And home-equity loans...
Posted on 05/27/2007 5:29:34 PM PDT by P-40
GE publicly unveiled a prototype hybrid road locomotive at its Ecomagination event in Los Angeles last week. (Earlier post.) The 4,000 hp locomotive uses a set sodium nickel chloride (Na-NiCl2) batteries to capture and store energy dissipated during dynamic braking as well as an on-board fuel optimizer system.
GE’s work on the hybrid is one of the projects in the Department of Energy’s Heavy Vehicle Systems Optimization efforts, and is one component of a larger GE effort on heavy-duty hybrids that includes buses and very heavy-duty off-highway vehicles such as mine trucks.
The energy stored in the locomotive batteries will reduce fuel consumption and emissions by as much as 10% compared to most of the freight locomotives in use today. Railroads account for about 2.5% of national fuel usage. In addition to reduced emissions, a hybrid will operate more efficiently in higher altitudes and up steep inclines.
Locomotives are electric drive vehicles—the diesel engines function as gensets to power the electric traction motors. Locos use dynamic braking—traction motors ceasing to act as motors and becoming alternators—to decelerate or to maintain speed on a downhill grade. Typically, a resistor is used to dissipate the electric power (about 7,000 hp per locomotive) as heat produced by the electric motor during dynamic braking.
In the hybrid, the energy storage system (ESS) is connected to the main DC link through an electronic converter controlled by an energy management system and associated vehicle system controls. The ESS provides supplemental power to the traction motor along with the power from the genset, and receives power during regenerative braking.
With proper system controls, the hybrid propulsion assist enables reduced output form the diesel, thus reducing the overall amount of fuel required. provide vehicle acceleration with a reduced output power from the diesel engine, thus reducing the amount of fuel required.
Road locomotives’ requirements are significantly more demanding those of automobiles. Locos experience high utilization (an average 8,328 hours per year—a 365-day year has 8,760 hours) over a very wide variety of temperatures. Train coupling delivers significant physical shock, and the steel wheels, steel rails and track irregularities contribute to fairly constant vibration. Locomotives are designed for a 20-year life, and cover about 250,000 miles per year.
Loads range from 1,000 to 4,000 tons per loco, and acceleration and deceleration are of long duration, ranging from tens of minutes to hours.
The hybrid battery system for a locomotive thus needs to provide both high energy and high power. GE’s hybrid prototype has a power/energy (P/E) ratio of about 2. By contrast, the Camry hybrid has a P/E ratio of 19, the GE/Orion V prototype hybrid transit bus a P/E ratio of about 5, and the Sprinter plug-in hybrid prototype with SAFT Li-ion batteries a P/E ratio of about 7, according to GE.
GE considered two variants of NiMH, one li-ion system and two Na-NiCl2 designs before deciding on the Na-NiCl2 pack. Only the sodium nickel chloride batteries passed all the requirements for the system given the application demands, which included: relative weight, relative volume, cooling medium, battery management, cooling impact on size and weight and reliability.
The battery modules are environmentally sealed, thermally insulated and air-cooled, and operate at 300°C. There is module-level monitoring.
The fuel optimization system—which functions with a conventional locomotive as well—factors in trip objectives, speed restrictions, the manifest and track geometry to calculate optimal speed and power settings. This integrates with the hybrid energy management system and the Consist Manager to produce optimized throttle and brake commands and energy flow control to deliver the best efficiency from the entire locomotive “consist”, or package of locomotives (lead and trailers) that move the train.
Even without the hybrid propulsion system, GE’s Consist Manager can improve fuel economy between 1% and 3% for each locomotive.
Before the GE hybrid locomotive is offered commercially, the engineering team will continue work and analysis on the batteries and corresponding control systems on-board the locomotive. Following lab testing, GE will produce pre-production units for customer field validation purposes.
GE Introduces Hybrid Locomotive Prototype to PublicKinetic energy - any body remember what kinetic energy is?
This is a kinetic energy recovery locomotive.
They recover kinetic (motion) energy and convert it back into potential (chemical in this case) energy.
I believe several other roads operated similar systems on mountainous sections. The Pennsylvania was the most heavily electrified railroad in the US, but most of its territory was too flat to benefit much from this method of energy recovery.
About the only two things GE actually makes anymore is locomotives and bad network TV.
You beat me to it. This is done in Europe all the time.
And home-equity loans...
I beg your pardon; GE is big in electric power generation, transmission and switching:
http://www.gepower.com/home/index.htm
And just to paint the complete picture:
In terms of market capitalization, G.E. is the world’s second largest company.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric
More:
Today
GE is an enormous multinational conglomerate headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut. Its New York headquarters are based in 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Rockefeller Center, known as the GE Building for the prominent GE logo on the roof. Through its RCA subsidiary it has been associated with the Center since its construction in the 1930s.
The company describes itself as composed of a number of primary business units or “businesses.” Each “business” is itself a vast enterprise, many of which would, even as a standalone company, rank in the Fortune 500. The list of GE businesses varies over time as the result of acquisitions, divestitures and reorganizations. General Electric’s tax return is the largest return filed in the United States, approximately 24,000 pages when printed out. Electronically, the files were 237 megabytes.[3]
In 2005 GE launched its “Ecomagination” initiative in an attempt to position itself as a “green” company. GE is currently one of the biggest players in the wind power industry, and it is also developing new environment-friendly products such as hybrid locomotives and photovoltaic cells. The company has even set goals for its subsidiaries to lower their greenhouse gas emissions.[4] Soon, GE will be selling technologies to companies that are struggling to adapt to stricter environmental regulations.
On May 21, 2007, General Electric announced it will sell its GE Plastics division to petrochemicals manufacturer Saudi Basic Industries Corp. for net proceeds of about $9 billion.
Giant 300-degree-C battery porn bump!
They do make one ehll of a locomotive. Mostly just kidding, I have millions of dollars in their PLC's and they piss me off every day.
Maybe its the environment the PLC’s are used in (corrosive or vibration, HV transients) - or is it personnel and a training issue?
Seriously, I’ve ben looking at contact sprays, like described here:
http://www.listserve.com/archives/collins/2003-11/msg00118.html
Battelle found that half of the products being sold to the DOD to prevent
corrosion in electrical connectors actually accelerated corrosion in some
tests all of which (except one) were qualified under the Navy’s
specification MIL-C-81309. Battelle contacted all the companies that claimed
their products were corrosion inhibitors but caused corrosion, and none of
them had done any testing to substantiate their outrageous claims. However,
Battelle identified MIL-L-87177A Grade B (invented by the Bell Labs for
their own use) as an excellent corrosion inhibitor for connectors that
lasted for a full two years.
Google search:
MIL-L-87177A Grade B
Really?
Airplane engines, MRIs and medical equipment such as medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies, power generation such as turbine control systems, oil and gas systems, utility systems, commercial financing, real estate financing, and a whole lot more.
They make pretty good jet engines.
There were some early trolley systems that did the same. Talk about being ahead of their time!
Any idea about how many locomotives get built, bought or sold in a year? I had no idea the market was lucrative.
There are only two players in the domestic market - GE and GM.
KE =1/2mv2 Kinetic energy equals one half of the mass times the velocity squared.
They make a lot of gas turbine engines.
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