[ExI] Electric cars without batteries

[John Clark]

On Oct 22, 2010, at 2:57 PM, Henrique Moraes Machado (CI) wrote:

> Could someone who knows more than me about electric cars (I assume most people on this list probably does) and electricity in general enlighten me (with numbers if not too much trouble) on why no company has yet made a car with a gas turbine for power generation that feeds an electric engine?

Turbines have a lot of advantages, they can be very efficient and their design is simpler and thus they are more reliable than internal combustion engines, but the actual construction of a turbine is much more expensive and complicated. The turbine blade must be light, strong, very precisely machined, corrosion resistant, and able to maintain it's strength and precise shape even at extremely high temperatures; all this can be done but its not easy and its not cheap. Also, in general the smaller the turbine the greater the RPM's, if you scaled down the turbine you have in a power plant so that it would fit into a car it would have a much higher RPM, and that would give you more problems in metal fatigue and wear. And you'd have to gear down that super fast RPM before you could connect it to an electrical generator, and that would likely be a more complex arrangement of gears than those found in the transmission of the car you use today. There are also serious noise issues you'd need to solve. I don't want to discourage anybody, someday we may well all be driving turbine-electric cars but it will take some R&D.

 John K Clark        


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