I read about a new GE hybrid unit on their website for their evolution series. Aparently it generates electricity by the Dynamic brakes into batery boxes under the walk way.Now thats “ECOMAGINATION”. What do think about GE’s experiment?
only time will tell if it works out for the best… to early to make any kind of specluation on the units since they are still in the R&D phases… if it infact turns out to be something that helps cut down on fuel use…and the can work out the bugs in computer software…they might be good…but like i said…to early to tell
csx engineer
The GE webpage is:
https://www.getransportation.com/general/locomotives/hybrid/hybrid_default.asp
Interesting reading! Be sure to checkout the “How does it work?” GE link too.
I really liked the video. It would be nice to have some environmentaly concious diesels out there.[:D]
Thats pretty cool!
Pretty soon the Gevo’s will be phased out.
The question I have for enthusiasts of hybrids everywhere is how cost-effective are batteries as a source of motive power?
Many people hear batteries and they think limited range and all of the jokes about electric cars and very long extension cords. The hybrid of course gets around the need to be plugged in by having a small Diesel to charge the batteries or to charge the batteries on energy otherwise wasted in the brakes.
Even if you have an application such as a hybrid where the limited energy capacity of a battery is not a concern, you still have to worry about the batteries wearing out. Owners of camcorders got a taste of how these supposedly rechargable batteries would stop taking a charge after so many uses; I imagine laptop computer users get sticker shock when faced with replacing a battery pack.
Things like engines wear out because they have various sliding and rolling bearing surfaces, and while you do oil changes to preserve those engines, at some point friction wears out some key part that they are no longer worth maintaining. Batteries don’t have any moving parts, but they are like electroplating factories inside where chemicals or platings are moved between positive and negative sides by the actions of charging and discharging. The recharge never quite gets the battery plates into the like new condition, and a battery can wear out much as a mechanical system with friction parts, only a battery tends to wear out much sooner.
There are ways to get more life out of batteries – some batteries like to be discharged and then recharged fully, other batteries like being floated on shallow discharge and recharge cycles. But there is no getting around the limitation that moving chemicals, ions, or metal platings around in an electrochemical system is a much less mature art in terms of repeatable cycles than designing lubricated mechanical parts that can run for long times. As such, batteries are expensive ways of storing energy because you have to di
Hybrid applications in automotive vehicles are a good application for urban (downtown) driving. Long-haul driving simply doesn’t work. Hybrid cars actually get BETTER gas mileage downtown than the do on the freeway. They prefer the dynamic applications, and not the steady-state applications.
Translating that the the RR’s, I’d suspect that the hybrid locomotive would be most suitable for a switcher or an inter-urban application on light freight or passenger service. Long haul pulling coal drags would NOT work.
Mark in Utah
The design of the Green Goat and presumably other dual-power switchers is predicated on the duty cycle of most switchers, short periods which require full horsepower between longer intervals requiring less power or waiting for the next chore. Like the original dual-power and tri-power switchers of the 1930’s, you can use a smaller engine to keep the battery charged between heavy use periods.
I agree with much of what has been said. An ideal Hybrid locomotive application I would think would be Metra’s Rock Island suburban service. But note, that if the energy goes into batteries instead of into grid resistors, it becomes regenerative braking and not dynamic braking.
A lot of improvements have been made in the NiCad batteries that Hybrids use, and those of you who know Hybrid owners or have a Hybrid yourself, particularly the Toyota Pyrrus, will be happy with the reports of longevety and the guarantees. Laptop computer batteries have more problems because of the need to make them supercompact, but they are improving also, and I think 5 years is a possibilitiy.
Fuel efficiency of long haul freight locomotives is very good at the present time, tops of any transportation. Difficult for a Hybrid to improve on it. What GE seems to be saying is you can get some added horsepower free when you need it without having a second or third unit in the consist when the horsepower is not needed most of the time. That seems to be their pitch for the long-haul market, not fuel economy. And that is a good pitch too!
Sounds like a nice idea. Generating power from the wheels would save alot of fuel.
On the old Milwaukee road western district a train going down the hill help pull the next one along the tracks since it was feeding power back into the grid. The only probelm with hybrids is the fact that they are designed for shorter hauls and right now do not have the best room.
