I have been thinking about the future of the automotive industry for quite a while now, and mostly thinking about electric and fuel cell vehicles.

I believe, we are going to see a dramatic change in the propulsion of vehicles very soon. Fuel consumption must decrease, and the inefficiencies of the typical vehicle are being targeted as the first thing to change. What is going to replace the Gasolene / Diesel Engine? I have considered this quite a bit, and here are my opinions and findings on different alternatives. Hybrid fuel / electric: There are many advantages of the hybrid. To the average driver there is no difference between a hybrid and a regular car, you drive it, you fill it up at a gas station, but it gets better fuel economy when driving in town. To the auto industry, hybrids offer a learning platform, where they can develop battery, motor and other electric drive components without having to take the giant leap of producing a purely electric vehicle which requires a significant change in support infrastructure and possibly driver awareness.

Hybrid Fuel / Hydraulic: Over the last little while there has been an increase in hybrid hydraulic systems. The Hydraulic hybrid uses an internal combustion engine, but has a hydraulic tank that stores pressurized fluid which is used to provide power to the wheels. UPS has a few in testing, and have reported great success.:[wired.com][pressroom]Someone has done a similar thing to a BMW vehicle: [AutoBlogGreen] The Advantage of they hydraulic hybrid is that it can store and use energy very quickly. It is possible to fill or empty a hydraulic tank within seconds if it is designed do do that. This means that for a relatively small mass a large amount of power can be delivered. This technology makes lots of sense for large vehicles that make frequent stops, like delivery trucks, garbage trucks and buses. The down side is that hydraulic tanks don't store a lot of energy, so you can't go long distances on hydraulic power alone. I haven't done alot of research into it, but I am pretty sure that if you designed a hydraulic tank the size of a gas tank, it would not allow you to go 300-400 km. That means that you would always have to have a separate source of energy to travel large distance, so hydraulic drives will always be hybrids, relying on an in-efficient energy source, unless some hydraulic storage technology breakthrough comes along.

Bio Fuel:I havn't done much research into Bio-Fuel either, so I could be wrong about this. If we were to replace all the fuel we burn with Bio-Fuel It could not be produced quickly enough for the demand. Therefore Bio fuel is not the answer to our problems, but it may be part of the answer. Using waste from other processes we can produce a small amount of bio-fuel that can be used to supplement our fossil fuel resources. It makes sense if the total harm and cost to produce and use the bio-fuel, is lower than the harm and cost of using other fuels.

Hybrid and Bio Fuel summary: As long as fuel is being burned in the vehicle, and emissions are being produced, there will exist in-efficiencies that will eventually get eliminated. It is always more efficient and cost effective to produce energy at a power plant than on board a vehicle, but how that energy gets to the vehicle is the bigger question

Hydrogen: Hydrogen is used as an energy storage system. Electricity is used to split water into hydrogeon and oxygen, then a fuel cell is used to turn that hydrogen into electricity, or an Internal combustion engine burns it to make mechanical power. The efficiency of converting electricity into Hydrogen is about 70% [wikipedia] . The efficiency of a fuel cell to turn that hydrogen into electricity, or an internal combustion engine is around 40% efficient. [wikipedia] (that article (as of MArch 16, 2009) talks about production to wheel efficiency as well) [AutoBlogGreen] . The total efficiency from production to wheel is only about 30%, where as a battery electric system is about 80 percent efficient. The picture for Hydrogen gets worse, hydrogen is hard to store, it leaks out through solid containers at high pressure, it boils off when stored as a liquid, and it takes up lots of space in low pressure, so no matter how you store it, it will essentially take up energy. The longer you store it, the less efficient it is. Factor in having to create an infrastructure to deliver the hydrogen to where it is needed and you end up with a weak economic argument as well.

Electric Vehicle: Electric vehicles (IMHO) have the greatest future. There are numerous ways to produce electricity cleanly, and electric motors electricity very efficiently; that means that the least amount of energy is wasted. The biggest issue right now is how to store the electricity in the car. Right now the most likely solution is lithium-batteries. Lets look at the issues behind Lithium batteries.
Today's consumers expect their car to operate like a car, they don't want to make sacrifices to drive an electric vehicle (at least that is what the automakers are saying). That means they don't want to take more time to "fill their tank" than they do now, they want to be able to drive just as far as they can now without compromise. With an electric car, being able to drive as far as their current fossil fuel vehicle means they need about a 40kWh battery. A 40kW lithium battery weighs about 300kg (600lbs), is about 300L, and costs around $20,000. Those are 3 big obstacles to overcome. Removing the Internal combustion engine allows more room and weight for batteries, which makes the size and weight a little easier to overcome, but if an electric car costs $20,000 more than its gasoline counterpart, who will want to buy one? If you spread the cost of the battery over its expected life of 10 years, that is $2,000 per year, which is more than a typical years worth of fuel, so even if electricity were free, the battery is more expensive. The price of batteries needs to come down, or people need to get buy with shorter range on the car, for the rest of this little report I am going to assume a battery is around 20kWh, something that is more affordable, and with a little flexibility from drivers, may be an acceptable comprimize on range / price.

