Diesel Electric Advantage

today we're going to talk about Edison Motors truck and the advantages of a diesel Electric yeah so the Edison Motors truck is diesel electric it's a fully electric truck as in if you were to remove the diesel generator it would still exist as an electric truck it's a range extender essentially so how this truck works is being fully electric it drives and operates off the battery but when the battery gets low the diesel ax essentially as a level four fast charger to recharge those batteries you can drive the truck for about two hours to three hours off that battery and the diesel generator recharges while you're driving down the road in about 30 to 40 minutes will fully recharge those batteries back up it's an electric truck with an onboard generator onboard charging system that's essentially right so it takes its inspiration from a freight train which had been diesel electric and they use large capacitor Banks we use large lithium-ion battery Banks and my belief with the few way electrification is going is that if electric is the future Battery Technology needs to get more dense way less and become more compact with better charging infrastructure and to get us to that point the diesel electric with that generator on board is the next logical Bridge Gap in that solution what would some of the advantages be to have a diesel electric logging truck yeah the uh some of the main advantages to these diesel electric trucks are the power and the torque the torque curve on an electric motor is flat where you normally get your torque on a truck it's up you hit a peak RPM and then it falls back down again diesel electric you get that instant RPM that instant torque right from zero full torque rate from zero and high torque so with this truck the power output is at it has three electric Drive Motors each with 250 kilowatt hours 750 kilowatt Drive motors which gives you over a thousand horsepower but the torque is a hundred and ten thousand foot pounds of torque if you compare that to a normal Cummins X15 550 it puts out 1800 fat pounds of torque from the motor goes through its gear reduction which means in first gear at Max torque it gives you 60 to 70 000 foot-pounds of RPM assuming you're running like four three three rear ends that would give you around that seventy thousand so that's a low geared rear end and we are still almost double what first gear is in torque and that torque is going to be smooth and linear across the entire power output apart from just the torque of the electric motor it's the fuel savings you're using that battery as a peak loaded demand a truck takes a ton of power to really get it off the line and get it moving you got 140 000 pounds on a super B in BC to get that up and moving it takes a ton of power but once you're up there you don't need the power you back off the throttle you're just maintain your momentum instead of building that initial inertia so that battery gives you that full thousand horsepower shove off and then once you're up to speed it doesn't do a lot plus as you're going downhill AC Motors the motor actually acts as a generator it puts a load onto your drive axles and sends the power to recharge the battery so when you're coming down the hill you're recharging the power back in the battery it's building up and it gives you the peak load demand to climb up the other side same as if you're slowing down to stop at a light it's rebuilding that power back up it stores that power and it reuses you to launch off the line which really allows you to put in a small generator to maintain its peak load which essentially what we've done is we've taken a 15 liter Cummins we've reduced it down to a 9 liter engine basically instead of having a 500 550 horsepower motor we have a 350 400 horsepower motor puts out 350 kilowatts the super B going down the highway uses an average of 200 kilowatts that's what it requires to keep that momentum moving so an extra 150 goes back to recharge those batteries you get about two hours of drive time off the batteries it recharges those batteries in about 30 40 minutes we have 250 kilowatt hour battery pack on board as opposed to running a full size megawatt battery like some of the other commercial trucks do so the generator is running off diesel but it's not running near the amount of time as your motor would be and it is a smaller generator how would the that result or reflect in your actual fuel savings I guess it'd be dependent on terrain and things like that but what do you kind of project for fuel savings that is one of the hardest things to predict because we are building heavy vocational trucks for the logging garbage Heavy Haul oil field vac trucks those kind of things that it's not easy to calculate if it was a highway tractor you we could just enter the map and see what it does but Highway OTR work pulling a drive at is the worst application for this part from like a dry van going down the highway how would you estimate the the projected fuel savings okay so the best way to say that is that the harder you work this truck the better it's going to do the more down and Uphill you have the more regenerative braking the more stop and go the better fuel mileage you're gonna get the harder you work it the more you pull the better you are so to explain it this way is that a C9 generator uses about 50 liters of fuel per hour which means you're going to use 50 liters of fuel to recharge those batteries and you're gonna get a couple hours of driving now that's pulling super B weight so instead of looking at 60 liters per hour fuel consumption you're looking at 25 liters per hour fuel consumption on a log and truck like where we've built our prototype and we've done the testing uphill downhill with that sort of Hill we're looking at about a 75 to 80 percent reduction in fuel mileage as you're coming down the hill you're recharging that battery so you can go back up the other side you're coming down on a logging truck you're down the mountain loaded you're going back up empty on a real ideal application you might never have to fire that generator up you could have a 100 fuel reduction so I can't give a mile per gallon savings but if we were to look at the application you can clearly see how this makes sense to save money so you'd have the benefits of the electric being the the the torque and the power that are nowadays unheard of in a truck but to estimate the fuel savings it's really depending on the application yeah and that's our gravel truck a garbage truck and a city stop and go between all the lights