turboplanner

2 hours ago, Ian said:

Unless something changes dramatically FCEVs have lost the market. It appears that battery vehicles have won and the people pushing the alternate technologies have lost.

 

Not at all. I'm doing an analysis of the current Greens Policy for the coming election where they start with the statement that Australia has one of the worst takeups in EV in the world, which is not true. I estimate the Greens budget to achieve what they want is about 6.5 trillion dollars per year, and that's coming out of our pockets, not theirs.

Out of around 270 Countries I'm looking at quite a lot  introduced a few EV and then turned their back on them. The market share in Japan has been declining year by year and they were one of the first into the market.

A second group is giving lip service to battery electric vehicles (BEV) by reporting all forms of vehicle with some electric power, so hybrids which don't do much for CO2 reduction are included.

These countries and the industries and "experts" pushing BEV are in addition, only quoting numbers of vehicles produced, so countries like USA and China look like they are leaving us in the dust, however when you go and get actual figures and actual markets and use what the auto industry has always used to judge success; market share, it's a vastly different story.

The change this year is that countries are beginning to quote BEV market share as BEV market share. This is showing that PHEV (Hybrid) share is declining in most of these countries, probably because it doesn't do either job well.

The countries on the chart below are the ones who have openly quoted 2021 market share. There's another group which have only produced figures for half year 2019, so it's a work in progress to pull vehicle numbers from market sectors and calculate the market share from total production which is a well established figure around the world.

5%market share is about the minimum for a viable auto industry business so some of these countries are shaky.

The UK look to be in trouble because it went out on a limb and set a cutoff date after which ICE cars will not be produced, and 11.6% market share indicates they don't have the ability to do it. It would have needed to be above 50% to succeed.

6 hours ago, Ian said:

Haven't you just repeated what was stated on the first line. I think that we're saying the same thing.

Also, from a mathematical perspective, in terms of losses isn't the cascading loss pretty much the same as the loss when sending the power direct as AC power loss is pretty much linear with HVAC?

In theory, yes, but practically, no. Without the Queensland Sugar Mill power, on a very hot night up the east coast, Adelaide would be blacked out, even though is has a Big Battery/Wind Farm at Hornsdale, just 239 km away.

On that theory, every town and city should have its own power station to minimise transmission losses, and that used to happen up into the 1950s, but the cost of power to the cosumer was far cheaper using a grid with losses.

6 hours ago, Ian said:

However if power is very cheap (think Solar) you don't care as much about losses it becomes more reasonable.

Solar has been sold on the basis of free energy which it is, but it's not cheap. It's a good example of where theory is quite different to practice. The best example of Solar to date has been rooftop installations, which certainly work, but the Total Cost of Life, primarily due to the complexity of the system (and I mean the real cost of life without RoI etc being left out) is not competitive with mains power, so the Eastern States Grid wins again.

6 hours ago, Ian said:

Anyways this is a way away from airplane fuels and whether Hydrogen is a good or bad fuel. Personally I think that Hydrogen is a pretty silly fuel for plane for the following reasons.

1. It is expensive.
2. It is volumous, the only possibility is cryogenic storage. Energy density/Volume is low.
3. It burns in very low concentrations, great inside an engine but a bit of a bummer with leaks and sparks. Modern turbines burning kero type fuels was seen as a huge advantage.
4. It is difficult to contain, it permeates a number of metals causing issues and it is very difficult to stop leaks.

However I may be wrong.

Direct hydrogen burn cars, which are the current novelty in some parts of the world require bigger tanks than LNG, and LNG tank size was one of its downfalls, and because of its extreme handling safety requirements, the chances of allowing members of the public to stop at a Roadhouse and dangle a hydrogen hose are remote, so infrastructure becomes and issue. An aircraft does have spare space in the fuselage, but even with woven fibreglass rovings the weight of a safe container would probably push it outside the envelope, and a refuelling network is problematic, probably not able to make enough money to exist.

Fuel Cell vehicles, known in some countries already as FCEV in an effort to boost flagging EV market share, are able to operate with a hydrogen tank about the same size as a petrol tank, but have a lot of equipment, and cost in 2005 was three times that of a diesel powered vehicle, so a long way to go to economic success, and faced with the same infrastructure issue as straight hydrogen power. Hyrogen as well, is an asphyxiant, so any leak is deadly.

