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Electric Airboats

  • Thread starter Thread starter Anonymous
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Anonymous

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The idea occured to me today while I was thinking about locomotives.

Why not an electric motor on an airboat? Electric motors produce their maximum torque @ zero RPM. You could really get some snap out of one, and if you were careful, you might be able to end up lighter than an auto engine.

A small gas powered generator could proivde the power.

Any thoughts?
 
Dwarf, power in electrical terms is amperage, and a small on-board generator wouldn't develop enough amperage to do much more work than the horsepower rating of the engine driving the generator.

The big advanges that an electric motor driven propeller would have would be that the engine / generator unit could be mounted down low in the hull, and that the prop could be switched off / on while the power unit was running.

BF
 
hey red dwarf if you want to experiment,if my father in law still has his 500 horse electric motor you can have it and it only wieghts 5 tons.
 
1 Horsepower is 746 watts. whether it comes from the shaft of a gasoline engine or a generator. You lose efficiency if you run a gas engine to drive a generator to turn an electric motor because there is no 100% efficent method of work conversion. Electric trains are horribly inefficient but they use it cause its cheeper than a transmission and slip control.

Gasoline engines are WAY lighter than a generator and motor combination. Figure the weignt of a 500 HP gas engine. Thats 373 Kilowatts. 373,000 watts. Check out the weight and size of a 373KW generstor set, then add the same weight of the generator for the motor. Well you get the idea. For the HP a 502 etc big block engine is a bargain in spades .

The one cool thing with electric drive though would be the ease of reverse thrust ! Literally AIRBRAKES !

Scotty
 
Whitebear, I hadn't thought about reverse ..... that would be fun!!

Diesel-electric conversion works so efficiently in a railroad application because of a factor that usually doesn't carry over well to nearly anything else, and that is that weight is a GOOD thing. To a point, of course.

A modern locomotive will weigh, on average, somewhere in the vicinity of 420,000 lbs. For that you'll get 5000 very managable horsepower, computerized systems management and wheel slip control, central heat and air (when it works), and GPS tracking at no additional charge.
But a locomotive will only pull (develop tractive effort for) 26% of what it weighs before wheel slip begins to set in .... so in our case around 110,000 lbs. of tractive effort per unit.

A 2000 hp locomotive and a 5000 hp locomotive can move the same amount of weight if they weigh the same. The higher horsepower unit will just be able to accelerate the load faster, and maintain a higher average speed.

BF
 
I guess I chose a bad word when I related it to efficiency. My thought was that nobody would enjoy runing an airboat that took miles to get on a plane, and then it took miles to get it back down. Obviously an airboat isn't going to drag that kind of weight around but it will accelerate reasonably rapidly. Most (if any) airboat hulls wont even float one of those engine driven motor-generators.

Sounds like you know trains. I know nothing about them 'cept I love to watch the steam ones run. I'm told steam engines develope max torque at zero RPM and as HP builds torque falls off in proportion to the HP build up. Though they are nostalgic, if we still ran wood burning steam trains, by now, North America would be deforested. I guess it has been a benefit to burn dinosaurs instead.

Actually I could have left that whole sentence out referring to trains and the post would still have said the same thing and I wouldn't have looked quite as ignorant about trains. Hahahahahah :D

"Look out here she comes shes comin, look out there she goes shes gone. She's screamin right through Texas like a mad dog cyclone." (Texas 1941 - Johnny Cash)
 
Scotty, misconceptions about trains abound. It's only after you've been around them for a while that you begin to really comprehend the dynamics of them. It took me 35 years.

They're the most efficient mass mover on the planet as long as pure efficiency and not speed is the criteria, and the only reason that they continue to operate. Railroads can move one ton of freight 176 miles on one gallon of fuel. You can couple two of the big Dash 9 engines (10,000 hp total) to a 95 car unit coal train (10,000 trailing tons) and run from Jacksonville to Tampa 'no problem', and you'll be hauling around one ton of freight with one horsepower in the process.

I loved the steam engines. Around 20 years ago I had an oppotunity to run a Nickle Plate Road 4-8-2 on an excursion for the National Railway Historical Society. The whistle on that thing was so pretty it would make you cry, and they have a presence about them, even sitting still, that no diesel will ever come close to.

Wow .... how's this for getting off the subject :lol: ?

BF
 
Thanks, I knew I could count on you guys to point out all the reasons why it won't work.
 
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