Rare Earth Motors Not Necessary for EVs

[Bret Cahill]

Just use the cheap low power low power density 10 kW motors that have been around for decades.

If you want to scoot through intersections and accelerate to freeway speeds in seconds use compressed air for short bursts of 100 kW power.

This technology has already been proven by UPS and Peugeot.


Bret Cahill

 

Alot of technology people think is new has been around for some time. I have an old book about cars fromn about 1910 or so - "A good horseman wil usually make a good motorist" or something like that. In it is a description of an electric car.

It describs a complex arraingement for the accelterator usiong multiple taps for I assume multiple windings on the motor or something like that. Fascinating that they could do it that long ago really, but people were smart. Smarter than today. No graphing calculator or any of that in math class.

The main problem with electric cars is not the motor, but the battery. That technology has advanced quite a bit but most of what is good about it comes with an environmental cost. And expense. he materials used are not cheap.

The reasons we do not have alternative energy and electric cars has very little to do with any conspiracy theoris involving oil companies. "Defense" contractors perhaps, but oil companies are not at the root of the problem. At the moment they are making money, but they know their days are numbered. Fact is, once a viable alternative comes up, they will be peddling that. For sure.

Another thing is you will never have an electric fighter jet. Well by definition it wouldn't be a jet, but the fact is that it is going to be a long time before they can produce the power to mass/volume required for such an application, as well as many others.

All electric motorsa have certain advantages over the fossil fueled engine. You don't get acid in the oil, or soot. No exhaust to worry about nor intake. Pretty much one moving part - the rotor, so one set of roller (or Timken or whatever) bearings, no maintenence. Well maybe not none at all.

If things were made to last, and you are really cranking this motor, permanent magnets can lose some of their strength, especially if there is alot of heat involved.

In fact you can eliminate the magnets altogether. Just use windings.

What REALLY pays in an electric car, if you have batteries that are somewhat forgiving when it comes to charge rates, is a scheme that uses the vehicle's inertia to charge the battery when deceleration is called for. Of course there are still brakes, but just letting your foot off the "gas" pedal charging the battery, for example going downhill, would turn the converter.inverter around sort of and boost the voltage from the motor turned ghenerator into enough to reverse the current through the battery. this circuitry is not all that difficult.

One advantage an electric car really has is with a propoerly designed motor there is no need for a transmoission. The torque curve starts at zero RPM. This reduces the weight for one, and makes a CVT look like stone skins and bear knives.

Even better was a concept car I read about. Not sure if they ever built it but supposedly this baby was to have a motor for each wheel. The problem with such a design is that for maximum benefit the motors would have to part of the unsprung weight, which is bad. Old rear wheel drive cars (supposedly) performed better with independent rear wheel suspension. This is only partly because off the new control they gain over the geometry, the main gain is because the differential became sprung weight rather than unsprung weight.

So for that scheme to yield the maximum benefit, the motors should be as light as possible. Lightness is good no matter where you want someting to move, but here it has even more importance.

So you talk of compressed air, OK, that is a possibility but you must realize just how much compressed air you will need. In a little shitcan sub 2 litre engine, have any ideas how high the cylinder pressure goes during combustion ? Let's just sat 100 PSI ain't gonna do it. Let's just say 500 PSI ain't gonna do it. Plus, somehting has to compress that air.

There are shemes with tricky transmissions using aa flywheel for that purpose. this adds a bunch of mechanical complexity which is not in our best interest.

I would advcate for say small front wheel drive motors that are lightweight and enough fo cruising, and perhaps a se of heavier and ore ppowerful otors for the rear wheels where the fact that they do not turn can be an advantage in that simple U joints rather than CV joins could be used, or maybe more unsprung weight in the rear would not be as much of a disadvantage.

Of ocurse now that Lockheed Martin has outdone the Tokamak by a factor of ten in size to output ratio, maybe blowing someone's doors off will take on a whole new meaning.

(yes, I was a speed freak. I mean when me, or most of one side of my family went looking for a car the first thing was up with the hood. What engine does it have ? How fast is it ? Later we got to whether it had like, seats. Windows. All ancillary items in our view. ;The center of the car is the engine, not the goddamn cupholder like these new engineers think. And those trick mufflers these days sound like shit. Look Man, a V8, if it is loud, is supposed to have BASS. I mean more bass than a rich wigger's Toyota with the dB meter stuck to the dash. I want to be able to lift the pavement, and then throw asphalt once I punch it.

