IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

EV AND THE HYBRID-----Carl Schwab

The EV is the Electric Only Vehicle—NO  ICE (Internal Combustion Engine). The HYBRID, such a Toyota PRIUS in the current PHV version can be electric up to certain range before switching to ICE assist. The facts are that either on electric only can produce an MPGe (miles per gallon equivalent) somewhere between 70 MPGe to 110 MPGe. In order to meet the 2025 targeted fuel performance the auto industry has to arrive at a scheme that utilizes these excellent MPGe numbers in some manner.

One scheme is to use the EV as a second car i.e. each household would have 2 cars---one a conventional and the second car an EV. This scheme works well where the second car is used for LOCAL driving and convenientally recharged while in the garage overnight. The writer has used this scheme and it works well. But notice it depends on the second car. Suppose you have only one car? If you have only one car and it is an EV then you are dependent upon multiple recharging stations conveniently scattered in your area of interest. The government has been trying hard to promote this idea but it slow to be accepted and seems even slower to become very popular.

This leads to the alternate version wherein the single car is a HYBRID PHV. In this scheme the HYBRID is recharged overnight and is ready for electric only driving up to the limit of the charge. In the case of the PRIUS this amounts to some 15+miles (rumored to be increased to 35+ miles) at which time the ICE starts and the car continues powered by gasoline. BTW in this scenario the VOLT will go some 40 miles before the ICE starts and in very many cases this is sufficient that the car will not use the ICE when used for LOCAL driving. If the need arises for longer trips then the remainder of trip is powered on gasoline. Now the HYBRID car is more expensive than a conventional because it is more complex. But it is completely independent of requiring frequent external recharging stations. And it relieves any anxiety about running out of battery charge and needing to buy a battery recharge while on the road----PITA.

BTW the EV, in theory should cost less than a conventional ICE car. No ICE, and also the car is less complex, hence should cost less. To date this has NOT been demonstrated and the stated reason (which the writer questions) is the cost of the much larger battery required. The battery manufacturers contend that “economy of scale” cost reduction does NOT apply to large batteries. No reason is given.

This later scheme is gaining in popularity and in fact articles explaining this, are allowing the HYBRID PHV to prevent the wider spread use of EV only. This is evidenced by the fact that PRIUS PHV sales are increasing while the NISSAN LEAF is not meeting sales objectives because of customer resistance.

INTERESTING---

A Hospital Experience, Part 4 - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

“Never argue with a fool. Someone watching may not be able to tell the difference.”  -  Source unknown.

From what follows then, you'll know better than to ever argue with yours truly.

Thirteen years ago, I was hospitalized overnight for observation in the aftermath of a minor stroke, a "transient ischemic attack" or TIA. It was that hospital's policy to do a chest x-ray on every incoming patient regardless of the reason for admission. Upon viewing my x-ray, they told me I had a hiatal hernia. In reply, I told them no, that I'd had a fundoplication procedure just two years before and that they'd mistaken the one entity for the other.

In retrospect, I was possibly wrong, but without a doubt, I was very, very stupid to have responded that way. It is just possible that I put my life at grave risk.

Please be warned that the next two paragraphs are quite real, but quite graphic.

Had I been thinking clearly, I would have requested that their x-ray results be forwarded to my own doctor, to my gastroenterologist. My recent hospitalization this month was indeed for a hiatal hernia which had allowed my stomach to migrate upward into my chest wall, including getting partially behind my heart.

This was dangerous to me on a whole bunch of levels because my stomach was forming adhesions to my aorta, to my heart and elsewhere. The end result COULD have been stomach gangrene in which case I would have lost my stomach or possibly cardiac arrest which COULD have ended my life. The surgeon referred to this all as my having been living with a time bomb in my chest.

The key point is that having heard from that first hospital's staff years ago that they'd found something wrong with me, I should have had that message of alarm immediately communicated back to my own doctor(s) for further evaluation.

Who knows but that my surgery of this past April 1st might have been less extreme and perhaps I'm just plain dumb-lucky to still be alive.

A Hospital Experience, Part 3 - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

On my last day in the hospital, after I was approved for discharge and while I was sitting in a chair in my now ill-fitting shirt and slacks, I watched as some workmen prepared the room and my hospital bed for its next occupant. Talk about taking things apart!

