The roads are yet to be dominated by fully electric passenger vehicles but that isn’t stopping the development of large electric vehicles weighing several tons.
As reported previously, a Swiss consortium is to electrify a Komatsu diesel dumper truck capable of transporting material down a quarry 20 times a day. Regenerative braking on the journey downhill will power up the truck’s 700kWh battery pack and reclaim more energy than is required to make the return trip. Excess power could then be fed back into the grid, according to the truck’s developers.
This led us to ask if electrifying large vehicles is practical, and over 500 respondents were largely optimistic that it is.
A total of 36 per cent of respondents agreed that it is a good idea in certain applications, whilst 24 per cent thought the technology ready to be applied to trucks.
A fifth of those who took part thought that the electrification of trucks is hindered by power/battery requirements, and 15 per cent held the view that infrastructure can’t support it. The remaining five per cent couldn’t find a fit, electing instead to choose the ‘None of the above option’.
The Poll generated a good deal of debate, with many of the 40 comments making reference to the Swiss consortium’s plans for the Komatsu diesel dumper truck. Of the question posed by the Poll itself, Nick Cole said: ‘Yes technology can make these things work, but only in special cases. The power requirements are enormous and cannot be sustained for general purpose vehicles which require refuelling in a matter of minutes and not hours. And as yet the infrastructure is to all intents and purposes non-existent. Fuel power density, transportability and flexibility is the key.’
George Cramp added: ‘…the batteries will be very heavy and charging will be a problem. To overcome this, use compressed H2 and then drive the vehicle’s electric motors with no pollution and very fast charging and no problems with sourcing lithium and cobalt. The technology for catalytic hydrogen manufacture exists already. It uses a lot of electricity but we will soon have an abundance of this with turbines and solar if the government allows this to be built.’
Finally, John Patrick Ettridge said: ‘The technology is already available, it is vested interests in the old technologies that are holding progress up.’
What do you think? Keep the debate alive using Comments below.
An open-minded corporation could replace the inline engine by a radial engine. Reducing the power/weight ratio a great deal (See this example: http://www.clearenergysystems.com/system_components.html). The opposite way: battery will add an enormous amount of weight to the vehicle. The larger the vehicle and power required the less gain. 50 tons of battery are required to replace 1 ton of kerosene. So we won’t go to space with batteries. Where is the cut-off point?
I wish there were options for more than one answer! It would make for a more rational survey. Yes technology can make these things work, but only in special cases. The power requirements are enormous and cannot be sustained for general purpose vehicles which require refuelling in a matter of minutes and not hours. And as yet the infrastructure is to all intents and purposes non-existent. Fuel power density, transportability and flexibility is the key. Yes it will be great to remove dependence on fossil fuels but like fusion power there are in practice and on a large scale absolutely no alternatives.
As a correspondent noted last week, how on earth are vehicles supposed to provide relief in places devastated by hurricanes with a completely destroyed electrical infrastructure?
Many years ago when my father was Chief Engineer at Coop in Scotland there were electric vans they could travel no further 40 in a day and it took 12 hours to fully charge them good for local limits only.
Is it just me, or does this sound like a mythical perpetual motion machine? If the extra energy is claimed when the truck is full, I can see how it may generate enough to charge the battery, but with losses in the system, even so I find it hard to believe you get more back than you need to exert for the return trip. This also only works if you load is picked up at the top of the hill rather than the bottom, i.e. the opposite way round to, for example, an open cast mine/ quarry.
That was my thoughts too.
Mine too. The Swiss are good at many things but perpetual motion isn’t one of them.
Unless they’re taking spoil from the top of a mountain further down. But then they’d just use a slide.
I think the point was that the truck was carrying a load downhill so presumably it would be carrying nothing back up. It depends on the truck weight and load of course but this seems entirely feasible. But for general use I don’t see large vehicles being entirely electrically powered until we have a hydrogen-based economy and some people won’t be too happy about storing liquid H2 in their vehicles. Battery capacity and hence weight is the killer here, not to mention the generation capacity required.
Remote mining sites might do better with a large solar farm and a battery changing facility than trucking in fuel for diesel engines. It would depend on how remote.
Diesel Engine manufacturer Cummins are also working on electric trucks.
http://social.cummins.com/unveiling-next-generation-energy-diverse-products-technology-solutions/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2017/08/29/take-that-tesla-diesel-engine-giant-cummins-unveils-heavy-duty-truck-powered-by-electricity/#f1c302478f1b
“Regenerative braking on the journey downhill will power up the truck’s 700 kWh battery pack, reportedly reclaiming more energy than is required to make the trip back up” – so there IS a future for perpetual motion after all………! – joking aside, brilliant to see electrification in other automotive areas
Read the article link please :
“Ten hard years of toil are in store for the electrically powered Komatsu HD 605-7. It is expected to transport material down from a mountain ridge and into the valley 20 times a day – more precisely, from a quarry on the slopes of the Chasseral to the Ciments Vigier SA cements works near Biel. ” (in the valley)
Sorry, but there is no way that regenetative braking could harness more power on the downhill run than is required to go back up hill again. This is arrant nonsense. Power will be lost in both the conversion of momentum into battery power, and battery power into motive drive.
