Looking To Better Engines Instead of Electric Vehicles 570
hlovy writes "Don Runkle thinks it's engines, not batteries, that will make automobiles cleaner and more efficient. 'We unabashedly say that we have the best solution,' says Runkle, the CEO of Allen Park, MI-based engine developer EcoMotors International. The startup, which brought in $23 million in Series B financing this summer from Menlo Park, CA-based Khosla Ventures and Seattle billionaire Bill Gates, has designed an opposing piston, opposing cylinder engine that uses fewer parts than traditional motors do and generates more power from each stroke of the engine, CEO Runkle says. He says the 'opoc' engine is smaller, lighter, and less expensive than the motors already out there, and a more viable option than switching automobile fleets over to electrical power."
Slashvertisement (Score:5, Interesting)
Maker of supposedly cleaner engines thinks that cleaner engines is a better idea than electric vehicles. In other news, maker of windmills thinks wind energy is better than solar. Manufacturer of solar cells disagrees. BP thinks they're all full of shit.
Worse, take a look at the submitter's profile - very few posts (though going back a ways) and a whole lot of story submissions pimping some company or other. I'm catching a whiff of an ad campaign here.
Re:Room for improvement. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Damnit slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
You think that the EV's are being powered by unicorn tears? No. It is coal.
Depends on where you live. Still, ironically environmentalism has pretty much killed all non-coal economic sources of electricity - as nice as it is, solar and wind are still far more expensive than then their baseload counterparts.
I'd be building nuclear plants, but you can get EVs that are 'powered' by solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc...
EVs are one of the reasons I think that 'conservation' isn't going to save us from having to build nuclear power plants. EVs get around 3 miles to the kwh. People tend to drive 12-15k miles a year. That's 4-5k kwh/year. Take a 'standard' 2 car household, that's 8-10k kwh, 667-833kwh a month. Or around 2/3rds the standard electric bill. We could save 1/3rd the electricity we currently use by using energy efficient appliances and turning off the lights and such, only to turn around and double our usage by plugging our cars in.
EVs aren't, can't be the 'only' solution for replacing oil based fuels. But they have their spot, I can say that.
Re:why not both? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, hybrids easily get 50-60 mpg at similar speeds though. So do small diesels (those can do even better, in fact).
You do realize these are exactly the circumstances where a hybrid drivetrain actually helps a lot, even compared to small diesel engines?
Re:energy density (Score:3, Interesting)
Two stroke diesel engine (Score:5, Interesting)
The only reason IC engines are even competitive with the electric motor is because of the high energy density of the fuel carried on board. If you solve the energy storage problem for the electric motor, there is no way IC engines could compete. Not on efficiency, not on torque, not on emissions, not on noise pollution, nothing. You are held hostage by the fuel tank. Not the IC engine.
Re:why not both? (Score:3, Interesting)
Short term, I see engine designs and hybridization (why run a gas engine at a stop light?). I also see E85 coming from other sources than corn, which will slow down the need for overseas dino juice. Better our vehicles be drunkards than carnivores.
Medium term, I see nuclear power allowing for use of thermal depolymerization and technologies to suck CO2 from the air to combine it with water and make crude oil, thus allowing for gasoline to be produced and existing infrastructure kept. Why nuclear power? It is carbon neutral, inexpensive, has a lot of energy generating capability in a small area, and the technology is very mature.
Long term, nuclear fusion, supercap technology, and electric motors. However, there are large hurdles before this happens, from getting the power/weight ratio of supercaps on par with chemical storage mechanisms like gasoline, getting fusion productive on a wide scale basis, and getting an electric grid that can handle transportation 24/7, so vehicles like the Nissan Leaf can plug in, even when parked near the Pravda "shop" by Marfa Texas.
Re:opposing cylinders? (Score:3, Interesting)
What I see is: Significant increase in complexity - three piston rods per cylinder, six crankshaft attachments to rods per cylinder pair - plus piston rods on the outside of the engine block.
Good for small engines, but massive increase in complexity and size for more than one cylinder pair.
Also, much of the claimed advantage of cylinder shutdown is negated by gasoline direct injection (an alternative method to reducing pumping losses at low power levels).
Re:Room for improvement. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's sort of inherent to the design. The big problem with a (wankel) rotary's emissions is that the combustion chamber is relatively long and flat (think of a really thin banana), which means that the flame front(s) have to travel farther and faster in order to completely burn everything. Since this is easier to do in a cylinder (ie: piston-engine), a rotary tends to put out more unburned and partially combusted gasses - the bad stuff.
That said, you can fix anything by throwing enough money at it. Most rotary engines i've seen have at least two spark plugs per rotor (equivalent to having two spark plugs per cylinder) to help spread the flame front. Maybe there's a better/faster way of ignition such that it travels the length of the chamber at (very very very) high speeds? Maybe some sort of (frikkin') laser? Who knows?
How is this anything new? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:opposing piston, opposing cylinder engine (Score:5, Interesting)
The deal with lower piston speeds is all about momentum. The less momentum a piston has, the less energy is wasted trying to get it to suddenly move in the opposite direction.
