EV never has to be recharged… Because it recharges on the way downhill.
“World’s largest EV never has to be plugged in” is sufficiently click-baity without being so dumbly self contradicting
Reminds me of some guy with a OneWheel that was saying he’d never charged his board in like a thousand miles as his daily commuter.
He lives near the top of a mountain lift, so he takes it home and just runs on pure regen lol.
So he’s just breaking? What a silly thing to claim. I bet he’s not even regening a lot. When i ride up a mountain until my battery is down to 40% or so and ride down i regenerate around 1% or something. It might even be in the 0.6% or something
More like “never has to stop working to charge”. It is novel that its charging mechanism operates as a function of doing its primary job.
Not novel. I think there was a train somewhere in Africa, that transported some ore from mountain to port. On the way down with ore it charged and uphill it used charge.
Is novel for a dump truck to use this. Of course it’s not a completely new concept entirely.
That’s genius. Who cares if thermodynamics wins, it weighs less on the way up so works out just fine.
Just like the example in TFA.
I think it’s still pretty cool. Turning potential energy to kenetic
Yeah I was gonna say I’m pretty sure this isn’t a single use, disposable vehicle
The dump truck, at 45 tons, ascends the 13-percent grade and takes on 65 tons of ore. With more than double the weight going back down the hill, the beast’s regenerative braking system recaptures more than enough energy to refill the charge the eDumper used going up.
So the energy this truck uses is harnessed via mining and loading… Essentially this energy was stored in the ore via geological processes.
This truck uses continental drift as his fuel.
In other words, OP’s mom.
Boom
I’ve heard of a diesel-electric logging truck that uses this concept as well. Use the batteries going up the mountain empty, charge them again going downhill loaded.
The truck has a penis?
I’ve seen a cable lift that worked basically like that. It transferred ore down the mountain, so heavy buckets going down lifted the empty buckets back up.
Didn’t Tom Scott make a video about this?
Yep.
Statistically, yes.
Since everything seems to be going downhill right now, how would I harness that power? You telling me the crystal peddling influencers were right all along? 🤣
Or in physics terms, potential energy.
We achieved perpetuum mobile
Yes, but actually no.
I guess it all depends on the physical layout but this seems like a very complicated way to get material downhill.
Is that just a gravity battery that just so happens to be a dump truck as well?
Kinda like the mine in the UK that use a cableway without a motor to bring ore down and empty buckets up
deleted by creator
I saw that Tom Scott episode too. I’ll miss him.
Reminds me of this ropeway thing that Tom Scott covered that doesn’t require power input either, for similar reasons:
Niche application but still cool.
ARGH Why did you have to remind me that Tom Scott is still missing from Youtube!
So it was designed for this mine I guess?
I’m not sure there’s a lot of mine you’re going down filled up, the images I have in mind are quite the opposite, but that’s a really cool idea!
There actually is some design to stock energy this way, with weights you lift while having excess energy
If you’re thinking of that CGI crane lifting concrete blocks, it’s unfortunately a really bad idea.
Pumped hydro stores energy by lifting weight uphill, instead. Water is basically the cheapest thing you can get per tonne, and is easy to contain and move.
To store useful amounts of energy using gravity, you need pretty large elevation differences and millions of tonnes of mass to move.
I love that I knew this conversation was going to happen as soon as I read the article.
And, yes.
Depends on the scale of “going down”. Many mines are in the mountains and the material has to be brought down to lower elevations. The mine entry may be lower than the nearest pass but still a lot higher than the destination of the ore.
Open pit is much more common for this type of equipment and it’s basically a reverse mountain. Still might be enough regenerative braking from just the weight of the truck though.
Still might be enough regenerative braking from just the weight of the truck though.
In that case no, because it’d be bringing the weight of the truck and the ore with it.
An open pit at an elevation of 1.5km still means the bottom of the pit could be 1km higher than the place the ore is processed at
yes it does. just going by the numbers posted operating in the space it does results in a net loss of12% battery each trip.
Very cool! It’s a pretty specialized use case, but still awesome to see.
Wow what a great use case.
I’m pretty sure they’ve been doing this for years in South America already.