So if the price of the batteries comes down, or people accept shorter range vehicles, how will electric vehicles work? The North American electrical grid has the capacity to provide the electricity that the vehicles need, but getting the power to the batteries can be a problem. Most of today's lithium batteries take at least 1 hour to charge, that is a fact of the chemistry. From a typical wall socket you can get about 1.5kW of power, that means it would take about 13 hours to charge 20kW battery from dead to full. Using the most power you could at your house, (240V 50A) you could get 12kW charger and charge in about 1.5 hours. I think anything under 13 hours for a full charge would be reasonable for a driver with a garage, but many people don't have their own garage. Tutting a 12kW plug in most stalls in an apartment parkade or on a street so people could charge while they are at work or at the mall is not feasible, and still if your charge takes an hour and a half, people would be lined up to to get the plugs all day. 13hour (110V 15A) chargers could be installed in many stalls in parkades, on streest, but having enough of them at malls and on street parking would be expensive and easy to vandalize. Regardless, a 1hour or 13 hour full charge will not allow people to take electric vehicles on longer trips, so it won't be the answer for everyones problems.

Recently there have been advances in lithium batteries to allow them to charge faster, but there are drawbacks to these systems, either decreased battery life, greater weight, and they still would require 15-30 minutes for a full charge. Because of these drawbacks alot of research has gone into battery exchange ideas. The premise behind battery exchange is that you would drive your car to a battery exchange station, who would remove your battery and give you a fully charged battery in 2 minutes or less. Here is a list of the advantages and dis-advantages of this system
Advantages:

• Quick vehicle recharging
• No Battery Cost to the vehicle. Since the battery would be property of the charging program, the cost of the battery would not be in the vehicle, so inital cost is down, and amortized over the life of the battery
• guaranteed battery health, since the battery is taken back and charged, it would be the responsibility of hte charging service to make sure the battery was in top shape.
• New battery technology As new battery technology comes out, you could get new battery technology (greater range, lighter weight) without having to buy it.
  Would meet the needs of 100% of the population. People in apartments, or without covered garages would be able to use the technology.
  More Batteries on the Grid. The batteries that are being charged, or stored would act as a grid banalcer, able to provide power to the grid if the demand became grater than the power plants could provide. This would allow for greater use of wind power, which is inherently variable. In fact there have been business propositions that using batteries solely for this purpose would be profitable, providing power when it is needed, being able to rent the batteries out to electric vehicles only makes it more attractive. Batteries with old technology, or degraded performance would still be useful for that type of business, allowing the best batteries to be used in vehicles, while the old batteries are sort of re-cycled as grid balancing storage.
• low cost for installing a battery exchange station. There are no tanks needed to be stored in the ground. Remote locations could have the batteries shipped in and out if there is no suitable power near by. A battery exchange machine could be easier to install than a fuel pump. This also means that it would be quick to setup a battery exchange infrastructure.
• Road Tax. A government road tax could be incorporated into the price of exchanging a battery, allowing upkeep of roads and infrastructure. If everyone charged their cars at home the way tax is collected to pay for roads would need to be changed.
• Cheaper Batteries. If all batteries are made to a specification, it would be a more competitive market to produce the batteries, since there would be no proprietary batteries.
• Well designed battery enclosures. Since all batteries will be the same, it would be easy to do through testing on those batteries. The could have very high standards for safety.
• Batteries could be transported. It would cost energy to transport the extra batteries to be recharged from remote locations, but it would keep the truck drivers employed, and would allow for commercial wind farms that would only recharge batteries, and not have to maintain a connection to the power grid.

