Monday, September 13, 2010

The Future is Not Quite Now. But Close

So I realized that i never finished my "future of the Automobile" post. And I was struck today by seeing a blog post on Gizmodo about the very system I see as the future.

So what is the future? The future is electric.

But haven't we already covered that? Well, yes and no. While there is a long history of electric cars, none of these are the way to the future. We have the problems of batteries, we have the problem of the time it takes to charge these batteries, and we have the problem of the lack of charging stations. I'll tackle each of these.

Batteries are bad. In every way. They are heavy, they are poisonous both to make and dispose of, and they are expensive. The main way i see to overcome this is the use of capacitors. These receive charge, then as soon as they stop receiving this charge they spit it right back out into the circuit. They are much lighter, usually smaller, and dont involve such exotic and expensive materials as batteries do. Another method of doing away with batteries has been shown recently in a few iterations. Starting with the Williams Formula 1 car in 2009, and currently working in the Porsche 911 GT3 RSR Hybrid is a system which uses a flywheel to capture energy during braking. Like current hybrids use regenerative braking to charge their batteries, these use the braking to spin a small flywheel up to 100,000 rpm, and can use that to return electric power to motors mounted to the crank shaft in the case of the F1 car, or the front wheels in the case of the Porsche. So this type of system could also be used to maintain the electrical energy, or at least regenerate energy.


Both of the energy storage methods are designed for short term storage, and not maintaining lots of kilowatts for days on end. So this is where the series hybrid comes in. A small engine, reconfigurable to a variety of engines depending on market, to provide electricity to the system when it is away from it's primary power source.

Primary power source? This is where we start getting in to the truly new technology. Charging stations are good for big batteries operating in urban environments. But to travel to Southern California from San Francisco would require multiple recharges, and take up a lot of time that could be spent on the road. The solution to this lays in inductive charging.


If you have seen the Powermat charger for cell phones, you know what inductive charging is. Admittedly, despite having a firm understanding a lot of the technology I talk about, this is one where I am a bit fuzzy. But it essentially works so that the power is sent through the air to the device. In an automotive scenario, there will be wires in the road that send the power to the car driving above it.

So how does it all come together? You have the car starting up and getting to the road with residual charge being held in capacitors. If there is no residual charge, the back up motor could provide the power for that short trip. As the car drives on public roads, it is powered by the inductive current coming from the road with the capacitors providing power if there are gaps with no cables in the road. The capacitors can also provide additional current for boosts of acceleration. If the car needs to drive off the road for an extended period of time, the engine can come back on line and power the car.

So I had this idea several months ago, yet had never seen it done (or heard of it being done). But it did happen. These guys got a lightweight, super aerodynamic car to drive 31 mph with no internal power source. It is in infantile stages, but it is a huge leap in what is the next step.


(Pics credit Jalopnik, Powermat, and University of Karlsruhe respecitvely)