To gain power would require conversion efficiencies greater than 100%. I can only conclude that this gibberish was put out by the PR dept.
Hi Graham
You would be correct about the ‘arrant nonsense’ of the vehicles being able to do the return run on the energy reclaimed from downhill braking – except that on the downhill run the vehicle has a full load of stone on board and on the way back up it is empty. Assuming that the payload is 30%+ of the vehicle all up weight the downhill regeneration should be capable of more than compensating for any reasonable mechanical and electrical in efficiencies.
This downhill ‘flow’ of heavy stone has been used for years to power cable railways where the laden wagons going down one track easily pull the empty wagons back up the other track using a steel rope and pulley.
Thanks William. Or indeed water, as demonstrated by the Lynmouth – Lynton funicular in North Devon. http://www.cliffrailwaylynton.co.uk/how-it-works/
Have you forgotten that it will be fully loaded downhill and empty going back? So it isn’t “arrant nonsense” – apology?
I am not a trained engineer but the batteries will be very heavy and charging will be a problem. To over come this use compressed H2 and then drive the vehicles electric motors with no pollution and very fast charging and no problems with sourcing lithium and cobalt. The technology for catalytic hydrogen manufacture exists already. It uses a lot of electricity but we will soon have an abundance of this with turbines and solar if the government allows this to be built.
Has anyone ever looked into the possibility of removable batteries? i.e. you go into a “garage”, a spent battery is removed and replaced by a fully charged one – possibly with a difference charge if the battery is not fully spent. If the industry could agree on a standard, then it could vastly improve turn-around time, especially for commercial vehicles.
We have had these on our fleet of electric forklifts for 20 years, charge them all overnight, looks like the future for longer distance travel to me.
It seems quite reasonable to me that the regenerative braking system can extract more power when controlling the descent of a dump truck with a 50 ton load, than is needed to power the same dump truck back up the same incline when empty.
Electric commercials are real and while not suited – as yet – for the majority of applications, will undoubtedly grow in numbers as the technology (especially battery chemistry) develops and users come up with new strategies for their use – e.g. with ‘swap out’ battery packs.
The quarry is at the top of the mountain the processing works at the bottom, the E-Dumper Truck is loaded with 65 Tonnes of Rock and then regens down the mountain and charges up the 4.5 Tonne 700Kwh Battery. It will discharge surplus energy overnight to the grid. It will save a 1000L of Diesel a day apparently.
I have heard some clever ideas to justify electric vehicles replacing fossil fuel ones, but can they be serious about using a dump truck to convey spoil down a mountain when a conveyor sounds like a simpler option? You could even build the regeneration circuit into the conveyor’s cable drives and power the whole site for free….
… And me too . ( With centuries of Swiss watch-making, and all those ‘perpetual’ chronometers – who knows ?!?!? Perhaps they’ve finally defied the laws of thermodynamics . . : )
Imagine the chaos as electric vehicles run out of charge on motorways and come to a halt on the carriageway or block a slip road. How will they be recovered; will the AA or RAC go out with a massive battery pack and wait there for several hours while they recharge the vehicle, only to find out they have run out of power and need recovery. The potential for collisions will be immense as vehicles run out of power and have no way of moving them off the road. What happens in the motorway services as hundreds of motorist arrive for a charge and find that the few charging points are already in use; will you need to book recharging times weeks ahead or book into motels for a few days as you wait your turn?
” Regenerative braking on the journey downhill will power up the truck’s 700 kWh battery pack, reportedly reclaiming more energy than is required to make the trip back up. This excess power could then be fed back into the grid, according to the truck’s developers.”
Surely you jest or you have taken leave of your senses.
Yup. One or the other …
I must admit that I usually envisage of material being brought up out of a quarry; I am sure there are (a few) cases where the quarry is above the road – but I would suspect a limited market for such…
Perhaps the wording could have been clearer and some editorial comments might have helped elucidate things
Perpetual motion machine – I don’t think so.
Better to stay with the proven technology and direct electric vehicles effort elsewhere.
We need to start thinking of the hydrogen economy, especially for all heavy vehicles including buses. It seems to me that alternatives to batteries is taking a back seat.
The infrastructure for battery power will have to be immense and expensive even for light vehicles together with the search needed for raw materials. It would probably negate the extra expense of hydrogen production.
If most of the comments on here are a fair reflection of the intelligence and vision of British engineers at large then I despair! Maybe they’ve been breathing diesel fumes for too long. Ironically the man professing not to be a trained engineer speaks the most sense.
Infrastructure: Currently lacking but a well-recognised issue. simply a question of investment.
Fast charging: Rapidly improving and with the development of large capacitors, solvable.
Range: Again fast improving. It beats me why lorry drivers would suddenly lose the capacity to read a fuel gauge when their motive power changes from diesel to battery. Of course if Elon Musk has his way there won’t be a driver, so problem solved!
