Energy thoughts: Me, my cars, and voltage!

      I am VERY energized at finding solutions to energy problems. In fact, it may be that “thing” I was put on Earth to do! Here is my biggest thought regarding energy. About 8 years ago, I started taking an interest in energy efficiency, especially as it relates to transportation. It seemed ridiculous to me that our internal combustion engines create so much wasted heat. So I studied the physics behind internal combustion. I looked at the history and probably all of the gas saving devices, contraptions, and snake oil available. I built some of my own and combed over patents.  My 73 Beetle at the time was a rolling laboratory and, frankly, I did have some success, regardless of what naysayers believed (and still do on my motorhome.) I’ll be happy to discuss that with anyone who wants to listen. However, no matter how you cut it, internal combustion engines have one big fault: combustion time. You put in something that explodes, not too fast and not too slow, and you have between 4 and 10 milliseconds to have it expand, push on the piston, complete burning, cool off enough, and get out. I converted a generator to use hydrogen instead of gasoline. It was amazingly efficient and ran so cool you could touch the engine while it was running. It was also quiet. But Hydrogen is difficult to store and I knew that it really is only a carrier of energy anyway.  Electricity is the way to go when it comes to transportation. Why? Because converting electric energy into motive energy is very efficient compared to heat engines and we’re trying to move after all. Heat engines are mostly heaters. That’s why they get so hot. In fact, most people don't know that part of the 14.7:1 "stochiometric" fuel to air ratio includes enough EXTRA fuel for evaporation at the end of the stroke to extinguish the flame and cool off enough to prevent meltdown. It is not actually stochiometric in the chemistry sense. Very little of the actual energy gets converted to motive force – perhaps between 1 and 15%. Not so with electric motors. They are 76-80% efficient, including gear losses and such.

      I was doing all of this because I could not see a way to transition the existing 250 million registered cars off of gasoline/diesel and on to alternative energy sources. I was enthralled with the Tesla electric vehicles, but wow they are complex and expensive. I would love to see us move to renewably sourced electricity, with a beefed up grid, and electricity based transportation. But that left me thinking. What about all the cars on the road today?  Then I got an electric bike motor with a LiFEPo4 battery of my own. It’s simple and it’s strong (not to mention a blast!) I can charge it to go a distance of about 30 miles at 28mph for around 4.5 cents from the grid (and my electricity is renewably sourced, so it's completely emission-free) I wanted to be able to charge it from my 12V system with solar panels (I have 800W of solar,) but it requires a 60V source. Fortunately, I am pretty good with electronics and can program microcontrollers, so I designed and built a device to charge the 48V battery from the 12V panels with a modifiable pulse width. It watches the voltages, pulses, and turns off at the appropriate time.  In this process I learned about the intricacies of charging lithium-based batteries and about how motor controllers work. Not that difficult really. So I looked at my bike and then looked at my ’69 Beetle. I envisioned axial-flux motors on each front wheel and a trunk full of batteries. Then I thought, “It wouldn’t take too much to design retrofit electric conversions to fit just about ANY car. I also am using a little-known open-source circuit for battery charging that is simple and efficient (capacitive transformer power supply.) That also means it would be inexpensive to produce.

      This way, everyone doesn’t need to buy a brand new electric car to get the benefits of using electricity for local trips AND they still get to use the gas engine whenever they want. There are many hurdles. Lithium batteries are very expensive – that’s the main problem. But I am convinced battery technology will just keep getting better and better with costs dropping.  Running accessories could present a problem, but just idling a gas engine doesn’t use much fuel, so until a good solution is presented, that may be it.

      I have thought of making this a focus in an individual masters degree study plan at Goddard College. When done, I would hope to have a complete design. If it didn’t go mainstream, I’d be able to do it as custom installations and have a fun little niche business.  

There you have it. One of many ideas running around in my head.