They sound like they’ve finally developed the batteries needed to do the job. The charging system and batteries have been substituted for the dynamic braking resistors, so they’re capturing energy that used to be wasted as heat through the dynamic brake grid. Sounds like the maximum savings would be on a railroad line with constant up and down running. Long grades may charge the batteries to maximum before they reach the bottom, so they may still need the old resistor grid.
Yes, they would.
In the UK, we had a railway line across northern England (the Manchester - Sheffield ‘Woodhead’ line, but it’s now abandoned as a through route) electrified at 1500V DC. The freight locomotives used regenerative braking, but to enable this to be used all the time, the feeder stations would automatically switch surplus energy into resistor banks if there weren’t enough trains going upgrade to absorb it.
In case anyone thinks batteries are always puny things in power terms, diesel-electric submarines have traditionally used banks of huge lead-acid battery cells for underwater power. Years ago, I worked for a while in the research labs of a UK battery manufacturer, and they had a collection of these ‘submarine cells’ in the lab - each 2 volt cell was about 5 feet tall and 1 foot square, and would quite happily supply enough current (thousands of amps) to melt anything you might accidentally short-circuit the terminals with!
Tony
[:)]Very True! I’m glad there are some people in here who have researched the new hybrids. I am one of them. The reason for the better mileage in the city then on the highway is because the engine actually shuts down when the car comes to a halt. Then the engine starts back up automatically when the gas is pressed.
Hybrids cars tend to not have good towing capacity so I don’t think a hybrid loco would have enough power to tow as much as a regular diesel. But like Mark said, the hybrids will probably do good in the yard.[:D]
Another happy Honda Hybrid owner… !
The comments on battery life above are very well taken. However, what has changed is not so much the batteries themselves (although there have been changes) as in the way they are used. Many types of batteries suffer from what is termed ‘memory’ (NiCads are particularly bad, but all types have the problem). This is when a battery tends to remember the charge state it was in when it was last recharged, and it can become very difficult to discharge below that state, even if that is nowhere nearly fully discharged.
Modern hybrid vehicles get around the problem by controlling the charging and discharging rates and amounts by some very sophisticated computer software; the Toyota and Honda approaches are different, but amount to the same thing in the end. Consumers, on the other hand, tend to just recharge a battery much too soon, ‘just in case’, with the result that the memory effect kills the battery’s ability to discharge.
So… if you have equipment with rechargeable batteries, like a laptop or a cell phone or a video camera, be sure that you do NOT recharge the battery until it is really just about to drop off line – it will last a lot longer, and you will be much happier!
G’day, Y’all,
Dave, what is the net difference in regenerative braking and dynamic braking? Seems like they serve the same purpose.
Jock Ellis
Cumming, GA US of A
As far as brakeing goes they do the same thing. The differance is what is done with the electricity that is generated. Dynamic brakes waste the energy by converting it to heat and dissipating it to the atmosphere. Regenerative braking takes the energy and stores it for later use. This can be done electricly by charging batteries or mechanicaly like by spinning a flywheel. The big advantage is that the energy that would normaly be wasted stopping a vehicle can be used to propel the vehicle back up to speed.
What the hybrid will get you is saving all that kinetic energy you would have otherwise wasted as heat. The design will determine how much you can save and where and how you get to “spend” it.
On the flat, level at steady speed for long distances, it’s hard to beleive that a hybrid will pay off. But for hilly terrain or mountain grades or anywhere else braking is regularly done with decent frequency, a hybrid might work out.
For a road locomotive, you can use it to add HP once you get over the adhesion limited min cont speed to accelerate the train faster.
For a commuter loco, this would really help a lot. You could also use it to give a boost at start when the engine and generator are still getting up to full speed/load. This would particularly good on GEs where this can take 90 seconds. You might be able to knock some serious minutes out of commuter trip times where the stations are only a few miles apart.
Just to add to Chad’s comments, regenerative braking is most commonly used on electric railways where the energy can usually be used directly by other trains (rather than having to be stored).
On modern, AC drive passenger trains it’s fairly common to have regenerative, dynamic (called rheostatic in the UK) and friction braking all automatically controlled and blended, via a computer linked to a single power/braking control handle in the cab (move it in one direction from neutral for power, the other direction for braking).
Basically, if the power supply is ‘receptive’ the equipment will regenerate, if not it will use rheostatic, and when the speed is too low for electric braking (or if you’re not stopping quickly enough!) it blends in the disc brakes.
Tony