electric motors

Please add some detail to your question!

I assume RV = recreational vehicle.

Do you want an electric motor to replace the internal combustion engine? replace a bad transfer pump motor? what will the motor need to do? My initial response would be to check with the RV dealer, but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and guessing the situation is a bit more involved. Please remember, our answers are only as good as your question.

It isn't the electric motor that is a problem. Its finding the electricity to run it far enough to get out of the parking lot.

The electric cars you hear about are small and light weight. You are talking about a 45 foot truckbed with a shell mounted on top. Not to mention all those interior fittings and additions.. I lived in a 37 foot motor home for five years and that one had a 400 HP engine to drive it. In my work I am always asked to evaluate diesel - electric propulsion instead of straight diesel engine drives. The problem always comes back to where to find enough stored electrical energy for a mobile vehicle to run any practical distance.

A colleague drives a Prius. That same power plant would barely get you 10 km down the road if driving a 45 foot RV. And you might even get pulled over by the police for going too slow and holding up trafic. Storing enough electrical energy is still a problem for the automotive world. Which is why Hybrids are being sold at present. For electric motors look to Baldor, Siemens and Westinghouse or GE. Siemens has a real nifty electric drive motor for busses which is close to the size of your RV. Unfortunately unless you convert your RV to an electric trolley bus, you will have a storage problem with your battery bank.

Thank You for your input:
The fuel cell deliveries punch. It produces 440 Volts DC with an amp surge of 199 amps / second. The new type batteries no one else has and made for this application alone. These fuel cell runs on Hydrogen. We have a Hydroge4n Atomizer that produces 800 SCFT per minute at 68 PSI. The only thing that comes out of the vehicle is water dripping on the High Way.

Now back to the motor. Where can we get Siemen's or any other motor?

Thank you. Billy hendrixbilly @yahoo.com

Your local electrical contractor supply house should be able to point you to the local Siemens or Baldor distributor. Good luck!

Now back to the motor. Where can we get Siemen's or any other motor?

REPLY

Already told you. Ossapower now has the distributorship for N America. They took it away from FEYS who kind of blew the marketing process. I don't know what kind of fuel cell spec sheet you are looking at but it ain't gonna happen soon. As for the new batteries, yes, it works on small cars; but not five ton RVs at 45 feet in lenght. My 37 footer tipped the highway scales at 15,700 pounds or rougnly 7.4 tons. Having worked for a custom coach builder I'm pretty sure you are not going to build a an RV weighing less than 5 tons. And you are not going to move 5 tons of vehicle with the kind of battery powered electric drive presently on the market no matter how many LiH batteries you stuff into it. There must be a 1000 engineering reports out there documenting the physical laws governing how to accelerate a given weight to a given speed and requiring such and such horse power to do it. But since you don't believe me or other list members, call up your local electric supplier like NEDCO, Westburne or Gescan and get a quote on an electric motor to replace whatever horsepower you have now. Or call Baldor, or GE or Westinghouse directly and ask for an applications engineer. Then tell them you want an electric motor to power your 45 foot RV weighing so many pounds and see what they say.

Now if you have a budget like NASA and a handful of engineers, maybe you can get something that works. But as a practical matter, within a realistic budget. Its highly unlikely. But go ahead and try anyways. Good luck!

I just thought of something. If you have a spare half million $$ you can try to buy one of the test busses being run in the City of Burnaby in British Columbia. These are hydrogen fuelled using Ballard fuel cells. Ballard is also a Burnaby company. Probably one of th eworld leaders in vehicular fuel cel design. I was talking to one of the maintenance mechanics and he said its not exactly a rosy outlook for these busses. However they do have the electric drives you want and the Hydrogen fuel cell storage. Biggest problem with the busses is they can't get out of town. Not enough range on the available storage capacity. No room to add more. If you are a travelling man, where are you going to refuel once the tank is empty? Husky fuels only carry ethanol blends, not hydrogen. and the white tanks are propane.

As other posters have already said, a conversion is totally unpractical, I would even go so far as to say almost impossible.

You need a company like say Toyota to design and build one from the ground up....

Ask yourself why the trucks have not been converted everywhere? Power!