amazing you have that smooth uh Power curve and one of the advantages is that generator is running at Peak RPM one of the problems is due to the limited RPM range of a diesel motor 500 to 2000 RPM traditionally in a truck you're living into a 1500 RPM range these electric motors go up to 20 000 RPM but the generator producing power can actually produce power at 1750 RPM it gets there and it stays there why that makes a big difference is that the way that the internal combustion works on a diesel what happens is your turbo is what builds your fuel air ratio the turbo relies on the exact exhaust gas coming out of the manifold it spins a big fan that sucks air in which that air being sucked in and forced in with the Turbo from the exhaust gas is what gives you a good fuel air ratio what happens is when you shift gears you let off the throttle the truck shifts a gear that exhaust spools down because you're not working the motor hard it then needs to Pump Fuel into the block to create those exhaust gas to suck the air in which means you're getting really poor fuel air ratio mixture at that start you're burning inefficiently just to get going to build your Peak RPM and then you shift gears and that can be up to 18 gears in a standard truck transmission that every time you shift the gear you lose your turbo boost you go out of your P car PM range and you got to work to get back there with the generator you're staying right at that Peak perfect RPM that you want to run at and you're learning that electric motor and that battery give you the Boost you need instead of shipping that sounds like you're gonna also it's gonna be a lot easier on the generator it's not going to be you have to work as as hard I guess it's running as a higher RPM and it's not going to be working hard pulling that load with fluctuating up and down which I know can wear on components really diesel motors love getting into their Peak comfy RPM and staying there they're not throttling down they're not adjusting they're not generators especially the old mechanical ones there is Legends of generators 3406 cats going to over a hundred thousand hours without a rebuild the average generator you're looking at about 40 to 50 000 hours before you need to rebuild that block now if you were to look at a truck being used shifting gears you're looking at 20 000 to 25 000 hours before a rebuild so therefore this making it run as a generator is doubling your service life of that diesel motor in the truck so you might be saving money on service and mechanical breakdowns or whatnot that happen rebuilds but I know that driving truck you're often paid by weight and electric and batteries weigh a lot so you must be losing losing there how what about what about weight so batteries weigh a lot so if you look at something like another conventional a hundred percent electric truck they use a megawatt almost a batteries that megawatt of batteries pushes the weight of the truck about two three thousand pounds higher just due to the massive weight of it so what we've done is because our batteries are really there for that Peak load demand and to let the truck run for a few hours off the batteries they're much smaller we're 250 kilowatt hours as opposed to 1 000 kilowatt hours quarter of the size what we've also done is gone from a 15 liter diesel down to a nine liter diesel so we've massively reduced the weight of the diesel motor when it all said and done on our first prototype truck before we started because it was a retrofit of a 1962 needle nose Kenworth when we started the build the truck weighed 9 000 kgs when we finished our hybrid upgrade we put it onto the scales it was 8 800. we lost 200 kgs 450 pounds of weight reduction by going diesel electric and on top of that the government in BC gives you a weight allowance because it's classified as electric it can run 100 off the electric without the diesel if it was a hybrid it would need the diesel to work with it but the diesel can be shut off we could remove the diesel put in larger batteries and it wouldn't make a difference to how the truck performs to make it 100 Electric so because it's electric we get an extra 1500 kgs in weight allowance on those Drive axles which means for your payload they did that to accommodate their way to the extra electric trucks ours being lighter for that payload you get that extra 3 000 pounds so with a little bit of weight reduction I mean the try Drive setup is going to be a little bit heavier and we've in the production version we've increased the truck by about 500 to a thousand pounds we're getting on par but in total you should be able to pack in a few thousand pounds of more weight than you can with a normal diesel your generator is gonna last longer yeah you can actually in theory you're going to be able to pack more weight make more money uh but then that I don't I don't know how to work on electric vehicles what about the serviceability of that that how so this is one of the things that because we built all these classic trucks and we really started as a trucking company with mechanics that work on our trucks we needed to make sure that if we were gonna have a truck number one we had to be able to build it and a lot of our mechanics are Apprentice they're not even red seals we have one red seal mechanic comes by to check on things the mean guys in their shop are they have that owner operator background their third fourth year apprentices going in for the Red Seal but we did this to make sure that the truck could be worked on by people that aren't technicians other than Eric who's our chief technology officer and a few of the electrical engineers that have come on board to advise on things the people building this truck in the shop are diesel mechanics we specifically chose Parts like we partnered with CBS Fleet break and these companies to select the best parts those parts that they always have on the Shelf that's what was used to build these trucks the electrical wiring harnesses are actually relatively simple we've reduced the Driveline components but your brake pods are your standard type 30 brake pot which means you have your standard slack adjusters the airline the coupling the brake fittings none of these parts are Edison Motor specific Parts they are all parts you can get off the shelf now what about the battery life yeah that's one of the big concerns about people with EVS is that a megawatt of batteries is hundreds of thousands of dollars um our battery cost I'll just straight up tell you is about thirty thousand dollars that's thirty