....the roller is removed. After working on it for two days, Turbo had a better idea; "Why not take the Perkins out of the roller, and just fit it to the Aeroflite" he thought, and soon was back in the air. He had to stop shooting ducks, which his Aboriginal status allowed, because of the traditional Perkins rattle which sounded like a continuous stream of ball bearings being dropped on a corrugated iron roof, but "if truckies can drive interstate with it, why can't I" Then he realised the Perkins era was before radios were fitted to trucks and .............

.......an approved sightseer, exempt from having to show an ASIC over Ginasland (incorporated in Switzerland). This made him the only person in RA flying able to fly over this land, because no one in RA owned an ASIC, and ....................

........alarming to TurboNgarrundjeri who identified as an Elder of the Yallock Yallock tribe who had never ceded their traditional lands which straddled Gina's latest mine.

Gina wanted to get the mine in production and TurboN wanted to fund production of Aeroflites [allaboutavrev]  and he was getting sick of sitting under a gidgee branch in the middle of nowehere so they struck a deal where Gina would build .....................

20 minutes ago, Captain said:

Relax everybody, one of the Mars Rovers has got out of the fish trap (but 2 of the windows still won't wind up properly).

 

https://fb.watch/cuUU1VXUda/

 

Source: Flinders Ranges Tourist Office

6 hours ago, Ian said:

Generally you want to generate power near where you consume the power.

If you're storing the power you want it near where you consume it, because if you have 30% transmission losses your battery or generators need to be 30% larger if they're remote.

The costs associated with these project is mind boggling, the solar project to supply Singapore with 20% of it's power is 30Billion, Singapore has about 5.6 million people and no heavy industry. The project consist of solar panels, some battery storage and a High Voltage DC link. That's up there with NBN's cost across Australia. It's effectively 1.2 million people for 30B.

 

Australia used at least  265,232 gigawatt hours (GWh) in calendar year 2020, and people generally want more power. If we add vehicular transport to this you can assume that we'll need another 50% additional

Has anyone actually looked at the identified sites in this study? Below are proposed storage areas in the Araluen Valley near Canberra. Given the environmental/ownership and community issues associated with development on this scale does anyone actually think that this is feasible? People complain when a plane or drone flies overhead, let alone a gigalitre of water perched above their properties.

It is academically true that there is a power loss if you generate in one location and supply to another, but the task is to get the job done, and it's a fact that on a stinking hot day in a couple of states when South Australia has used up its 50 minutes of Big Battery, and when 40 years of "renewables" power paid for by us taxpayers is producing only 1% of Peak Power required up the east coast, it's quite possible that the people of Adelaide are being powered by several Sugar Cane Mills around Cairns. They don't send the power to Adelaide, they send it into Carins which sends its power down the grid and so on until there's enough surplus power in Victoria to supply Adelaide, so while the theory is correct and the ideal is to generate power where it's used, in real life someone will come up with work arounds to get the job done.

9 hours ago, pmccarthy said:

In pumped hydro turbines are also pumps. No pump can draw more than about 6 metres which is an atmospheric head of water after losses. So all the gear has to be at the bottom of the shaft or pit, not at the top.

Downhole irrigation pumps can be bought off the shelf and the smallest sit in a 300 mm dia. pipe which can be suspended from the top of the pit.

..........booze thought old Alistair, a Nguggarubba man who still lived the way of the past, except for the one treat per day of Vickers gin, and was irritated by the current generation who were losing the ways.

"Morton was one of them", he thought as he noticed Morton walking towards him with a sheet of corrugated iron on his back. "What that on your back fulla?" asked Alistair. "That my Doona" replied Morton, and old Alistair signed at the weakness of the current generation, who were .................

...... to fly to New York before the white man knew it was there,

"What did you fly to New York for? asked Turbo.

"Things" said Morton, who was getting sick of this discussion .........................

.......so maybe we'll have to check all the equipment in the space program, but Morton stepped up and said "Bullsh!t mate, you city fullus are all the same. We know its too small, but us fullus  fill the diff with squashed banana, and put a condom over the carby and stick a few more holes in it and we've got a match. Turbo's engineering is great for and and he's our Elder now, because we are looking for more land to claim.................

........landed near a Mission Community in the western desert. Within days it had been fitted with a front axle from a Commer, rear axle from an FC Holden and engine from an XA Falcon and was o its way with 27 people to a nearby (200 km) swimming hole where ................

13 hours ago, RFguy said:

here is a good chart

Hydrogen as a direct burnable fuel - 130 MJ/kg . but storing it densly is a bastard

lots of energy to store it at 700 bar .