An electric car woith enought power can do that and take you to 200 MPH in seconds, IF YOU GOT THE POWER FOR IT. You can load the thing with batteries until it is a two seater with no trunk or anything, where you can't even take it to the store for a pack of cigarettes because they won't fit, but what good does thaat do you ? Then you gotta charge this mess.

And that is the other thing. Electric car does not mean free rides.Instead of paying the gas station, you will be paying the electric company, or throwing up somehting off the grid.

Know what ? Teslas start at $70,000, maybe they should throw in a solar charger.

That brings up another thing, an electric car does not idle, so how to put in air conditioning ? Most people whoi live in areas where solar recharging wold be viable I think would REALLY like air conditioning.

 

[Bret Cahill]

Alot of technology people think is new has been around for some time. I have an old book about cars fromn about 1910 or so - "A good horseman wil usually make a good motorist" or something like that. In it is a description of an electric car.

> It describs a complex arraingement for the accelterator usiong multiple taps for I assume multiple windings on the motor or something like that. Fascinating that they could do it that long ago really, but people were smart.

Chauvinism of contemporaries.

> Smarter than today.

Some prof recently said that the average citizen from ancient Greece had a better well rounded education than most people today.

> No graphing calculator or any of that in math class.

In some fields precision and math are necessary.

In a lot of fields all you need to know is the effect. No calculations or graphs necessary. You can invent and write valuable patent claims based entirely on effects.

This vastly increases the number of potential inventors.

Galileo never intended to throw the lowly empirical sciences under the bus when he discovered that physics could be exact.

I once laughed at medical science because it was so experimental. Then Steve Jobs blew it off and died.

I'm not quite so chauvinistic now.

> The main problem with electric cars is not the motor, but the battery.

Fuel cell cars are also using rare earth motors.

> That technology has advanced quite a bit but most of what is good about it comes with an environmental cost. And expense. he materials used are not cheap.

The biggest problem as far as cost is that Li-ion degrades over time making battery cost twice the cost of the grid power that'll ever pass through it..

Nano materials may be the game changer. Stanford did something with carbon nanotubes and the NTU in Singapore just announced titanium dioxide electrodes.

Li-ion could be recharged in 2 minutes and last 10,000 cycles:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141013090449.htm

.. . .

All electric motorsa have certain advantages over the fossil fueled engine. You don't get acid in the oil, or soot. No exhaust to worry about nor intake. Pretty much one moving part - the rotor, so one set of roller (or Timken or whatever) bearings, no maintenence. Well maybe not none at all.

If things were made to last, and you are really cranking this motor, permanent magnets can lose some of their strength, especially if there is alot of heat involved.

> In fact you can eliminate the magnets altogether. Just use windings.

I was thinking of those cheap Dayton motors used in industry with a power density of 0.05 hp/lb.

> What REALLY pays in an electric car, if you have batteries that are somewhat forgiving when it comes to charge rates, is a scheme that uses the vehicle's inertia to charge the battery when deceleration is called for.

Compressed air is cheaper more reliable, no expensive huge caps, and better as far as recycling.

.. . .

> So you talk of compressed air, OK, that is a possibility but you must realize just how much compressed air you will need. In a little shitcan sub 2 litre engine, have any ideas how high the cylinder pressure goes during combustion ? Let's just sat 100 PSI ain't gonna do it. Let's just say 500 PSI ain't gonna do it. Plus, somehting has to compress that air.

Peugeot engineers were using a "scuba tank" and comparing the energy to get up to freeway speed to a kiwifruit.

No one eats a kiwi because he's hungry.

.. . .


> And that is the other thing. Electric car does not mean free rides.Instead of paying the gas station, you will be paying the electric company, or throwing up somehting off the grid.

Barclays recently said it's already cheaper to be off the grid in HI and this will be the case in the SW in 4 years.

Some American bank then went even further: Utilities have no business in power generation anywhere in the lower 48.

If the NTU battery turns out to work, then the market for _any_ utility power will collapse.

No coal, no gas and no nukes.

It's cheaper to tell the home builder to install the solar cells and batteries and pay $15 more on your monthly mortgage than pay the utility for electric power.

> Know what ? Teslas start at $70,000, maybe they should throw in a solar charger.

They already offer to charge up for free in many places in California, Florida, etc.

> That brings up another thing, an electric car does not idle, so how to put in air conditioning ?