Weight: Improving all the time.
The days of the internal combustion engine are numbered.
Anyway nobody has yet mentioned the existing all-electric method of moving heavy goods over long distances. It’s called a train! A proper multi-modal distribution network would use rail for the long distance bit and fleets of electric vehicles for the short distance collection and delivery at each end. Making electric vehicles work for this will be much easier.
Strangely enough having read down the list I find the last comment to be one of the most balanced and sensible.
Although we can generate electricity with the right materials making an efficient generator (making it lighter), we are still not quite at the point of storing energy efficiently. Charging batteries at a fast rate is still a problem, although advanced materials are making this better. Capacitors are great as an intermediary supply storage, but with any moving vehicle the efficiency of power to weight ratio is clearly the biggest issue.
It does worry me that claims made may be true on paper, but from a practical standpoint, lack clear statistical measured fact.
The limited use cases I believe are inner city uses where air quality is a problem, Quarries and countryside have no need just yet.
Compare this to warehouse material handling trucks and you can see this is easily implementable in some applications.
Batteries swap in/out. When lowering the mast, energy is recovered (but not as much as to lift a pallet!). All very proven and reliable.
Electric car sales are currently around 1.7% of total car sales. I think that shows just how impractical electric cars are for many. Even massive subsidies are failing to spark interest.
It’s a niche market and it will be the same story for larger trucks and commercial vehicles.
Electric power still has a long way to go if it is to supersede the I/C engine.
One thing John Yeatman did not mention is cost cost cost. In the commercial sector ‘Cost Is King’ where businesses are run by accountants.
The technology is already available, it is vested interests in the old technologies that are holding progress up. Just look at how slow thing are progressing, especially before the Tesla came on the scene. Any thing that can be made in a smaller size can be scaled up to the larger sizes, and with improvements to renewable energies, and battery storage, and increase in scale of manufacturing, it is only vested interests that are holding up the developments required. I invented the Gemini Electric Motor & Generator a state of the art electric motor and generator, details at: http://www.geminielectricmotor.com and have experienced first hand the relentless ongoing persecution of any body trying to change from ICE motors or electricity as the new fuel for vehicles. I am currently working on a way to transmit the electric power wirelessly, which will require smaller batteries, and constant charging. Before you say it cannot be done, that is what the old Crystal Radios did, granted they only captured very small amounts of electric power, but enough to make the radio work.
I believe Nikola Tesla had a similar idea! good look with it. Similar ideas exist with contact phone charging.
I am an engineer willing to embrace electric vehicles even with some of the mad claims of fast charging! 350kW chargers, if a traditional garage forecourt had 12 of these it would require its own power station (4MW). That aside John is correct in that it’s the old technologies holding up the new. Range anxiety with EVs should be replaced with ‘is this journey really necessary?’
Many of these comments sound like the engineers who told Henry Ford that people want faster horses. Maybe it’s our education system that turns visionary 18 year olds into blinkered “professionals”. The Duke of Edinburgh said “Everything that was not made by God was made by an engineer”; let’s try to show some vision of a different future.
It certainly looks like PR gibberish at first. However it is touted as a dump truck; so if it is full at the top it will have more potential energy to convert as it goes down than work required to come up if it is empty on the return trip.
This makes no sense at all, gravity is free and if you mine at the top of the hill and conveyor it to a slide you have electrical power driving feed conveyors as you need them, and gravity is free.
At last realisation is kicking in: Scottish Power says UK will need to boost capacity. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-41373466). We just need to divert money from HS2 so instead of benefiting a handful of big cities and their (usually non-engineering) big businesses the whole of society can gain something more long-lasting.
Trains require tracks and swathes of virgin countryside to operate in. Power is still needed to be delivered to the trackside at each end and at various points in between. The local end delivery will also require power. The points of production of the goods to be carried are inevitably dispersed adding to this problem. Until there is a universal multi MW or even GW electricity supply everywhere fossil fueled vehicles will still be required. Unless there is commensurate investment in an alternative less harmful power dense liquid (and hence extremely flexible) fuel.
A bus that travels over 1000 miles on a single charge might just be the thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JpMTWdPZ6c
It’s too late to put the ‘arrant nonsense’ back in the bottle. Lets see the data, then we can make an informed decision.
On ‘platooned ‘ truck trains, will they fan out into echelon across the motorway like the peleton in cross-winds?
You miss the potential energy in the load hauling downhill, drop off, & move empty vehicle back to top of hill. The overall loading / unloading process of course cannot be > 100%, however this is a very cost effective method of moving material.
The carbon and emissions fear campaigns have diverted an enormous amount of engineering time and massive financial penalty to non-problems. The luddites will be happy when we are using the canals again and have sailing ships all to save a negligible amount of CO2!
Surely, the real problems facing the world that should be getting attention are getting electricity to the developing world, reducing chemical pollution, generating real growth in the developing world, and probably population growth reduction. These need a healthy western economy to progress, rather than one that is dependent upon unreliable, expensive energy.