For the vast majority of people, the car is just a means of transportation from point A to point B, using gasoline, electric drive or any energy source they don't really care. As long as this method is cheap and fast enough, it is the best choice.
Geely recently released an Emgrandol electro-hybrid version, using a set of powertrains such as methanol engine + hybrid system. There is not much information given by the official, but this should be Geely's fourth-generation methanol power, 1.8L alcohol-electric hybrid engine with 3-speed hybrid electric drive transmission.
Will methanol-powered cars really be the mainstream energy source of the future? What did this energy energy make us see earlier?
What is methanol and what can it do?
For us mass consumers, methanol is stranger to gasoline, batteries and hydrogen. There are a few facts about methanol that we should first understand.
China is a big country in methanol production capacity, methanol production in 2020 is 60 million tons, last year has exceeded 100 million tons; Geely Automobile began to develop the first generation of methanol technology in 2005, and now it should be the fourth generation of methanol power; the methanol taxi used in southwest cities a few years ago should be the second generation of methanol power.
The above is a market status of methanol, with a large production capacity and pilot cities that have long begun to launch methanol-powered vehicles on the road.
So what are the advantages of methanol compared to today's mainstream energy sources? The first is the economic advantage, which is well explained, the main source of methanol is coal, and China is a big coal-producing country that can extract methanol with inferior coal, and the price advantage will be very obvious after a wide range of sources.
There are several ways to use methanol as an energy source:
Methanol fuel internal combustion engine, Geely code JLC-4M18 engine belongs to this methanol fuel internal combustion engine; methanol gasoline, a certain proportion of methanol is mixed into gasoline, the world has been promoted, the continental label is M15, M85; methanol fuel cell, the current battery energy density is very low, short-term technological breakthrough is difficult.
Methanol fuel internal combustion engines and methanol gasoline are currently the two mainstream application methods. The underlying logic of the methanol hybrid system pushed by Geely this time is to replace the 1.5L gasoline internal combustion engine with a 1.8L methanol internal combustion engine in the original Thor hybrid system, so that methanol participates in the power output in the form of fuel.
Geely official data, thermal efficiency of 41.5%, maximum power of 132 horsepower, maximum torque of 495 Nm; alcohol consumption is 9.2L/100km, converted into synthetic gasoline is 3L/100km (0.6L lower than the Xingyue L hybrid). Is the combination of methanol internal combustion engine + Geely GHS2.0 hybrid system better than the existing Hybrid (HEV) products such as Toyota THS-II, Honda IMMD, and Great Wall DHT on the market?
The answer to this question, from an environmental and economic point of view, the methanol hybrid system does perform better than the hybrid system on the market. From the perspective of ease of use and cost, it is not necessarily that methanol filling stations are only laid in pilot cities; cost control is also a problem before large-scale application is formed.
Why must it be methanol, after the power is a breakthrough?
In the choice of new energy, there is diversity, such as hydrogen energy, lithium battery energy. And hydrogen energy is considered by the industry to be the ultimate solution to new energy, but the difficulty of hydrogen storage and transportation is too difficult, so the promotion of hydrogen energy has been slow; not to mention the power battery, the increase in energy density has not brought about qualitative changes, but because raw materials contain a variety of scarce metal elements, raw material prices have been fluctuating.
The advantages of methanol are obvious, and the chemical formula of methanol is CH3OH or CH4O. It contains three elements: hydrogen, oxygen and carbon. After combustion, only carbon dioxide and water are generated, which is more environmentally friendly than fuel models. Methanol vehicles produce 80% lower PM2.5 emissions than conventional gasoline vehicles with the same displacement. More importantly, methanol is economically salient, easily available from abundant coal, cheap and lowly polluted.
At the critical point, the technical reserve of methanol internal combustion engines has been completed.
Compared with gasoline, the spontaneous combustion performance of methanol fuel itself is very poor, methanol is corrosive to metals, and special storage and transmission tubes need to be configured, and the low temperature start effect of methanol internal combustion engine is poor. After from 2005 to the present, these pain points have been gradually overcome, Geely Automobile, Yutong Automobile and other brands are developing methanol internal combustion engine vehicles, and the products have been tested by the market for many years.
Take the methanol car first promoted by Geely Automobile in Xi'an and other cities, the early engine technology is that methanol and gasoline can be burned, providing a set of energy redundancy when the methanol filling station is not rolled out, and adding gasoline cannot be added to methanol.
What are the difficulties in the promotion of methanol internal combustion engines now?
Geely began to develop methanol internal combustion engines in 2005, and should now be the third or fourth generation of methanol power, which requires special treatment of the engine to make it more durable, and has to face a lower energy density than gasoline. In addition to the two obvious advantages of economy and environmental protection, methanol fuel still has disadvantages compared with gasoline fuel; in addition, before the scale is formed, the energy replenishment link of methanol filling is the biggest difficulty.
Of course, there is also a good side. The development of technology to today, is methanol + electric energy hybrid system, it is easy to make people have a "beautiful" association, with methanol to hydrogen, hydrogen energy to charge the battery. For the time being, it is not too much to discuss whether Geely's alcohol-electric hybrid can be done, let's first analyze the feasibility of this program.
Methanol hydrogen production technology, methanol and water vapor at temperatures above 200 ° C, through a dedicated catalyst will undergo a conversion reaction, can produce a certain proportion of hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Hydrogen is not easy to store and transport, which is a difficult point for the slow advancement of hydrogen energy; then 1 liter of methanol can store (make) 2 liters of liquid hydrogen, which is more efficient and safer than direct storage of hydrogen. For example, a alcohol-electric hybrid truck has tens of liters of methanol in reserve, and when the power is insufficient, it uses methanol to release hydrogen and use hydrogen to charge the battery. If this plan is implemented, it will bring certain benefits to the mileage, the start of the cold zone and the construction of infrastructure.
summary
This 1.8L methanol hybrid engine should be based on the hybrid treatment of the code name JLC-4M18 that Geely has verified in the market for many years, and the early technological development should have solved the pain points of higher cylinder compression and low temperature start of methanol engine. The association at the end of the article is only a more idealized solution.
I prefer to believe that the working principle of Geely methanol hybrid is to replace gasoline fuel with methanol, and the engine will be improved and miniaturized accordingly; there will also be a series parallel mode, pure electric mode, energy recovery mode, and the overall logic is not much technically different from the Thor hybrid system of Xingyue L.