Re: New BBC soap: Bert Coules?

And that's about the same ballpark "power" as supplied by a single diesel pump filling a car's tank in 3 minutes.

Is that a cage round the entire vehicle? How do you ensure that there are no passengers and pets around?

I'd suggest that jump leads are only intemittently rated and might get rather hot if used continuaously for even 5 minutes.

I don't thie the Safety Elf would be happy with the public being aywhere neat 33kV.

I know, but the new black clouds are generated as I describe. My personal experience says that the engine is noticeably more powerful afterwards.

nah. Just around the charge point

Then you havent used them for 5 minutes have you

AND I am talking about 5 minute charging.

Anwyay I wasnt saying use them, exactly, just that they are of the sort of order that will jappily tale 75A. In fact I've seen 75A model plane wiring that is way smaller.

The public already are.

25kv is a few feet above your head in a train...

Its not a question of how near you are, its a questioin of what's in between...

On a diesel the black clouds are simply an over rich mixture at full throttle - you dont control air, you control fuel to incrase power, and on turbos can be oil accumulated in the turbo hises leaking past the turbo bearings that gets burnt off when the throttle is opened

Burning off carbon won't make smoke

Depends on the efficiency of the process. But it is a good point. Anyone here in the industry care to tell us something about the 150 kW chargers?

Within the "pump" (charger). You connect with no power flowing, then when the charger detects that the connection is sound, it turns itself on. Much like those people who turn off a BS1363 ("13A") socket at the socket before plugging in. Or, for a conventional petrol/Diesel pump, you make sure the fuel is not flowing until you have "plugged it in" to your car, don't you - you don't spray it all over the place.

It won't have the kV/kA on it while you're grabbing it. As for the solid copper - yes, probably the connectors will indeed have substantial pins, to ensure adequate contact area; the cables leading to them (if high enough voltage, probably won't need kA), if they're similar to welding cables (with more insulation), still shouldn't be that much more unwieldy than the current hoses for petrol/Diesel.

He _might_ be right that some more lockout might be needed, though I'd have thought something just around the charging socket - perhaps like the airway bridge they use at airports to connect to the doors of aircraft to put the passengers through. Though maybe not.

(A fuse is too slow, but yes, an ELCB type device.)

Or connected the wrong way round as I can say from experience (-:. [I consider myself very lucky: I'd always thought one of the batteries would explode. In fact, just a _lot_ of smoke came off the cable (and one of them is now open circuit, though I've not found where).]

Interesting; it could reduce what's needed inside the charger "pump" body from a converter to just some switchgear. Although having worked (briefly) in switchgear, 33 kV switchgear probably isn't much smaller anyway. [You want switchgear that has thousands of operations lifetime, so it's not just a slow air-break switch like a lightswitch.]

Where there's a will, it can be done. As I saw pointed out quite a lot of years ago, if nowadays you proposed pumping an explosive gas under pressure into most domestic homes, someone would have a fit, but we do it anyway ... and just conventional petrol/Diesel pumps, for that matter

You'd be surprised.

Certainly, without regen. braking, most of the advantage - for something like a bus or delivery vehicle - is lost.

Can't speak for the ones you've seen; if they're being retrofitted, I'd be interested to know what arrangement. The ones my previous employer produces are an electric drive train (which the drivers and passengers like - it's got more torque, is smoother, and quieter), with a Diesel charger (4-cylinder where it was 6 in the equivalent bus). The range on the battery (under the back seats upstairs) was indeed only a few tens of metres - but, that's where most of the energy in a bus is used: accelerating several tons of bus plus passengers up from 0 to say 15 mph. All of which energy is immediately lost as soon as the driver has to brake, unless it can be recovered. And a typical bus does a lot of starting and stopping - not just at stops, but traffic lights, or other traffic.

If Slough-Maidenhead is a long distance route that uses trunk roads and not many stops, there will be less gain (though I suspect still worthwhile). I saw a reprint of an article in something like "Bus monthly" of how ours performed on a typical bus route in London: the buses they were replacing were getting 4.7 miles per gallon (!), whereas the hybrids got 8 - still terrible, but almost twice as much, plus as I said the drivers and passengers liked them.