All of the bed linen and the bed pillows were gathered into one ball of cloth which was taken away to heaven only knows where for, so I assume, some serious sanitization.

The bed's mattress could now be seen. It was actually an air mattress with education. While I was in the bed, the air mattress would inflate here and deflate there to minimize skin pressure issues that would eventually, so I think, have led to bedsores anyway, that is if I'd been kept in bed long enough.

The whole thing was encased in a vinyl sheath onto which most of a bottle of some antiseptic stuff was poured and then wiped over the entirety of both the upper and lower surfaces. As perhaps the late Jimmy Durante might have put it, that thing was given "Da woiks!".

However, one thing was ignored. That thing was the bedside telephone, a kind of a boxy old thing, made very rugged to withstand repeated droppings (which it managed to get over the course of my time there) and which I always noticed had this vaguely disquieting, semi-biological odor about it.

It did NOT help me deal with the after effects of nausea I was experiencing!

To be truthful, that thing was just plain disgusting and after watching the events unfolding before me, I could easily figure out why. Therefore, I offer the following suggestion.

If you have a loved one who needs to be hospitalized, please think to provide him/her with a personal cell phone to use. It can be placed conveniently on the table and it will avoid the odorous unpleasantness of the hospital-provided telephone.

Just a suggestion.   

A Hospital Experience, Part 2 - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

When I came to from anesthesia, I was already in the hospital bed that I would come to know as home for a while. As awareness slowly dawned, I could hear voices all around me. I wasn't hallucinating or dreaming or anything like that. Nurses and my roommate's visitors and other people really were speaking.

I was in quite a lot of pain and I had other medical distress issues going on, but my attention was drawn anyway to the voice of a woman who was apparently standing just out of my sight in the hospital hallway, just outside the hospital room door. That lady's voice sounded very much like my wife's voice and that's who I thought I was hearing.

Subdued voices DO carry. If you think you're not going to be heard because you're using sotto voce, forget it! You might as well be shouting at the top of your lungs because anyone nearby will mentally home in on your words, even involuntarily.

This lady was saying things to someone that included words like "... palliative care ....", "..... hospice ....." and "..... I don't want him to know .....". Would you care to hazard a guess at what I was thinking as I heard this?

When my wife came in, I asked her about what I'd heard. The expression on her face is forever etched into my memory. No, that voice wasn't her. No, I am not going to die. Yes, I am going to make it to see my grandchildren. I had not been so sure.

If you ever find yourself in a similar circumstance and you feel you need to have a possibly end-of-life discussion with somebody, please have that talk somewhere else. You can really cause a lot of inadvertent upset if you get careless about that.

A Hospital Experience, Part 1 - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I spent twelve days in the hospital this month. I was in surgery on Monday April 1st (Yes, that's April Fool's Day.) and I needed a secondary procedure the following week on April 9th. The doctors told me not to expect a quick recovery and that's exactly how things have turned out. My recovery has been slow and difficult. At this writing on April 23rd, I still have substantial pain although to be honest, on a week by week basis at least, I am getting better.

I would like to offer the first of several comments about the experience.

I was utterly delighted, even while in the midst of intense misery, to find myself receiving visitors. The sight of their friendly and smiling faces was wonderful. A also got a lot of phone calls from friends who could not come, but who had borne me in mind.

I am one of this world's truly fortunate men.

My only real problem was my incredible fatigue. Even now, my energy level is still low, probably due to the combination of surgical after effects and of the extreme dietary restrictions I've had placed on me. The "Whiff Whiffer" that Dr. Seuss once wrote about in "You're Only Old Once" (Anything you like is off your diet.) would have allowed me a smorgasbord by comparison.

The result was that toward late afternoon as my bedside phone kept ringing, I was getting really, really tired. I would have liked to just grab some shuteye if I could, but answering incoming calls precluded that.

Ergo, I would suggest that if you have someone in the hospital and would like to telephone them, please make your call early in the day and if you can't get through, try again early the next day. Late day calls can be wearing on an exhausted patient.

I hope I don't sound ungrateful because I know how lucky I am, but what I've described was what was happening to me.