five thousand dollars is what you get for that 250 lithium ion batteries so it's it's much cheaper when it comes time to service it it's you're looking at on par with doing an engine rebuild but you don't have to do it as much on ours batteries degrade over time that's not something you can avoid but we have a diesel generator powering those batteries so if you could get two hours of driving off the batteries when they're new in five years they lose a lot of their charge let's say it's an overly aggressive example but let's say it uses 50 capacity it loses 50 of its capacity due to being used a heavy heavy usage you should be looking at about 70 reduction in five years but whatever let's say 50 percent now on a normal truck the big issue with the batteries is that it lowers your range so on a normal EV you would lose your range so if on a fully electric semi is rated to do 500 miles on a single charge five years if it lost fifty percent of its charge can only do 250 miles you can see how that would be frustrating as it requires a lot more stopping but we have that diesel generator so if our capacity goes down from 250 to 125 all it means is that that generator needs to come on more frequently to recharge it so instead of charging it running it for half an hour and then driving for two hours you now need to run it for 15 minutes and you drive it for an hour it doesn't affect your range of your truck the way it would in a normal one it doesn't require extra stopping which means you can push the lifespan of that battery back to years and years eventually it might get to the point where you're like oh this is annoying the generator needs to run relatively more constantly that could be a thing but you're looking at 10 15 years out of that 35 000 battery as opposed to looking at five years out of a hundred and 50 000 battery so you can see that cost savings for thirty five thousand you get 10 to 15 years for a hundred and fifty thousand you get five to seven years before it's really frustrating to the point where you're like I can't make it through the day without stopping multiple times and the other Advantage is because you're recharging it you can set that generator so that it keeps those batteries above 50 percent you're not cycling down to that bottom end in your battery life range where you really do your batteries is when you drain them all the way down if you set that generator to turn on when it hits 50 and build it back up you're not working its battery constantly through its whole thing degrading the cells you're keeping it nice and topped up which is much healthier for the battery and going to give you a long time longer time what about the reliability of electric motors compared to that of mechanical motors electric motors are actually much more reliable a mechanical motor a mechanical transmission you have just check out the image of a mechanical transmission have a look at this thing you'll see there's counter shafts and Main shafts and gears and shift Forks moving all these things together electrical motors are actually incredibly simple all they are is a magnet spinning inside some copper wire there's not a losing a lot of moving Parts there's simple they last forever you can find electrical motors that are still in operation from the early 1900s they just they work they work well they're reliable they're easy to service you can rebuild them if easily it's they are a pure simple service thing as long as the company makes it easy to work on designs it with serviceability in mind you can get incredible serviceability and lifespan out of these electric motors have a look at the Mill in Town The Sawmill and Merit here uses laternos the one laterno they use every day to unload login trucks was made in 1967 and it is diesel Electric a diesel generator moving electric motors electric winches electric rack and pinion steering electric Hub Motors and this thing still unloads logging trucks every day since 1967 that's how long this log loader has been in service for if you compare that to a normal Mill loader where you get five ten years of service they're going on 50 years still unloading hundreds of logging trucks per day just as efficiently because that's how reliable these electric motors are it's more reliable less maintenance higher gross better fuel mileage overall this sounds like a pretty more power more power it's a win-win yeah it's this is one of those solutions that freight trains have been diesel electric since the 1930s and they can move millions of pounds of freight why hasn't this been done in trucks before like this is the obvious solution the diesel electric trucks the technology is there now to make easy simple to maintain build and construct diesel electric trucks why hasn't this been done this is the obvious Bridge gap between pure diesel mechanical and full electric Battery Technology isn't there yet that megawatt battery still weighs 20 000 pounds it needs to get more energy dense quicker to charge we need more charging infrastructure we don't need charging infrastructure for this charging infrastructure is going to be 20 30 years into the future as every single truck parked at a truck stop needs to plug in for 10 hours to charge these trucks 10 hours you need to be plugged in to charge a megawatt battery that is insane they're saying five hours but it's it depends on the level of power infrastructure that's another deal the point is you need charging infrastructure at every truck stop and that means that your average truck stop is going to be requiring more capacity and energy than small cities truck stops in the states could use more power in just one truck stop than the entire city of Campos with the diesel electric you don't need that charging infrastructure it's going to take years for us decades for us to upgrade that grid infrastructure to supply the electric so if we can reduce fuel consumption we can burn that fuel cleaner and we can get those electric motors the electric technicians the truck pan technicians this is the way to bridge the gap between just Diesel and Diesel electric it's all the benefits of the range and simplicity and the ability to fuel off of diesel with the advantage of the fuel savings the power the efficiency of electric this is the hands down in my opinion the best way to go it is the appropriate first step in the right direction yes

Channel: Edison Motors

Views: 17,297

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Id: Tyi12IR_2kk

Length: 21min 28sec (1288 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 17 2022