Diesel Electric Hybrid Monster Truck

4 comments

June 13, 3:35 PM

by John Ryden, Global Warming Examiner

 

 

HEMTT-A3 Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck

I’ve always wanted to get a big monster truck. Huge tires, sits really high off the road, good visibility, don’t have to worry about road obstructions like pot holes, goes in the snow, even take it off-road. The problem is that these big monster trucks don’t get very good gas mileage.

Well now Oshkosh Truck Corporation is manufacturing a truck using Diesel Electric Hybrid technology that increases fuel efficiency 20% over the truck it replaces. The HEMTT A3 truck is being built for the military, which is pretty demanding about reliability and performance. The truck has a 400 HP Cummins ISL Diesel Engine with a 305 KW electric generator. The generator charges a 1.5 MJ ultra-capacitor. The capacitor feeds power directly to electric motors mounted on the wheels. The vehicle can work off-road, climb a 60% grade, and achieve 65 mph on secondary roads. The truck weights 3000 pounds less than its conventional predecessor, but still can carry a 13 ton load.

The capacitor is the heart of the drive system. It stores the equivalent of 0.42 Kwh, or equivalent to 0.035 gallons of gasoline (4.5 ounces). You can’t get very far on that amount of power so the vehicle does not work as a home plug-in. The capacitor does buffer the power from the engine allowing the engine to always run at an efficient speed. The capacitor provides for bursts of power when the vehicle accelerates and can capture the power from regenerative braking. That is what gives the vehicle its improved fuel economy.

The real point to discussing this vehicle is that this drive train technology could also be used on more conventional vehicles like cars or utility trucks. A capacitor in a car could allow for a smaller, lighter engine to be used. It would be optimized to run at peak efficiency. You can eliminate heavy parts like the transmission. More of the car becomes solid-state electronics which are very reliable. The capacitor also recovers the energy from braking. The number of cycles on the capacitor should be almost unlimited so it won't degrade over time like a battery. Assuming a 20% increase in efficiency, a 30 mpg car becomes a 36 mpg car. If every car on the road today used this technology, we would save about 1.9 million barrels of oil each day, along with a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. You also could add a battery to this design to create a plug-in vehicle. The battery would not need the capacity to power the entire car (making it cheaper). It would only re-charge the capacitor; sort of like how a battery on a camera charges a capacitor that powers the flash. You might never need to run the engine just traveling around town.

I was thinking that if you painted the truck a little better color, maybe black with lightning bolts or flames, it would be a really cool machine to drive around. You can get it with armour plating if you drive in a rough neighborhood. Put a camper on the back, put the family yacht on a trailer and you would be ready for a week-end camping at the lake. The truck can also work as a stand-alone electric generator so there would be plenty of power for the hot-tube and plasma TV. As a hybrid electric, I was wondering if they would let me use the HOV lane to drive to work. My wife pointed out, that people would see me coming and just get out of my way! I’m not planning on getting one anytime soon though. It would be a bit of a problem to park and I haven’t figured out how to get it into the garage, although maybe I could put the garage on the truck.

OshKosh Truck Corporation

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