Thank you everybody!

MORE ON THE 787 BATTERY QUESTION-----Carl Schwab

Recently the writer has put up 3 BLOGS relating to the problem of li-ion batteries catching fire in the 787, 63 lb. power packs. The technology that Boeing has chosen seems based upon the higher energy density of the cobalt oxide based lithium system. Some resent research performed at the University of Southern California, (UoSC), just may point in the direction of possible improvement and future application to the 787 pack problem. That is what this BLOG is about. This new lithium-ion battery design uses porous silicon nano-particles in place of the traditional graphite anodes and does achieve significant performance improvements. This new technology achieves two things; first the energy density is improved about 3-to-1 AND the recharge time is drastically reduced to about 10 minutes. BTW this is now approaching what the lead-acid has performed in car-starter application for several years. VERY DESIREABLE.

This BLOG writer has long been a proponent of using nano-engineering ideas in achieving performance improvement of many different electrical components including batteries and capacitors. The main difference is using nano-engineeering ideas in the fabrication of the electrodes in the li-ion cell. What, simply put, is these ideas greatly increase the active surface area of the anode which directly improves the energy stored and recovered by the 3 to 1 increase. This same group believes that the cathode area of the li-ion cell can similarly be improved with even further energy density improvement and possible even further reduction in recharge time. ALL GOOD THINGS.

Researchers have long attempted to use silicon, which is cheap and has a potential capacity, in battery anodes. (Anodes are where current flows into a battery, while cathodes are where current flows out). Last year, the UoSC research team experimented with porous silicon nanowires that are less than 100 nanometers in diameter and just a few microns long. Tiny pores on the nanowires allowed the silicon to expand and contract without breaking while simultaneously increasing the surface area, which in turn lets the lithium ions diffuse in and out of the battery more quickly. Although the wire idea worked well, efficient fabrication was a real problem so the team turned to commercially available source for nanoparticles---tiny spheres ---and etched them with the same pore structure as in the wires and this is working well and now the efficient reproduction process is straight forward. BTW what is claimed (but not proved) is that this li-ion cell is much less likely to start to burn when subjected to elevated temperatures.

Future research will focus on finding a new cathode material with a high capacity that will pair with the porous silicon nanospheres to create a completely redesigned battery of substantially improved performance.

INTERESTING-----

More Funny Things - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Any thoughts about that utility pole? 

 

Care for a tall, cool and slightly off center glass of water? 

 

What's for sale??   

 

I'm starting to wonder if Earth might already be hosting an as yet undiscovered, alien life form. 

Do No Harm - Dick LaRosa

My ideas for alleviating drought started with solar heated evaporator rafts in coastal waters to add water vapor to air moving from sea to land. But this does not produce rain. The air must be lifted so that it will expand, cool, and moisture then condenses and hopefully precipitates. Orographic lifting is the process in which wind pushes air up a mountain and it operates in many parts of the world. But there is not much orographic lifting on the central plains of the U.S. There, we need a convective instability to make the moist air rise. This is provided by local surface warming that heats a column of air from the bottom so that it is less dense than the surrounding air, rises, expands, cools, water vapor condenses, releases heat of vaporization, expands and rises further, cools, yields more condensate, etc. A small area of moderate temperature might produce a small amount of precipitation. A large area of high solar absorption will produce towering cumulonimbus clouds with adequate precipitation, and possibly hail and thunderstorms. Black top parking lots, sunny slopes, variations in ground and crop solar absorptivity provide naturally occurring hot spots. We might increase rainfall by installing black plastic film solar absorbers on the ground. 

I sent a description of the evaporator rafts and ground solar absorbers to consulting meteorologists listed in the monthly Bulletin if the American Meteorological Society, and other people, requesting comments. Out of 35 emails and letters, I have 2 replies, so far. One warns me that my prescription for creating thunderstorms can cause much damage and personal injury or death. Leave it to a consultant to think of liability. I was still at the stage of wondering whether solar thermal engineering could economically improve on a sometimes inadequate natural process. If there was a hope of having any effect at all, then I would worry about unintended consequences. But that one reply was a wake-up call. To win friends and influence people, unintended consequences must be addressed from the git-go.