Billy-

Sorry it's taken me so long to get back. It sounds like you're talking about a hybrid-electric vehicle. Andy and others are correct; a conversion would be a major undertaking (if even possible) and with current technology, performance would be poor at best. The drive-train of a hybrid is a completely different animal from what your RV currently has; there is much more to it than a simple motor swap. A large portion of your current payload would be consumed by very expensive batteries. The trucking industry is actively looking into improving the technology for larger trucks (given the volume, fuel savings would be dramatic), but a real breakthrough looks to be a long way off. Hydrogen fuel cell technology looks to be more promising, but infrastructure problems are significant. To answer the specific question you asked- no, I don't have any idea where to direct you to find a motor, sorry.

Look into the technology that is used for tug boat power. I would recommend a diesel generator connected to an electric motor drive. DC would be the choice as it is more torque orientated. I am not sure that this would be the choice you are wanting as it is not going to be a cost saving. I had a motor home that was driven by a 504 cu in motor and it was running on gasoline. In the 70's the costs were not too bad. Now it would be too much to even drive it into town. I often thought that going from a gas engine to a steam plant would be less costly. Found a boiler and was going to build a steam engine out of the existing engine by adding double acting cylinders to the basic engine I had. Did a little design work and had a prototype of a conversion head replacement that would work to convert the bottom end of the engine into a base unit for the steam engine without having to change the manual transmission and all the accessories. Adding only the necessary pumps for the boiler etc. But, I ran out of money and sold the basic unit to another fellow who went back to the gas engine and was happy with it. Electric motors of the torque you are looking for could be had by contacting the motor re-builder in your area. They are not cheep and a rebuilt one of the horsepower you need is going to be high. Good luck on your design.

Look into the technology that is used for tug boat power. I would recommend a diesel generator connected to an electric motor drive.

REPLY: forget that. Way too expensive. you can buy a complete motorhome RV for what the drive cost. I work in that business and we have determined such a system is not cost effective until you get into 70 foot 100 ton plus boats. One widely publisized conversion of a 42 foot sports fish boat cost almost $200,000 but considering a conventional repower cost $250,000 it made sense in that instamce.

In addition to the problems mentioned above the added weight of a diesel electric conversion is very prohibitive.

Where/how are you going to mount this 200hp+ ac motor or 100hp+ dc motor?

Back in the mid 70s I mounted a DC forklift motor into an Opel Cadet as per mother earth news plans. The weight, including batteries, was well beyond what the suspension could handle which created a vehicle that was difficult to drive safely. I got 55 MPG and lost money on the deal.

If you are speaking about a recreational vehicle...

Better have a boiler lic. to think about steam generation.

If it blows you'll find yourself in jail, as regulations on boiler techs and DOT, are strict.

The fuel cells made by United Technologies are very promising for mobile electrical generation. Try asking them for R&D info. They have several bus designs which are very promising. They have been developed, for almost 10 years, for public use.

Cost will be in direct proportion to the volume of units you intend to produce.

At 20,000 units, or more; you may find it reasonably inexpensive to develop your RV using fuel cells.

Think of making a steam-electric hybrid. A steam engine running a generator to charge a battery that powers the electric motor. You would only need enough batteries to enable you to get up to speed immediately and they would only have to last long enough for the boiler to get up to full pressure, a matter of minutes. From that point the steam engine/ generator would run at its most fuel efficient speed. This is similar to diesel-electric systems except that there is less pollution and you have a greater choice of fuels. There is a Canadian company using electric motors in buses. Siemens and GE are possibilities, but there are some other companies I have seen on the Net that also build some powerful yet compact motors.

I have been thinking more along the lines of a steam-electric hybrid automobile, but an RV is just a matter of scale and might be easier to convert due to its size. E-mail beesidemeusa@yahoo.co.uk and ask about steam-electric hybrids, there is a lot of information there you may be interested in.

Please read the following link about steam driven cars:-

Stanley Steamer

It will show you that everything that goes around, comes around!!

A modern version of one of these cars should be at least twice as good I would guess!!!

Yes, they would be more than twice as good. Have read the article and more. The Stanleys were perfectionists and wouldn't sell to customers they did not approve of. They could not or would not do the research into improving their cars that Ford and others did. Price did as much to kill the company as anything else. Modern tech does make a steam-electric hybrid car more feasible. Ask beesidemeusa@yahoo.co.uk about the idea and get more info.