Archive for the ‘Automobile’ Category:
So Bring on the Plug-In Hybrid Already
Everyone’s heard of the Toyota Prius, Honda’s Insight, you know, the conventional hybrid vehicles (people spoke of them with hushed awe only a few years ago, and now they are “conventional”). These conventional hybrids, have a gasoline engine for power, and an electric motor to assist at low speeds. The electric motor obtains its power from an onboard gasoline-fired generator. Now there is another way to get power to the batteries that drive the electric motor – why not just plug the car in like with an EV? Now there’s an idea! Well, that’s what a plugin hybrid is – you put in two kinds of energy: gasoline and electrical. The utility power you get is generated on much better equipment with much lower rates of wastage than you could possibly put in a car. And that brings a great deal of savings on pollution.
But the plugin hybrid is different in one more fundamental way. It doesn’t rely on the gasoline engine as much as the regular hybrid does. The gasoline engine only kicks in for highway type speeds. The plugin hybrid aims to cover almost all of your daily commute on electric power. All the hype you have seen in the media about the plugin hybrid is having a little trouble actually getting the concept off the ground. A recent study says that plugin hybrid cars could take billions of dollars in government sponsored incentives to actually get off the ground. And for this reason, manufacturers haven’t really gotten involved yet. But that is set to change now. Toyota and General Motors will have plugin hybrid models out in showrooms next year. Plugin Priuses could sell in the thousands in a couple of years, they feel. And in 20 years, there could be 50 million on the roads in America. But that is only if battery technology advances as they expect it to.
And there is the main reason that customers have been slow to take up this kind of vehicle. Battery technology isn’t where it needs to be. Manufacturers feel that laptop battery technology is where the action will be. The Tesla electric race car actually uses standard laptop batteries, about 6000 of them to get going. Even so, no one is really confident that they will get cheap enough for everyday people. The battery pack itself could cost about $20,000. Since gasoline is not all that expensive, you would have to drive the electric vehicle 50 years to actually make any actual savings. And no one really wants to take responsibility for the infrastructure either – if you park your vehicle at work, where do you plug in the plugin?
What kind of improvements and mileage can you expect? Well the plugin Prius promises about 134 miles per gallon. And if you plug it in, it would be fully charged in under two hours. The world perhaps is moving away from hybrids towards all electric vehicles. Toyota isn’t really doing much about it at the moment; but that could be just because they’ve invested so much into the regular hybrid.
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Can We Expect Hybrid Electric Cars to go Mainstream?
Hybrid electric cars are at the cusp of becoming the wave in the automobile industry. Their popularity has been driven by the rising fuel costs and the need to have environmentally friendly form of transportation. Some of the latest innovations in the industry have seen these cars perform the same or even out-perform traditional gas-powered cars. The gas mileage of most hybrid electric cars is usually seen as the measure of performance of these innovations. While utilizing an electric motor, hybrid electric cars are also supported by a gasoline engine and run at city driving speeds. The electric motor can pretty much run by itself and the gasoline engine only kicks in when more power is needed. Generally, the term hybrid vehicle is used to refer to a vehicle that combines an internal combustion engine with an electric motor.
A number of hybrid vehicle configurations are available. The first of these is the parallel hybrid. Here, an electric motor and an internal combustion engine are used to power the vehicle. Automatically controlled clutches couple the two. The other configuration is the mild parallel hybrid. In this configuration, the electric motor is used to give extra output during an acceleration or deceleration. In the power split hybrid, one internal combustion engine and 2 electric motors are installed. The two motors are connected with the help of a planetary gear set. Series hybrids use the combustion engine to drive an electric generator rather than directly driving the wheels. Hybrid electric cars of this sort use the engine to either charge a capacitor, a battery or directly drive the electric motor.
Today’s hybrid technology, limited by the high cost of batteries is aimed at reducing fuel consumption through a number of ways. Combined with the electric motor, future vehicles are expected to employ regenerative braking to recapture energy and go into engine shutdown at idle to reduce fuel consumption. Gasoline engines are expected to remain dominant in hybrid electric cars with a possible mix of renewable energy sources like ethanol. Split path vehicles primarily function as motors and generators. They are very efficient. This is achieved by use of electric machines and inverters that convert energy from the engine to the generator thereby having a multiplication effect on the system efficiency. Strong magnets allow this high efficiency operation to take place and their cost is one of the limiting factors in hybrid electric cars going mainstream.
It is hoped with cooperation in the industry and as battery prices come down, hybrid electric cars will become mainstream.
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The Next Time Your Child Asks You about What Is a Hybrid Car
There is a category of vehicles that the government recognizes for its contribution to a clean environment (or its lack of contribution to a polluted environment): the Zero Emissions Vehicle standard (or a battery-powered car in everyday language). Not everyone has the stomach for the tame experience of such a car. For them, there is the SULEV standard – the super ultra low emissions vehicle standard – or a hybrid car in everyday language. So, exactly what is a hybrid car? The easy answer would be a Toyota Prius; but that would be neither here nor there. The concept is pretty straightforward: a hybrid car’s power derives from more than one sources. Usually, a car like the Toyota Prius or the Honda Insight has two power sources – gas and electric (or gaselectric). And they achieve their phenomenal mileage readings with all kinds of ingenious schemes that you would be most interested in hearing about.
If you ask a question about what is a hybrid car, the conventional answer doesn’t adequately explain the philosophy of it. Why should a car running on two different kinds of motor be efficient at all? Well, the conventional internal combustion engine you find in your regular car, basically, functions in an everyday situation because of the transmission. Each model engine is designed to run at a certain optimum speed; but you can’t really run an engine at just that one speed – what do you do when you have to race to work in the morning, and then slow down to inch along in bumper to bumper traffic? That one engine needs to run at all kinds of speeds, mostly at speeds where it is inefficient. What they do with a hybrid vehicle is, they give it a reasonable sized engine, maybe a one and a half liter one, and set it to run at just one speed, the one it runs most efficiently at. And then they get the car an electric motor to run off a bunch of batteries that they stick somewhere where there is space.
Surely you’ve heard that a car’s engine is most inefficient when you start it cold in the morning. That need never happen with a hybrid car, as the gas engine doesn’t operate when you are just setting off. At low speeds up to 15 mph, it is the electric inch motor that runs the show entirely, single-handedly. The moment you cross 15 mph, though, the gas engine starts to run in tandem with the electric engine. The gas engine only runs at its optimum speed, never higher, that is around 5000 RPM. That’s quite a non-stressful speed for an engine; since the designers know that the engine doesn’t need to run stressfully high rpms, they build it of lightweight material, that saves on dead weight. This is what is a hybrid car – clever ways brought together to coax every bit of savings from existing technology.
At the heart of any hybrid vehicle is a complicated gear set of planetary gears that brings the electric motor and the gasoline engine together to smoothly share load amongst themselves. This makes sure that the car doesn’t even need a transmission, automatic or manual, and the start button that you need to start a new car. That is what is a hybrid car actually – it always starts on the electric motor, so there isn’t a start button.
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