Overmod Lastspikemike Ironically, the accepted method of extinguishing Li ion battery fires is complete submersion of the battery in water..... Do you have a reference for that?
Lastspikemike Ironically, the accepted method of extinguishing Li ion battery fires is complete submersion of the battery in water.....
Do you have a reference for that?
The only way to extinguish a lithium battery fire is to flood the battery with water. A Lithium Fire Blanket will safely isolate a lithium fire battery for hours, until it can be flooded and extinguished.
But that advice appears to be contrary to the consensus advice to only use a foam extinguisher, ABC dry chemical.
Alton Junction
NYC had Tri-Power switchers - Primary was battery with a diesel for trickle charging and third rail shoes for electrified territory.
"The principle of operation was similar to that of modern hybrid locomotives, the diesel engine driving a main generator of 600 volts DC, which provided charging current to a bank of batteries which powered four traction motors, one per axle. In addition to being powered by the diesel engine, these locomotives were capable of operating as electric locomotives. Two of these locomotives were equipped to operate off of 3000 volt overhead lines, and 34 were capable of operating off of a 600 volt third rail. The locomotives were equipped with a six-cylinder four-stroke in-line engine of 300 hp (224 kW). The diesel motor was used to charge the batteries, which could not be charged by third rail power. The battery consisted of 240 Exide Ironclad cells with a total capacity of 301 kWh.
The locomotives were mainly used in city areas for switching work, where exhaust-emissions-free operation was required at spurs entering factory halls. The main batch was ordered by New York Central Railroad to be used in the New York City area operating on the West Side Line and the High Line. Some three-power boxcabs also worked Chicago, Detroit, and Boston. One locomotive was built for Rock Island, which used it for switching the LaSalle Street Station in Chicago"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_three-power_boxcab#/media/File:NYC_1528.jpg
LastspikemikeThe EU fire departments have water tanks to put entire EV cars into if the battery catches fire. No other method can work because cooling the fire is the only way it can be stopped. Apparently.
While the issue of stranded charge might be solved by dumping the whole vehicle in a tank of water, it might be necessary to leave the vehicle submerged a considerable time to ensure all the cells in the architecture are (1) discharged and (2) cool enough not to fail. There might be some interesting fireworks...
I continue to think that the 'better answer' to stranded charge is to develop equipment and training that allows it to be dissipated (or, better, recovered) even if the battery is damaged; this would minimize the 'surprise' of subsequent fires as the wreck is being transported, stored, or worked on. Why there have not been well-documented (and prominently recognizable to emergency personnel) contacts and jumpers to perform safe controlled discharge on large EV batteries is something of a mystery to me; on the other hand this couldn't possibly have escaped the notice of Tesla or Nikola engineers.
As I have said previously, it becomes the responsibility of EV manufacturers to provide tools and training for 'safe handling' of proprietary alternatives to 'familiar' fuels. We are about to see the issue taken up for expansion of hydrogen fueling as well.
Has anyone determined the amount of lithium required to replace all current autos? That alone may put the kibosh on the idea. I think the third rail idea might be usable for long haul locomotives. It would require a significant length that could replenish the batteries while moving while directing a portion of the power to operate the train. The modern version of mainline coaling towers or water pans.
ndbprrHas anyone determined the amount of lithium required to replace all current autos?
The 'modern third rail' is a bit different from what we think of in current practice; it is more like the systems for transit (as pioneered before 1910 by General Electric) that 'turn on' the contact area under the locomotive shoes, and manage current flow only in that relatively small area. The rest of the distribution architecture can run at high voltage if desired and be transverted near the point of consumption or charging.
The real 'first best use' of this, in my opinion, is for those areas of an otherwise-overhead-wire system where the overhead wire is difficult to provide -- under bridges, for example, or in areas concerned with inability to police trespassers who might be electrocuted -- even if only to permit a 'stalled' train in a gap between dual-mode-lite sections to move without using its combustion power. It would also be highly useful if installed at the ends of sidings, where it has the effect of constituting a charging point for stopped trains. You could always use it 'outboard' of the siding to provide additional starting boost to 'snap' consists up to speed, or provide regeneration for consists about to take siding.
You could use this system to provide either snapping or helping on grades. But there are more advantages to using high-voltage overhead wire for this, and incrementally extending it to longer stretches.
LastspikemikeKinetic energy recovery systems using battery storage are quite feasible and depend only on the economics. At the moment the cost of including these systems far exceeds any payback from fuel savings, even from reduced consumption of heavily taxed motor fuels. I know of no economically sensible kinetic energy recovery system on any vehicle, even a golf cart which would be a simple device to include such a system.
There was an effective use made of KERS in the University of Texas ALPS locomotive proposal, where the main generator (which was an SDI spinoff) had substantial rotating inertia and very high momentary current capacity. I doubt this would be cost-competitive for any service other than true HSR (although it is highly valuable in that context).
Where the real money-shot for KERS exists is in wayside storage for vehicles using electric transmission, whether from overhead wire or some form of third rail. The deceleration energy coming into a station spins up the relatively cheap flywheel array, levitated in a working vacuum on magnetic bearings, and the stored energy is then used to snap the near-immediate departure of the same train. All the weight and packaging of considerable arrays of flywheels is carried on the ground (where I would argue it belongs!) and can in fact be partially spun up with external power if there is a problem with peak current from the utility grid into the the rail electrical system.