As regards the solar absorbers on the ground, there are three parameters at our disposal:

1. Area of each individual absorber.
2. Number of absorbers.
3. Geographic distribution of absorbers.

With a modeling program to optimize these parameters, we have a means of controlling the size and geographic distribution of thunderstorms. Since thunderstorms can morph into tornadoes, we may have stumbled on a way to lower the incidence of destructive tornadoes. Many moderate storms spread over a large geographic area might avoid large killer tornadoes. This would be something like setting small burns to avoid a big wild fire. We may be able to increase rainfall while reducing the danger and destructiveness of thunderstorms and tornadoes.

I have ideas about deploying and retrieving these absorbers and evaporator rafts in response to seasonal predictions of drought or flooding. These will be the subjects of future blog posts. For now, let’s enjoy the possibility that we may have made progress in following the advice to “First, do no harm.”

WERE THE BOEING 787 BATTERIES COOLED PROPERLY? -----Carl Schwab

 The Boeing 787’s high profile battery fires have been the result of an engineering double-whammy: energetic battery chemistry combined with a possibly inadequate cooling system. This is the conjecture that an adhoc committee has been discussing with hope of providing some guidance to industry for everyone’s benefit. Battery experts say that the 787’s lithium-ion battery employed a cobalt oxide cathode, which is known to be more prone to overheating than other lithium battery chemistries. If this chemistry is used without measures to draw away heat from the pack, experts say it can cause a problem of the type exhibited.

ALTHOUGH Boeing has not said whether the 787’s lithium-ion battery pack use any kind of  active cooling system, experts who saw photos of the damaged packs said that it looked unlikely. Whether or not the battery exceeded its design voltage, however, the adhoc  experts believe a cooling system was critical.  Lithium-ion chemistries in general are “energetic” and the committee opinion is that cobalt oxide varieties of lithium-ion are particularly so---more so than manganese spinel OR the phosphate of the LiFe(PO4) type.

This BLOG writer and others have suggested using either manganese spinel form or the LiFe(PO4) instead of the cobalt oxide because of much better resistance to over-heating effects. However, the driver for the cobalt oxide form is the fact that its energy density is up to 25% better than either the manganese spinel OR the LiFe(PO4). Participants in the ad hoc committee are participants more in the EV or Electric Only car battery pack designs and rely on supplemental cooling in those applications. The Chevy Volt, for example, employs liquid coolant that circulates through 1-mm thick channels machined into 144 metal plates sitting between its lithium-ion manganese spinel cells. In a similar manner, the Prius PHV plug-in hybrid uses specialized fans, intake ducts, and 42 temperature sensor probes to actively monitor and cool its lithium-ion battery.

To be sure, the 787’a 63 lb. battery pack is smaller than those of today’s typical EV, which can often exceed 400 lb. BTW the 63 lb. number has grown considerably although Boeing has not been specific just how much. But experts say that lithium-ion batteries of all types need ways for heat to be removed. Size does make a difference but at even 63 lb. the ad hoc committee opinion is that provision for heat removal should be made. And to repeat, it is the opinion of the ad hoc committee that the cobalt oxide form of lithium-ion is more sensitive than are the manganese spinel Or the LiFe(PO4). The ad hoc committee also re-enforces the point that lithium-ion, particularly the cobalt oxide form have NOT to be overcharged at all. Now Boeing does say they have added further safeguards against overcharging and over-discharging.

INTERESTING----

Bates Stapler - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Now here's an interesting curio. At first glance, this just looks like an old stapler and you'll go looking for that box of Swingline _TM staples you put away somewhere some time ago, right? Well, not this time.

This is a tool from the mid-1930s whose staples are made while you work. The raw metal for making the staples is contained on a wire spool located at the opposite end from the handle.

Now just imagine somebody seeing this and in the heat of the moment, getting all excited with dollar signs appearing in the retinas over this rare antique. It's just gotta be worth a coupla-hunnert bucks, right??

Not so, Dear Reader. Look at what happened to pop-up when I did a Google search for the Bates Mfg. Company.

Mine is actually the Model C, but it is almost the exact same thing and the bid above is for all of thirteen bucks.

So, how many hamburgers would that come to?