Disadvantages:

• Manufacturers would need to work together to define a common battery module. This is a big disadvantage, nobody seems to want to work together, so this alone could be the shortfall of the system.
• More batteries would need to be made than cars using them. Each exchange location would have to have spare batteries, so there may have to be more than 2 batteries produced for each vehicle on the road, maybe more. This would add to the initial expense, but would be balanced somewhat by the exchange/recharge stations being able to stabilize the grid, and use the batteries to earn money by discharging when power is at a premium, and charging when power is in low demand. Also if sites had recharge capability those spare batteries would be ready for installation in the next vehicle within hours, so the number of spare batteries required at each location would depend on the power capabilities of the location, and the number of vehicles using that station.
• Having a true quick-charge station would require special hardware to be able to quickly access and swap heavy batteries, this would add to the initial cost of stations, but there could be slightly slower more manual options that reduce the initial cost of the station, but sacrafice the speed of the battery chage.

Rapid Charging Battery Stations Very recently there have been announcements in battery technology that claim lithium battery recharge times in the order of seconds (from 2007 [slashdot] from 2009 [slashdot]. This seems like a great improvement, having the ability to charge your battery from empty to full within seconds, or possibly a couple minutes, just like filling a gas tank. Lets look at the logistics of this system. Lets asume that there will be a 20kWh battery in a car to recharge in 2 minutes (one 30/th of an hour) that would take approx 600kW of power. Typically EV batteries are around 400V, which means that the battery would need to accept (600000 / 400) 1500Amps. To handle that current, a conductor which is about 3.5 cm (1.4inches) in diameter. That is pretty hefty, but still reasonable. In a battery that would probably be about 10-20 lbs of wire. Typical maximum charge /discharge rates of a vehicle are around 200kW (270 Horse Power), if charging is going to pump 600kW (800Hp) into the battery there would probably have to be some system to allow the Battery Protection system to expect a huge inrush of current and not determine that it is a failure in the drive system and disconnect the battery to protect itself. That means that there would have to be a standard communication protocol between chargers and batteries such that any battery could be safely charged by the charger. The alternative to that is to have the charger on board the vehicle, and simply provide the charger with some standard high-voltage power. The disadvantage of that is that a 600kW charger would not be cheap. It would be about $8,000 or more, so it would make sense to not put the charger in each vehicle. Also the battery cells would have to be in great health. If one of the cells gets damaged and begins to lose capacity, the charging system might cause that cell to overheat, or overcharge, or in the best case, it would just decrease the capacity of the pack. If you increase the battery capacity to have a comperable range to gasoline vechicles, or want to decrease the recharge time, the issues get compounded, requiring a 1200kW (1600 horse power) charger 3 inch thick wire inside the battery.

Then there is the issue of what sites would be able to deliver 600kW of power. Certainly your house would not have that kind of power, but if you had batteries charging slowly all day, then when you plug in your high power charger it would draw from the batteries instead of from the grid, and charge your car up quickly. This would have the same price problem as mentioned earlier, having an extra battery pack at your house, and a charger could cost $50,000. The same principle could be achieved at a quick recharge station, a bank of batteries could be constantly charged as to not overload the grid, and when cars come in to get recharged, the power would come from the on-site batteries, and not cause a spike in the draw from the grid. This has the same drawback as battery exchange system, where you would need to have more batteries that are just being used, but you would not require as many as the exchange system. Infact setting up a comercial recharge station would be relatively in-expensive. A "Single Pump" Recharge stations (a station that could handle one car at a time) would be about $50,000 (this would include the batteries, weather proof enclosure, and all the required safety equipment and such) and could be installed anywhere there is power available. It would probably be the size of 2 standard gasoline pumps, and would deliver the amount of energy per day that the service station is capable of. For example, if the service station only had a 110V 15A (standard household) line, it could quick charge up to an average of 40kWh of battery per day. that would be 2 cars with 20kWh batteries. Each car would be charged in minutes, as long as the battery inside the charge station had enough storage. If they had a 220V 50A line, it could quick-charge 264kWh per day, which is about 13 cars (20kWh each). This means that it would be relatively in-expensive to start offering the re-charge service, and as demand for the service grew it would be easy to expand, and then upgrade the power available to the charging stations to support more charges per day. One potential problem with quck charge batteries is that since they charge and discharge so quickly, it is easy to cycle them many times quickly, especially if the same batteries are used inside the quick-charge stations. Typically a battery has a limited number of charge-discharge cycles, so if a battery only lasts 1000 cycles before its performance degrades, a car that uses its battery capacity every day would need a new battery every 3 years, and a well used charge station battery could need to be replaced every few months. The research on the new quick charge battery I linked to above mentions that they have tested 50 cycles without degradation, it will be interesting to see how performance decreases after thousands of cycles.
Summary of Rapid Charge Advantages:

• You keep your own battery, so you know what it has been through, and its health.
• Car manufacturers can make the shape and packaging of the battery however they want.
• Rapid Charge stations could collect road tax
• you would fill your electric car similar to filling a gasoline vehicle.
• rapid charge stations could provide grid balancing
• very little infrastructure to setup, easy to start providing service, and easy to expand service, and possibly very little maintenance on service stations

Summary of Rapid Charge Disadvantages:

• You would own your own battery, this would increase the initial cost of the vehicle, and you would not get new technology as batteries improved.
• proprietary batteries for each vehicle could be expensive to replace.
• standard charging hardware and communication protocol for all vehicles.

