Battery cars for Hybrids

[da_kraut]

Hi,

just wondering if we might ever see a freight car full of batteries between two GEVO Hybrids kinda like they used to have diesel tankers between engines in the past.  It would certainly be one way to store a lot more of the energy produced when the dynamic brakes are being used by the locomotives.  Just a thought.  If the battery technology keeps on going the way it is now it might be a feasible way to save a lot of energy.

Frank

 

[Lyon_Wonder]

They can call it the battery tender:)

[carnej1]

 Both Railpower and General Electric hold patents on "Energy Tenders" exactly as described.  Both patents cover the possibility of using Batteries or more technologically challenging (i,e supercapacitators, superconducting flywhells) energy storage devices. You can find copies of both patents on the freepatents.com website. So such a system could appear in the future.

 I would point out though that the Green Goats have had significant Battery related issues (mainly fires) so this may be why railpower hasn't been actively promoting extensions of the technology. Some may recall they they were talking about getting into the commuter locomotive segment around the time the first goats went into service. I guess if anyone can make the idea work it would be GE.

 And as far as the more advanced systems go, the FRA was actively developing a flywheel energy storage system for locomotives, particularly the Bombardier Jet Train High Speed locomotive. Several million was spewnt before they decided it was too much of a reach at this point in flywheel development...

[TomDiehl]

One of the advantages in having the batteries on the main frame of the locomotive is that their weight added to the tractive effort of the locomotive. Putting them in a separate car or battery tender would make this weight deduct from part of the payload that the locomotive can pull. From what I recall of the BN fuel tender setup, it was designed to take advantage of the difference in diesel fuel prices across the route of longer distance trains. The diesel locomotive fuel tanks and the fuel tender tank car would be filled up at the point where the diesel fuel was the cheapest, and BN claimed this was a substantial savings in fuel prices. I don't see a similar advantage to having an equivalent in the electrical storage car.

[YoHo1975]

I've often felt that the trick was to create a road hybrid that was fed of the other engines in the consist so the dynamic braking of the engines would charge the batteries of this seperate platform, but it would have it's own set of traction motors to provide tractive effort during other times.