BTW remember the energy density below assumes 100% reaction yield (only about 33% for petrol ICE) 

that's why petrol below is at 12 kWh/kg but I have 4kWh/kg - efficiency of use) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interesting and very much to the point. To achieve equivalent power to petrol in race cars we approximately double the diameter of the main jets.

......rocket scientist. His V2 rockets reached Space and his Woomera launched V5.5. ........

1 hour ago, Ian said:

Battery electric vehicles have basically won the race. All urban transport will go this path.

 

I agree with your breaking down of each fuel into its characteristics, and I also recommend doing this before making a commitment to a new fuel, however that is stil only a small part of the vehicle package, which has to meet mutiple Applications.

Looking purely at efficiency also can trip you up, because the end product has to be buildable and also has to meet the Application requirements.

You might be aware that the one of the Greens policies in the current Federal election is that Australia is one of the worst EV performers in the world and if elected to Government they are going to subsidise EV, apparently to be come a leader.

Let's look at the subsidy first because we know the No1 objection to EV is price, and from my Industry experience you can sell benefits only up to about 10% price premium before you start losing market share. If we  take a family car, which means a family budget, affordability is $25,000, nd we could maybe squeeze that up with marketing programmes to $27,500.00 but that's when the tap turns off. You can buy a Chinese equivalent EV for $40,000.00, so the Greens subsidy has to be $12,500 per car to get the sales going.

To make a dent towards EV dominance, the Greens need a target market share of around 50%, and that's 500,000 car sales per year for our market; the dream of manufacturing them here is gone because Australia doesn't have the volume for efficiency required.

This might come as a surprise, but the Greens plan requires you the taxpayer to pay for this subsidy, and the annual, meaning out of your pocket every year, bill for 50% market share would be $.625 trillion.

Faced with that most Australians would prefer to be laggards I'd suggest, and you can't use a smaller amount becaise it would have no more effect that the current sorry efforts by the manufacturers involve, Australia's current BEV market share being 1.95%.

So I thought I better bring myself up to date with the basis for the Greens policy; that we were "one of the worst".

Well for a start, 58 Countries, some of them big don't figure in any of the published world EV analysis.

Of those left 5 so far have disregarded EV and show no sales figures, just a few proptypes for the cameras.

That leaves just 47 Countries producing market share figures. for EV.

I mentioned Austria some time back and how they puffed up the numbers by including Hybrids as EV, which of course they are not, and a lot of countries now quote PEV for their market share, which doesn't give us any real idea of genuine EV sales.

So some have started quoting BEV (Battery EV to make it clear what the target is). 

Over the last few years I've noticed EV proponents pushing the number of BEV produced by China; well it is a very big consumer and perhaps their reason is to cover up its 2020 EV market share of just 2.6%. And that's 2.6% PEV.

The UK, which has a policy to close down its ICE car production soon, and is running out of power, so building power line under the sea to Norway, and will buy power off them, has a current BEV market share of  11.6% (28,865 vehicle on total sales of 103,244. This is probably not a good enough performance to make the shut down date, so changes will have to be made.

The USA BEV market share is 2.96%, 443,386 on 15 million vehicles, so not a lot different to ours, and just ahead of China.

The rest are a work in progress to try and extract genuine figures, but in the long run will be worth the exercise.

1 hour ago, RFguy said:

The long and the short of it :

 

Hydrogen is hard to store volumetrically competitively.

 

Making hydrogen from electrolysis sux.

Best is reforming from natural gas etc. But then you might as well run AVGAS.

So, hydrogen might be good for buses, trucks.

Battery tech needs a 10x leap. Wait 10-15 years.

best option right now is a motor driving a prop, 15 minutes of battery , and a wankel engined gasoline generator holding the whole thing up.....

 

electric motor and 1 hour of circuits from a battery is quite feasible right now. good for training plane but little else.

 

 

 

What about when it's used in the fuel cell process to generate electricity to drive the wheel motors.

38 minutes ago, Ian said:

Actually the seals on the rotary operate best at higher RPM, it's the low throttle times where the engines typically struggle so constant high throttle should be a boon for them. 

 

In the Mazda RX2 I owned, the engine was very poor in urban traffic under 4000 rpm, gutless in fact, but at around that rpm became a fire breather, so expensive on fuel around town, and difficult to mix with conventional traffic.

On the highway it would spin the wheels at 5500 rpm and 160 km/r, so very good for fast highway travel before speed cameras.