To recap, slow charge stations at home or at office buildings / parkades will not be a permanent solution and would not work for everyone, and would not work for longer trips., Hydrogen works, but will always be less efficient than batteries which are continually getting better, Rapid Charging stations and Battery Exchanges seem to be the best solution for small vehicles.
Here is a direct comparison of battery exchange and quick charge stations as described above. Yellow boxes indicate a minor advantage to that technolgoy, a green box indicates a major advantage to that technology

Battery Exchange	Quick Charge
Battery is not owned by vehicle owner	Battery is owned by vehicle owner
Competitive Battery Pricing	Proprietary Batteries
New Battery Technology as it is developed	Battery remains the same for life of the vehicle (or until you buy a new one)
Battery Supplier would have to have extra batteries on hand	Charging stations would have some batteries for temporary electrical storage
Batteries at charging stations would be able to stabilize grid	Charging stations would be able to stabalize grid, but not to the same extent as the exchange system
Battery exchange stations could have high initial costs	Quick Charge stations could have lower initial cost.
Batteries would have to be easily accessible for changing	Batteries could be integrated into the vehicle and be less accessible
Standard well known battery with safety standards	battery enclosures could be custom design for each vehichle increasing cost to achieve same safety ratings.
Automakers would have to accept standardized battery formats	Batteries could be made custom for different vehicles, but all vehicles would have to be able to be charged by the same system

Looking at that I would say that both technologies have a pretty good chance at surviving, but I would have to give the upper hand to Quick charge because I believe automakers will be reluctant to using a standardized battery pack, initial cost of true quck battery exchange is higher, and as batteries get better and cheaper, the disadvantage of purchasing the battery along with the car will beome less of a factor. On the other hand, if battery technology develops so that you can store 1,000km worth of electrcity in a battery the size of a shoe-box that costs around $10,000, but that battery can't be charged in less than 10 minutes, battery exchange system would be the clear winner ... perhaps I will have to explain why in my next rant.

-ryan

Scott has had a productive last few months, he has been scooching along (pulling himself along using his hands and forearms) the floor pretty quickly for about a month. Last week he started a few crawling motions, but sofar hasn't made more than about 4 moves before figuring out that pulling himself along is still faster.

There are a bunch of new photos on the picasa site, so check them out.

We have been busy over the last month, lots of people have come to visit, and its not over yet. Tomorrow Grandma and Grandpa Biffard are coming for the day, then next week Grandma Stevenson will be here.

We got a new computer, so now we are running Linux on our home computer, it is taking a little bit to get used to but so far so good. We are using Picasa to manage our images (I have over 35,000 in our library) and it seems to do a good job with online photos. So the new page to go to to check up on our photos will be:
http://picasaweb.google.com/RyanBiffard
I will maintain an album for each month that we take photos and continually update that until the month is over, or create an album for an event if there is enough photos to post from that.

I wrote a image and movie download program which automatically makes backups of the media, copies files to a working directory, rotates, and compresses video so now we will have movie content as well. Youtube seems to be the standard for posting video so I am trying that out. To check out our videos go here http://www.youtube.com/RyanBiffard

Again we have been slow to post photos. We have been having a blast watching our little baby grow and discover new things. Today he rolled over from his back to his front! Here are a few photos to give you a glimpse into our lives.

- ryan and Camila
Here are the photos from the last few weeeks
Gallery 1
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Gallery 4

This last month has been pretty busy for our family. Camila has been in Kelowna most of the time I have been working lots here.

Scott is doing great. He is smiling and being interactive, and starting to be facinated by toys and things.

Here are the photos from the last little while
Gallery 1
Gallery 2
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Gallery 4

Camila is still in Kelowna, but she wanted me to put this gallery up so you could see the photo of Scott underwater. I'll update more later when she gets back on Thrusday.

Scott loves his baths, its the getting out part he doesn't like. We have been going for lots of walks and keeping pretty busy








Camila dressed Scott up to look like ryan and brought him down to Userful. Scott is smiling and generally a cool kid. He and Camila went to the Watson family ranch for a night, he traveled really well.

