Electric car design
A random person emphatically recommended that I watch Collapse. So I did.
It's basically an alarmist scareumentary, focused on the concept of peak oil. Not a bad one, although it does exaggerate some things; like, for example, how all plastics are supposedly made from oil, and how oil is the only assumed source of energy (we've got plenty of coal, for one). Nuclear pays for itself; that's something else they neglected to mention. However, I do agree on a very crucial point: oil is currently indispensable as a vehicle power source, due to its relative cost-effectiveness. We CAN have electric cars; indeed, the development of electric vehicles is from the same timeframe as the development of steam vehicles, and electric cars sprung up in the same era as cars powered by internal combustion engines (as seen from the Electrobat and Detroit Electric). Had there not been cheap gasoline and coal available, we might have developed a civilization around electric vehicles - although admittedly nowhere near as explosively as we had, since batteries are costlier to build and charge, especially if there's no coal for easy power generation.
The scareumentary is right on another point: we are a growth-oriented society. If it cannot maintain growth, the society goes apeshit. This is, of course, very bad in the long run, and we need to become more sustainable. How that'll work in the future doesn't matter, but in the here and now, I believe that it's very important for us to create some kind of cost-efficient electric vehicle that sidesteps the need for fossil fuels (fossil fuels are good for economy - just process them at large, efficient facilities and not beneath the hood of a grimy beater driving down the street). That vehicle has to succeed in two major ways: total cost of ownership, and utility. The Tesla Roadster fails both. Smart cars - electric or not - fail utility. The Toyota Prius (hybrid, but close enough) fails cost despite being a great car otherwise.
What's the matter with them? Lithium-ion batteries. The damned things undergo aging, which is an insidious loss of capacity over time familiar to anyone who uses cell phones, laptops, or portable shavers. They are also explodey and have a limited tolerance for charge-discharge cycles. Li-ion batteries mean that the Toyota Prius demands costly battery replacement; one of the reasons the company has wised up and uses NiMH batteries now... The Tesla Roadster is basically hung out to dry, since Li-ion is all they offer, and it's a pretty exotic power pack that goes into that car. They couldn't settle on a more robust battery since the Roadster is supposed to be a playboy ride of sorts, and low endurance would be an unacceptable buzzkill.
If you ask me, NiFe batteries are the way to go. The things are damned near indestructible and piss-cheap. Environmentally friendly enough to dump into the ocean en masse with a clear conscience; the envirotards would be certain to appreciate that. Obvious downsides include relatively low energy density (something like a fifth of what Li-ion offers, and a sixth of what its bigger brother does) and slow recharge time. These can be fixed by making the vehicle power pack five times bigger and possibly replacing the whole thing with a robotic gantry crane at a "power station". A potential vehicle could have something like an enclosed flatbed platform that opens up, and allows the battery to be replaced. Pretty interesting, I think. Slow recharge time has one considerable advantage: when all those suburban daily drivers plug in at night, it won't cause the local substation to explode.
As far the motor goes, here the electric vehicles have an unquestionable advantage over internal combustion engines. Tiny; incredibly powerful; vastly more efficient; not requiring a plumbing and greasing nightmare; having very few moving parts... AC motors have a greater head up over DC, of course, and can easily vary their speed in response to variations of AC frequency (whereas DC is a fundamentally fixed-speed affair, with speed adjustment done through voltage variation at the expense of efficiency and within annoying limitations). It seems plainly obvious to me that synchronous AC motors are the way to go. AC is tricky to generate, however. It'll require a variable-frequency drive, which is quite wickedly expensive and unreasonably complex. For a while now, I've had a much more elegant sort of variable-frequency inverter in mind; an inverter using gas tubes, specifically of the thyratron variety. Oscillator tubes can do some pretty amazing things, and one of those is the ability to naturally generate smooth waves (as opposed to digital, square waves that transistors make). That right there obviates a huge issue with solid-state VFDs. Obvious problem is heating the cathodes, since people don't like to wait for the things, but that could be solved by sealing Plutonium pellets inside the cathodes. Naturally, the pansies will shrink away in terror from the Mighty Atom, and then try to forbid it, as they already have... Meh. Anyway, we need to make this happen somehow. For too long has the dream of nukes on wheels been dormant in a deep slumber. Having a thyratron inverter with small elements of something as safe as Plutonium (note: not a sarcastic statement) is a baby step.