Unfortunately, one of the problems with opposed-piston designs is that they really just move the problem of from one spot to another. Sure, your pistons have less momentum, but you end up attaching two of them (the outside pistons) to incredibly long and relatively fragile connecting rods. At that point you either have to limit the amount of power/cylinder you're producing (so you don't break the rod), or you need a big, thick, heavy, super-strong rod to handle high loads (power) and vibrations (rpm) - at which point you've defeated the whole purpose of reducing the rotating mass (or, alternatively, the total mass when you stack 10 of these things together) anyway.
Opposed piston engines are nothing new. In fact they're over 100 years old. And this guy hasn't given us anything radically new that would thrust an opposed-piston design to the forefront of internal combustion.
So to trot out an old meme: Nothing to see here, move along.
Re:opposing piston, opposing cylinder engine (Score:3, Interesting)
Now the 'pushrod' being discussed here is in fact a 'pull'rod. i.e, it's primary load is under *tension* not compression. (likewise, it will have a light-duty suck stroke which will compress the rod). Also consider that this rod will have to be very long. If we had failing push-rods, you can bet this thing is going to have to be *very* strong to not snap under extreme tension.
As a disclaimer, I am not familiar with relative compressive & tensile strengths of high-tech alloys. I am assuming that they are, in general, far more durable under compression than tension, right? If not, then I retract this whole thing
Re:why not both? (Score:2, Interesting)
The OP isn't entirely incorrect. GE for one is designing locomotives with more sophisticated power systems to increase fuel efficiency. Namely, they are incorporating regenerative braking and a battery system;
http://www.getransportation.com/rail/rail-products/locomotives/hybrid-locomotive.html [getransportation.com]
history downscaled (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes opposed piston is an old idea. For a time they were popular for high power density applications, and high efficiency applications (awesome axial flow properties). The reason this old creation fell out of favor is that, for the high-density extreme-efficiency uses fulfilled, there was an all around better replacement: gas turbines.
Gas turbines, however, have their own host of issues which make them unsuitable for all applications. Captone's 30kW microturbine, for example, is itself small, but has a sizable host of systems to support it and deal with the high temperatures, and costs a decent fraction of a million dollars last I checked. It and it's upsized bretheren are found in buses, and the occasional exotic-- see the CMT-380: a car custom built around the sizable & demanding microturbine power plant.
Given the challenges of using gas turbines, EcoMotors opting to dust off and enhance the next best thing makes some sense. There's big opportunity to evolve this already uber efficient two stroke's airflow with modern techniques and tooling. You've pointed out a number of mechanical challenges, but these seem to me considerably more mundane than the challenges of adapting a gas turbine to an every day machine. It may be old tech, but it's considerably better than what powers nearly a billion motorized vehicles on the roads and in the fields today.
I'd say the revival is both well timed and worth pausing to examine. Please feel free to contribute alternative reasons for their having fallen out of favor; would be most interesting to collect more facts or anecdotes.
Re:why not both? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not in Europe, anyway. Here its typically 750RPM when idling, 1500RPM when applying power. No other speeds are really useable because all the gas flow is in resonant pipes.
In reality, most trucks here are similar too - but there is a slight power band and by having 12 to 24 gears, you can stay in a fairly narrow power band.
Incidentlally, the received wisdom is that you improve MPG 10% for each additional gear you have because of being able to stay in a narrower power band (assuming the power band is narrowed to suit the range of gears as well).
(May not apply to petrol engines) (in my country a "gas" engine burns natural gas, and not petrol).
Re:The same sorry mistake (Score:2, Interesting)
The world just doesn't work like that, Hydrocarbons won't vanish overnight. They just get more and more expensive, and as the expense climbs, people come up with solutions.
The English burned up all their wood, then found coal, then found oil, and that is how things work.
On one hand, yes, genuine catastrophes are rare. And I happen to be in the camp that hydrocarbons are not rare, they are just getting more and more expensive, in both direct extraction costs and environmental costs
On the other hand, your real life example sucks. The Brits burn up wood, found coal, and then discovered that oil was plentiful if they kept the Persians under their thumb AND made a deal with Sauds who are tied directly to Islamists who want to turn the clock back one thousand years.
Gee, what could possibly go wrong with a game plan like that?
Our present oil economies are indirectly subsidized by seven hundred billion dollars of US defense spending every year. That is not sustainable model. And the coming multi-polar world will make it less sustainable still.
And finally, I would note that the Anasazi and Rapa Nui were blossoming cultures right until wandered over the cliff. Present prosperity does not necessarily indicate resilience when the world changes.
Re:energy density (Score:1, Interesting)
The Stone-Age did not end because we ran out of stones.
The Bronze-Age did not end because we ran out of bronze.
The Iron-Age did not end because we ran out of iron.
And the Oil-Age will not end because we run out of oil, but because something better will come along.
Gravity still gets a vote (Score:3, Interesting)