Click on the thumbnails to the right to go to the new galleries from the past 2 weeks.

We are starting to get into a routine. Scott is pretty good at sleeping and eating. Grandpa Biffard sent some photos of himself holding Scott, so I put those in this gallery too.

Not much news around here, I have been working on a solar panel for the Aptera Type 1 electric vehicle. I have assembled what should be a 60W solar panel, and am now working out the manufacturing process. I have also designed and will be building/testing a circuit to allow the panels to safely charge a 12v Battery this week.

This week was pretty un-eventful, wich is a good thing. Scott is pretty mello, just hangs out and sleeps and eats. I got the photos of when the Biffard Grandparents were here. Unfortunatly there are no pictures with Grandpa Biffard, next time we visit I will be sure to get some.

We bought a digital video camera last week so I have been spending time playing around with that. My Windows computer is really old and slow so it can't even play the HD video files from the camcorder, fortunatly the Linux comptuers at work were really easy to setup and get working with the files. Hopefully this week I will get some time to convert the video down to something more web-friendly and be able to post those up.

Photos 1
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We have had a great week at home. Scott is doing well. Lots of people have come to visit, Grandma and Grandpa Biffard were here on the weekend and we will update with photos of that soon. I think I need to start organizing my photos slightly differently now as I haven't taken so many photos of the same thing over so many days. Cam says he is so cute, how can you not take photos. Oh well for now you will have to click on all the galleries, next update I'll have something better figured out.

 

We are excited. Scott got to come home today at around 5:30. Laurie came over, then Anne and Steve and Kenna And Julie stopped in, and Brenda, Lauryn, Sophie and Rhys showed up aswell, so we had a full house. Uncle Glen came home from Atlanta tonight aswell, but there aren't any photos of him.


More photos

 

Day 2 in the private room. Wanda and Quan came to visit, Milt and Jane were there too. Scott is doing great, and will most likely be able to come home on Tuesday.


More photos

 

Scott is doing great, he got moved to a priavte room so Camila got to sleep with him on his own, wothout monitors plugged in, and his IV locked. They had to wake him up at 02:00 to give him his vancomycin in his IV. Camila was finally able to get some good sleep from 03:00 until 6:00 and Scott slept from 03:00 until 06:45, then had a good feed for an hour. Uncle Todd also stopped in in the morning on his way through town with his band.
More photos

 

Scott is still in the NICU and will stay in the hospital until at least Tuesday. His blood cultures came back negative, so they are discontinuing one antibiotic. On Thursday he had a little redness around his belly button on Thursday that could have been an infection they gave him a second antibiotic that needs to stay running until Tuesday. Chances are that the redness was just sensitive skin, but it is safer to just continue the antibiotics and wait it out.
Photos of Scott, camping out in the NICU

 

Just a quick update. Scott and Camila are still in the hospital, I updated the photo gallery with a couple more photos.

Scott has been breathing rather quickly (100 Breaths Per Minutes) so there were a bunch of great doctors and nurses checking over him. In the end they did an X-Ray and found that he had a bit of air around one of his lungs. The Medical term for this is Pneumothorax. The regular procedure for this in babies is just to let it work it self out, so he is under observation until at least Saturday in the hospital.

UPDATE 4:00pm: The Doctors and Nurses at the NICU have been very good, but are not convinced that the quick breathing is just due to pneumothorax. There may have been a bit of air around his lungs, but he seems to have a an infection aswell. He has a couple different antibiotics dripping in while they keep running the tests to find out what it is. He had a Lumbar Puncture around 10:00 and the NP said that it looked good and clear, but we have to wait for the results to confirm

 

Scott John Biffard was born June 3 at 11:53PM, weighing 8lbs 1oz and Ryan didn't faint. Cam and Scott are both doing great.

Here are the first photos, looks like Chelsea is the winner of the poll.

I spent some time and wrote a little baby poll. I will update that page with everyone's guesses. Enter to win FANTASTIC prizes. :)

 

Poll is now closed, but there has still not been any activity indicating the baby will be here any time soon, I guess I won't be winning the baby poll. Cam is still feeing good, and is in good spirits. - ryan

I have been working hard on renovating the Bathroom recently, I haven't had a chance to go rockclimbing or do pretty much anything except work on the Batroom. Here are photos, Renovations started on March 3rd, I finished everything except small things (like hanging the shower currtain, and door) April 19. I was hoping I would get everything done in 3 weeks, It took 7. I think it turned out well.

We just got back from the Australia / Newzealand trip, Here are the photos from Australia.
Link to photos from Australia
Link to photos from New Zealand