It's basically an alarmist scareumentary, focused on the concept of peak oil. Not a bad one, although it does exaggerate some things; like, for example, how all plastics are supposedly made from oil, and how oil is the only assumed source of energy (we've got plenty of coal, for one). Nuclear pays for itself; that's something else they neglected to mention. However, I do agree on a very crucial point: oil is currently indispensable as a vehicle power source, due to its relative cost-effectiveness. We CAN have electric cars; indeed, the development of electric vehicles is from the same timeframe as the development of steam vehicles, and electric cars sprung up in the same era as cars powered by internal combustion engines (as seen from the Electrobat and Detroit Electric). Had there not been cheap gasoline and coal available, we might have developed a civilization around electric vehicles - although admittedly nowhere near as explosively as we had, since batteries are costlier to build and charge, especially if there's no coal for easy power generation.
The scareumentary is right on another point: we are a growth-oriented society. If it cannot maintain growth, the society goes apeshit. This is, of course, very bad in the long run, and we need to become more sustainable. How that'll work in the future doesn't matter, but in the here and now, I believe that it's very important for us to create some kind of cost-efficient electric vehicle that sidesteps the need for fossil fuels (fossil fuels are good for economy - just process them at large, efficient facilities and not beneath the hood of a grimy beater driving down the street). That vehicle has to succeed in two major ways: total cost of ownership, and utility. The Tesla Roadster fails both. Smart cars - electric or not - fail utility. The Toyota Prius (hybrid, but close enough) fails cost despite being a great car otherwise.
What's the matter with them? Lithium-ion batteries. The damned things undergo aging, which is an insidious loss of capacity over time familiar to anyone who uses cell phones, laptops, or portable shavers. They are also explodey and have a limited tolerance for charge-discharge cycles. Li-ion batteries mean that the Toyota Prius demands costly battery replacement; one of the reasons the company has wised up and uses NiMH batteries now... The Tesla Roadster is basically hung out to dry, since Li-ion is all they offer, and it's a pretty exotic power pack that goes into that car. They couldn't settle on a more robust battery since the Roadster is supposed to be a playboy ride of sorts, and low endurance would be an unacceptable buzzkill.
If you ask me, NiFe batteries are the way to go. The things are damned near indestructible and piss-cheap. Environmentally friendly enough to dump into the ocean en masse with a clear conscience; the envirotards would be certain to appreciate that. Obvious downsides include relatively low energy density (something like a fifth of what Li-ion offers, and a sixth of what its bigger brother does) and slow recharge time. These can be fixed by making the vehicle power pack five times bigger and possibly replacing the whole thing with a robotic gantry crane at a "power station". A potential vehicle could have something like an enclosed flatbed platform that opens up, and allows the battery to be replaced. Pretty interesting, I think. Slow recharge time has one considerable advantage: when all those suburban daily drivers plug in at night, it won't cause the local substation to explode.
As far the motor goes, here the electric vehicles have an unquestionable advantage over internal combustion engines. Tiny; incredibly powerful; vastly more efficient; not requiring a plumbing and greasing nightmare; having very few moving parts... AC motors have a greater head up over DC, of course, and can easily vary their speed in response to variations of AC frequency (whereas DC is a fundamentally fixed-speed affair, with speed adjustment done through voltage variation at the expense of efficiency and within annoying limitations). It seems plainly obvious to me that synchronous AC motors are the way to go. AC is tricky to generate, however. It'll require a variable-frequency drive, which is quite wickedly expensive and unreasonably complex. For a while now, I've had a much more elegant sort of variable-frequency inverter in mind; an inverter using gas tubes, specifically of the thyratron variety. Oscillator tubes can do some pretty amazing things, and one of those is the ability to naturally generate smooth waves (as opposed to digital, square waves that transistors make). That right there obviates a huge issue with solid-state VFDs. Obvious problem is heating the cathodes, since people don't like to wait for the things, but that could be solved by sealing Plutonium pellets inside the cathodes. Naturally, the pansies will shrink away in terror from the Mighty Atom, and then try to forbid it, as they already have... Meh. Anyway, we need to make this happen somehow. For too long has the dream of nukes on wheels been dormant in a deep slumber. Having a thyratron inverter with small elements of something as safe as Plutonium (note: not a sarcastic statement) is a baby step.