Eco Factor: Battery-powered boat uses solar panels for a recharge.
Alan Belle, an engineering lecturer at the Australian Maritime College, and his team have developed a battery-powered, solar-assisted boat dubbed the Greenliner. The designers of this boat hope that the boat can be put to mass production within a year.
With the current technology, Greenliner is able to travel for seven hours covering about 35 nautical miles. Belle states that their aim is to improve the range and the speed with the use of lightweight lithium polymer batteries that promise about eight times the speed or eight times the traveling time and range. The team believes that the mass produced model of the boat will be a weekend boat that recharges its batteries during the five working days on solar panels and can be taken our during weekends.
The Dark Side:
The current specifications of the boat mean that it’s nowhere near to mass production. 35 nautical miles is not what one would want to travel in nine hours. If lithium polymer batteries don’t increase the proposed cost of the boat by much, then we surely have a future here, else we would still want “1Liaison” to be commercialized.
Via: Examiner
Thank-you for carrying the GreenLiner story, however as the misquoted person I feel obliged to clarify your story. I stated that technology was presently available that made it possible to commercialise a solar recharge ’day boat’ next year (ie: The technology is already available). Your information source knew the GreenLiner is an undergraduate student project aimed at increasing appreciation of alternative propulsion and it is not being suggested as the vessel that would be a commercially viable option. Due to academic funding limitation, there are several faults with this vessel, and it is severely limited by the lead acid batteries it is using, as anyone doing this type of thing for real will know. At no time was MASS PRODUCTION in 2009 ever mentioned, though local companies are investigating commercial production of a day boat along the lines suggested by us, with LiPo batteries. The interest in the Tamar river attempt is encouraging as it indicates a wide interest in Alternative Powering and Propulsion. There are already several providers of electric vessels advertising on the web already, including for retrofits. The “1Liaison” appears to be a very well presented Industrial Design exercise in Cyberspace, with a different target market segment to our ‘day boat’ concept you have picked up on. Our Students at the AMC (a National Institute of University of Tasmania), have their vessel in the water, achieving increasing real world engineering goals each year. Details of further awareness raising activities we are involved in can be found at http://www.amc.edu.au/apc and http://academic.amc.edu.au/vpl/ and some GreenLiner details at http://academic.amc.edu.au/vpl/AlternativeP&PRun2009/Participants/AMC_GreenLiner/index.html
Hey All!
As the motor builder and industry participant sponsor for the Greenliner I can make some pertinent comments regarding this. The Greenliner is not and never will be a production vessel, the ’dark side’ comments are meaningless. It is designed to be a student project platform to be able to be reconfigured to be able to do a variety of projects for engineering students of the vessel propulsion lab, in scale but with real data. The electric configuration allows for extended running indoors with no issues of toxic gasses and dangerous temperatures. It can be thrown into any swimming pool and run, should that be desired. The motor doesn’t get hot enough to be a hazard, so can be accessed at any time for measurements and adjustments. The smooth power delivery has enabled the motor to be set up to be its’ own dynamometer.
This years’ student focused entirely on efficiency and virtually halved the energy required for the current cruising speed. The solar panels could have provided around 3% of the run energy if the weather had been fine, but that wasn’t the case.
Being a student project platform there is very little funding available, so it currently uses lead-acid batteries that were not bought for this project. Lithium batteries are preferred as they have a lot of benefits: weight and volume for the amount of energy, ability to be left partly ’flat’ (so can be slowly recharged from solar which is not good for lead-acid batteries).
Yes, Lithium batteries are expensive, but over the life of the batteries should provide greater cost-effectiveness over lead batteries.
We are plotting a solar-recharged ’picnic boat’ that solar-recharged electric propulsion is the most appropriate technology for the application. This isn’t some cyberspace concept to be talked about how wonderful it could be, it’ll be done or not.
The biggest battery project we’ve done so far is 1.2megawatts, so battery/electric propulsion is now fully capable, it is just not able to be done on the cheap - yet.
James
Good luck to the greenliner team!!! It is a great inititaive and can see will have a bright future.
I have been lucky to have seen the boat in real!!!
Kyril