That's not really KERS in either sense. Since it uses a 'big enough battery' it is nothing more than a fancy Japanese-style hybrid powertrain, with the battery energy being directed to (presumably torque-vectored) propulsion or spooling up active boost... just as people have been doing in principle and practice with electric hybrid systems for a long time. In my opinion there is very little practical vehicle acceleration to be gained from the spinning turbocharger rotor, but very subtstantial advantage to using what we used to call a Satcon motor to accelerate the rotor(s) quickly to expedite boost.
The point of KERS is that it stores energy IN that spinning flywheel, not in a battery, and then recovers it from the flywheel. If you have a few hours to research down the rabbit hole, go here:
https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/29969
and see what still remains of the MegaGen and the ALPS locomotive collateral.
KERS was used as a technical term to distinguish it from things like turbocompounding, on the one hand, and the Japanese style of parallel hybrid transmission on the other. Volvo, as I recall, developed a "practical" system of coupling the energy from a large turbocharger (both pressure and inertial) back to the engine crankshaft. In those days it was just as equally far more practical to use a Satcon on the interstage to harvest and deliver electric power, using a battery as a buffer, but the cost and cycle characteristics of the batteries made that approach excessively expensive for the benefits received.
Now that lithium cells and supercapacitors are far more efficient, and their production has been 'costed-down' for other reasons, making everything 'electrical' makes far more sense. We realized this for large steam locomotives nearly two decades ago: if all the auxiliaries run on 220 to 240V 60Hz AC, and you use similar power to run the ECP brake trainline, instead of a bunch of little steam turbines pissing away your expensively generated chemically-treated feedwater, you have simple wiring harness for power with powerline modulation for data and a great deal of the cost of 'modern steam' disappears.
With respect to the turbo example: any child can figure out that spooling the turbo with the energy from braking is a good idea. Making it asynchronous is the genius, and while you can do that a la Karman with a pressurized accumulator, it is easier to do it electrically -- and you get all the other prospective benefits of Ludicrous+ power on demand free.
And what you are missing so badly is that, once you have that ONE big battery with the correct internal architecture and construction and cooling... all the benefits can be tapped from it, and the BMW-style reformed 5kW or so fuel cell that only runs the vehicle auxiliaries (a la SPV2000) becomes workable.
I admit it would have been fun to see this work out in the marketplace, but zero-carbon has made its hydrogen counterpart more attractive, and in fact made its 'big brother' the continuous topping charge fuel-cell yet more attractive.
[quote user="Lastspikemike"]You can't build that one battery big enough and it doesn't look like you will ever be able to.
It's actually easy to build that 'one battery' big enough for practical wayside storage, even using liquid metal batteries to cut the cost and improve the number of cycles in effective lifetime. If I remember correctly, there are or were test installations of flywheel-bank short-term energy storage on one of the ex-Reading SEPTA lines, and the 'idling' current for the magnetic bearings was surprisingly small.
I was involved in the mid-to-late Nineties with magnetic storage for grid AC power, which developed the art of superconducting-magnet refrigeration to a surprising degree. While this would be of more value for a general distributed utility architecture also supplying railroads than for a purely dedicated traction system, it remains useful in principle, and may become dramatically more so as research into practical higher-temperature superconductors advances.
The practical battery for railroad applications has already been built; it is in the FLXdrives, and the poor man's version of it is 'spam in the can' over at RPS in Fullerton. The point is NOT to replace fossil power with battery power, it is to do just what MB was doing in your example, use the higher-energy-density liquid fuel more effectively.
If you have not read the COMSOL 'case study' for the GE hybrid locomotive of a decade and a half ago -- find it and look at it now. That was a reasonably practical chemistry, and if you remember the old Ford experiments with sodium/sulfur back in the day, modern nanoinsulation makes that chemistry fully workable in the kind of built-out plug-in charging infrastructure that makes widespread BEV operation even thinkable in the future.
As GE points out now (admittedly a bit between the lines) there really isn't a dramatic need in general service for more than about 40 minutes 80-20 for the main traction battery in a hybrid consist. As I keep saying, the situation for flat switching is a bit different: there the 80-20 charge and discharge cycling is severe but reasonably more time-limited: aggressive cooling is the 'secret' there, not nominal capacity. Were it not that aggressive cooling is part of the secret for practical road locomotives, too, it would be easy to note that switchers are a more expensive and difficult use of "battery" technology than 12,000+hp road power is.
Energy density is the problem solved by fossil fuels.
The practical answer is one or two units burning an appropriate high-energy fuel, mothering an electric unit functioning as a road slug and hybrid enablement. If you want to use that middle unit for switching, it has a cab and controls; if you want a two-unit consist equipped for bidirectional running 'cabs out' without the pain and sorrow of running long-hood-forward, there you are.
And every inch you electrify the right-of-way becomes useful for propulsion and charging with the dual-mode-lite that is almost trivial to implement on an AC-synthesis inverter-drive locomotive. Eventually you may push the battery or other storage back into the infrastructure, where we wanted it in 1997...