to do a few laps so off they went. One crashed on the first lap (driver "caught out by the weight"!). Another "expired" on the second lap. The last one returned to the pits after the 2nd lap.
It was a lash up of the Lotus chassis with (rumoured) hundreds of mobile/laptop batteries forming the pack.
Lotus have just launched their new electric supercar, the Evija, which touts 2,000 HP. Track testers said it was extraordinary.....until the charge ran out after 15 minutes of hard use.
MikeHig
Spectator article on the woes of buying an EV:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-i-regret-buying-an-electric-car?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=LNCH%20%2020210419%20%20House%20Ads%20%20SM+CID_10c24a0d4ccff322a8ea9ddeecf46123