It was happy to cuise at 209 km/hr for several hundred kilometres, again, before speed limits; faster point to point than a light aircraft with preflights and taxi at the end.

With all of this, I didn't notice any seal issues or excessive oil consumption; just excessive fuel consumption and inflexibility in the city.

However............if there was a constant head wind on a country trip, even at a cruise of 110 km/hr, the silicone seals (not the tip seals) would burn out, requiring a pull down and replacement, which I could do in a weekend.

In a light aircraft application it would be a juggling act to set cruise rpm just under that beautiful high power threshold that burns silicon seals and uses a lot of fuel.

5 minutes ago, Student Pilot said:

Good luck if you can find anything to do with CASA that smells of roses, the stench of stifling over regulation, the stink of pilot persecution. No smell of roses......

I wonder how many private pilots have actually written requesting exemption, giving plausible reasons.

We had electric fork lift trucks also; I worked on the design of some components including the acceleration module.

LPG did the same job in cool stores and was more versatile with greater range so that replaced electric.

If someone invents a better battery they could come back in.

Electric milk carts died because home delivery of milk died, so not becaise of any shortcomings; they replaced the horse and cart where the horses learnt the route and the driver could run to the house and back to the cart which had automarically moved on. Now and again there was some urgent shouting as the horses made for the depot. This would be an autonomous application today, but it's more economical to deliver milk in hygienic cartons to supermarkets in semi trailers.

The trams are still electric, in the application where very heavy vehicles take advantage of an electric motor's ability to deliver maximum torque for startability from 0 km/hr. Same for commuter trains, but both pull power direct from the easter States grid because high torque = very fast battery drain.

The cable electric omnibuses were replaced by diesel, not for technical reasons, but because diesel was more useable; it could change routes instantly, take detours to avoid road closures, and be rediverted instantly. For example some years ago there was a tram strike at the time the Formula 1 GP was on in Melbourne. Hundreds of route buses were chartered, they ran along the tram lines and there was no loss of service.

There has been some experimentation with electric and Hydrogen fuel cell route buses. Hydrogen fuel cell buses worked very well in a three year trial with the MTT in Perth, but had an instant death because of the 300% higher cost than diesel.

Electric is a disadvantage with route buses because of the fast drain. The diesel engines on main routes are usually a lot more powerful than on outer services.

There is an opportunity for electric on some school bus routes.

In coaches, there is an opportunity for electric short distance charter and private school coaches.

Many designers have tried to come up with a design to transmit power to cars, starting with the Nikola Tesla invention, others with a road pickup (the achilles heel being when you get out of your lane or take a wrong turn and the motor dies.)

2 hours ago, Student Pilot said:

It's an indicator of how GA has been treated, nobody gives a sh!t. Federal gov not interested, rich people vote libs anyway and they can afford to fly their rich. CASA being the biggest impediment to flying, you have to be a lawyer to read anything they release. They are actively discouraging aviation, I don't know how people maintain an AOC these days.

Originally Terrorists were using Cessnas and ramming buildings. In the Melbourne area after those attacks people were bolting padlocks on the controls. It never made any sense to me to need a card when anyone could just walk around the end of a mesh fence but then again a shopowner last week got a knife wielding crook to flee by throwing custard at him.

....Budgy Smugglers at Aspen......but she hadn't fastened her boots and the board took off hurtling down the mountainside. Too late, Turbo saw what was happening and hurtled straight down the mountain-side, and lickily his streamlined six pack provided just enough smoothing and he started to catch up. bull hadn't moved; he was still engrossed in his new Manual, "The Shift Key".

Turbo saw a granite boulder off to his right and swerved on to its snow bridge. He flew high in the air and then dropped vertically five hundred feet easily passing her, but landed with a terrible crash on the icy snow. Somewthing was wrong; he couldn't move his legs, but as she slid towards him at over 150 km/hr he grabbed her, and saved her life. Now he couldn't feel his arms either, and .............

...a quick trip to see Tobias at the Austrlian Hire Shop for some boots and a board, and heard the most common call on the Mountain "Fasten Your Booooots" as she ....................................

....sees Olaf down there on the ski slopes, and jumps out to ....................

......the ability to control the ........

54 minutes ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

And short-range cars. At the moment, a 2 car family should have one electric.

I'd be careful; the Millenials are regularly calling on people your age to sell your house for affordable housing and move into a single bedroom flat "because you don't need a big house any more".