Reminds of this bucket-line system
Not very smart that they waste all that energy in mechanical brakes. See my comment (the one with the picture) for a way bigger and electricity-generating ropeway, including a video of a guy less squeamish than Tom Scott riding most of the 45-minute way up.
WILL NOT TOLERATE THIS TOM SCOTT SLANDER
He literally has
Filmed safely: https://www.tomscott.com/safe/
in the description. Meanwhile, that fat dude from Vrchlabí jumped into a moving bucket of one that is faster, 2.5x longer, at deadly height, and his only plan of getting down safely was a mattress. He acknowledged how illegal and dangerous it is and yet publishes the video with his full name.
Just accept it, Tom Scott was being way more cautious.
firstly I was joking
secondly, cautious ≠ squeamish. we shouldn’t be setting masculinity as an exampleYeah, sounds like maybe he just didn’t have a death wish.
deleted by creator
Back in my day we drove back and forth to work uphill, both ways, and we only lost weight because we could never afford enough Starbucks and avocado toast!
Does it discharge extra energy into anything else? Does it burn off extra energy as heat to maintain regenerative braking?
It powers a massage chair for the driver
Great question.
That is definitely one of the big caveats of BEVs over diesels. A battery on an EV can only take in so much energy. Once you hit that ceiling, the battery won’t take in any more current. Fun fact, having a super charged battery in a BEV causes all sorts of headache and can cost you performance.
You either have to switch back to service brakes or, as you mentioned, burn off energy as heat. Not sure how they’re doing it with this truck, but on other BEV loaders which I’ve worked on, we add a hydraulic valve whose only purpose is to create flow, pressure, and subsequently heat. It basically just adds a dummy load. I suspect they tapped into the dump hydraulics and added such a valve for this truck.
It seems like an opportunity for vehicle-to-vehicle charging, putting the power gained from gravity into another vehicle.
It would need to happen quickly and at the same time as unloading and it would have to keep enough energy to climb the hill plus a safety margin.
deleted by creator
Esisyphus
I cannot avoid to be pedantic on this, it is recharged during half the trip… it just does not require plug-like recharging
Yeah another clickbait headline. It’s getting recharged all the time, it’s just very lucky to be in a use case where it goes down hills with large loads all the time
It’s more than a clickbait headline, the first paragraph is just flat out wrong:
Perhaps best of all, it consumes no energy doing it.
Obviously it’s consuming energy going uphill. Just because the power source is gravity doesn’t mean it’s not consuming energy.
2017
At 50 tons and 700 kilowatt-hours, this truck is the biggest EV in the world Each round trip will generate 10kWh of spare electricity for the grid.
Till elon finds out that if he manages to cover the sun, he can charge us on sunscription
Don’t give hime ideas…
Pretty sure its also not solar. The machine gets loaded with weight at the top of the hill, its regenerative brakes store power on the way down, it drops the load off, and the lightened machine stored enough charge to drive back up.
well that was unexpected
I’m curious if the desgin team knew about it in advance
Are you asking if Swiss guys knew about mountains? )
hahaha guess it boils down to that 😂
but I was specifically wondering if they built the vehicle with a charger and ended up never using it, to their own surprise. or if they knew they’d (almost) never have to charge it
Must have a cable somewhere as a backup otherwise you’d need a full battery replacement should it ever be discharged.
Gonna go ahead and guess that when designing a 110 ton mega dump truck things are probably pretty front loaded on the planning side of things.
A 600 kwh battery pack so… Rocks can roll down hill? Galaxy brain moment.
Genuinely, I cannot tell what your point is. In some alternate universe, are we just rolling the rocks downhill? Don’t you think we’d already be doing that? This seems like a great use case to replace diesel trucks with ones that recharge themselves using potential energy from ore. This absolutely is a galaxy brain moment, in that it’s a very smart idea.
Probably a lot less safe (and harder to aim) if you don’t use the truck. Also unlikely they get all the way down unless you mine it in wheel shapes (increasing labor and also, luckily, danger).
Are you surprised by the concept of potential energy?
Oh cool they’re using the same principle the guys at Edison are using for their logging trucks on a much larger scale