Hopefully they'll just use a $120 a window unit.

When it burns out you go to Walmart and replace it yourself.

> Most people whoi live in areas where solar recharging wold be viable I think would REALLY like air conditioning.

AC is an a fortiori argument for EVs.

You sit on the freeway stuck in traffic. The only energy you use is your 1 kW Home Depot window unit.


Bret Cahill

 

[Bret Cahill]

Just use the cheap low power low power density BIG AND HEAVY LOW EFFICIENCY 10 kW motors that have been around for decades.

Just hang two or three on each wheel.

If you want to scoot through intersections and accelerate to freeway speeds in seconds use compressed air for short bursts of 100 kW power.

> That's inefficient. And heavy.

It's as efficient as batteries, lasts longer, can be recycled and yet is still light enough to make for low energy consumption.

This technology has already been proven by UPS and Peugeot.

Is Peugeot still in business?

UPS is.

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 18 Oct 2014 20:46:12 -0700 (PDT), Bret Cahill
<BretCahill@aol.com> wrote:

Just use the cheap low power low power density BIG AND HEAVY LOW EFFICIENCY 10 kW motors that have been around for decades.

Just hang two or three on each wheel.


>If you want to scoot through intersections and accelerate to freeway speeds in seconds use compressed air for short bursts of 100 kW power.

That's inefficient. And heavy.

This technology has already been proven by UPS and Peugeot.

Is Peugeot still in business?


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Bret Cahill]

Just use the cheap low power low power density BIG AND HEAVY LOW EFFICIENCY 10 kW motors that have been around for decades.

Just hang two or three on each wheel.

If you want to scoot through intersections and accelerate to freeway speeds in seconds use compressed air for short bursts of 100 kW power.

That's inefficient. And heavy.

> It's as efficient as batteries, lasts longer, can be recycled and yet is still light enough to make for low energy consumption.

In today's EVs the big short burst of power is supplied by caps powering expensive rare earth motors.

Instead of one motor doing both high power and low power tasks a dedicated driver could be used for each task.

Since the energy is small, the kilocalories of a kiwi, compressed air doesn't require a large tank and pneumatic motors are more compact than anything in addition to being more reliable.

The French are using it for a liquid fuel vehicle with a small engine but it can be used for cheap low power electric motors as well.


Bret Cahill

 

[David Eather]

On Mon, 20 Oct 2014 13:06:15 +1000, Bret Cahill <BretCahill@aol.com> wrote:

Just use the cheap low power low power density BIG AND HEAVY LOW
EFFICIENCY 10 kW motors that have been around for decades.


Just hang two or three on each wheel.


If you want to scoot through intersections and accelerate to freeway
speeds in seconds use compressed air for short bursts of 100 kW power.


That's inefficient. And heavy.

It's as efficient as batteries, lasts longer, can be recycled and yet is
still light enough to make for low energy consumption.

This technology has already been proven by UPS and Peugeot.

Is Peugeot still in business?

UPS is.

Peugeot is

 

[DaveC]

> Is Peugeot still in business?

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peugeot_Sport#Return_to_Pike.27s_Peak_Hillclimb
_Race>

 

[Bret Cahill]

new magnet technology dramatically reduces the need for expensive rare-earth
minerals with little to no drop in performance.

Something that wasn't impossible to perdict.

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/toyota-develops-new-lower-cost-magnet-for-evs/

Neodymium is desirable in magnets because of its tolerance for heat and its
ability to maintain magnetization. Just swapping half of the neodymium for
cerium and lanthanum wouldn't solve anything as both would lead to increased
degradation of the magnetic properties. To get around this, Toyota had to
spend some serious coin

Spending the $$$ wasn't too hard to perdict either.

on developing new technologies that help to bring
motor performance back up to that of neodymium alone.

Part of that technology comes in the form of grain refinement. Toyota was able
to come up with a process to shape the grains of material that make up the
magnet into tightly packed, uniform crystals. Next, because the grains are
uniform (think bricks in a wall or Legos), the grains only have to be coated
with expensive neodymium, where previously it was mixed throughout, requiring
more to get the same effect. Lastly, the alloy of cerium and lanthanum that
make up the core of each grain is a specific alloy, 1:3 lanthanum to cerium to
be exact, and this mix produces the best resistance to demagnetization.

Note they didn't eliminate neodymium altogether.


Bret Cahill