That too. Well, it might, if the control system decides the battery level is low, but at least it doesn't continuously idle. (One thing that _is_ disconcerting is that there's little or no correlation between when the Diesel runs and what the bus/driver is doing.)

Are you sure - electric motor + fuel motor + battery weighs less than just a fuel motor? (Plus there's the volume they require, too.)

That is a good point. (I'm in favour of hybrids - just fully aware that they're oversold. [And the opposition also oversells.])

Agreed a lot of it is.

It's one of the "greenhouse gases", the presence of more of which _does_ reduce heat radiation from the planet; I'm willing to accept that. How _significant_ it is, both in isolation and in comparison to other such, I don't know. (I _believe_ methane is far more significant, and that comes mostly from burping cows, or possibly even ocean algae or from below.)

I doubt it's not a lot better in stop-start urban driving. On any long journey, let alone constant-speed testing, I'd happily believe it is worse, if only because of the extra weight (two engines plus battery).

Because a lot of the people willing to shell out the extra money for a hybrid, want something of at least comparable _performance_ to what that money would get them in a conventional car. The petrol engine has been developed (in cars, anyway) for a lot longer than the electric one, so to get that performance, at least with the electric engine being reasonably small, the petrol engine needs to be directly connected.

There _are_ such vehicles - most new buses are of that type, but electric-only drive cars with a small petrol generator-only do exist; some people (and manufacturers) refer to them as "range extenders". I think they're aimed at a different type of purchaser, as their performance is _a little_ less.

(One I read about had a little 600cc engine for charging. Whether that could get the car moving at all from a completely flat battery state, wasn't clear.)

Which is also very slow! The biggest - the ones made by a Polish company (something like Warsila, but that's not quite right), that drive the biggest container ships - run most efficiently at 180 RPM, that's only three cycles per second! (Though the pistons still reach, IIRR, 6 m/s. These are _big_ engines!)

In message <Oot+ snipped-for-privacy@the.dark.at.the.top.of.the.stairs>, Bill snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com writes: []

I suspect just that they weren't developed in time. When I recently looked into the subject, I found there _are_ Diesel hybrids, even cars - but only expensive big ones (a Mercedes was one of them). Now that the politicians have decided to hate Diesels (without IMO valid technical justification), no manufacturer (I hope I'm wrong, but we'll see) is going to put effort into developing a small one - they'll use petrol-burning engines for that part of the market (electrics with a small charger engine).

Not entirely; regenerative braking is "green". Whether it will cause a reduction in fuel consumption that outweighs the increased consumption caused by carrying round two engines and a battery instead of just one engine, I don't know: it will certainly depend on the type of driving being done. I'd be surprised if it didn't yield significant savings in most urban driving; for long relatively-steady-speed journeys, I don't know. (But if you do mostly that sort of motoring, arguably you shouldn't at present buy a hybrid anyway; what saving, if any, would take a long time to repay the higher purchase price.)

Have you figures? I could believe that there is _some_ inefficiency in the conversions (in fact I'd distrust anyone who claimed otherwise), but are we talking conversion efficiency of 90-95%, or 30-50%? Plus there's the point about the fuel engine always being run at its most efficient speed. []

While I accept a petrol engine efficiency is highest at full throttle and a specific rpm, a diesel engine is more efficient at all loads.

I would suggest the advantage of a petrol hybrid compared to a diesel is very questionable.

In message <qhlk00$v0p$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, Fredxx snipped-for-privacy@nospam.com writes: []

For stop-start working (buses, delivery vehicles, and arguably congested urban driving in general), I suspect anything with regenerative braking will be more efficient than anything without.

Electric with Diesel top-up is probably best of all, at least for urban.

Mine never needed either.

But there has to be a moment when a switch or relay connects the power.

Bill

It's a case of using the 'right tool for the job'. Until it is fully inserted, sliding a plug unto a socket usually results in an only partial, high-resistance contact - with the obvious resulting damage to the surfaces. An on-off switch is usually designed to have a fast snap action, preventing such damage. The rule is 'Make sure the switch is off. Plug it in. Switch it on. When finished, switch it off, then unplug it'.