Archives

Cool. Every little bit helps.

http://blogs.dieselpowermag.com/6213658/diesel-news/kenworth-delivers-first-hybrid-truck/index.html

Good example of the right technology for the right application. It will be fun (for me anyway) to watch what happens with hydraulic hybrid and electric hybrid technology in medium/heavy duty start/stop applications. School buses, garbage trucks, delivery trucks, etc running as hybrids would put a pretty good dent in our oil consumption.
Keith

I wish pierce would come out with a hybrid fire truck.... Then I could convince the town go that route and help save on fuel costs. We get around 3-5 mpg in our engines and about half that in our ladder trucks...

I wonder how reliable they are when used in ultra heavy duty applications such as fire trucks...

Oshkosh Truck has developed their ProPulse system, an electric hybrid system developed for their military apps. Oshkosh owns Pierce. Perhaps there offering the system now.

Hydraulic drive systems are aleady used in construction equipment, so the reliability experience is there.

But I wonder how much would be gained in a fire truck application, how much start/stop driving and overall miles?

Keith

I'd say in a city setting there is a lot of start and stop driving... the problem lies in driving distance... Most departments run an average of five miles or less driving distance for a district.

As for overall miles, I'm actually assigned to a truck company that has 186,000 miles and over 11,000 hours on it. Yes it is our cities oldest truck (18 years) that is still running first out (the majority of the apparatus is younger than 5 years old)

Can't stop thinking about these fire trucks. These ideas/thoughts may be obvious, or competely insane but...
--10K miles / 10 miles per run (RT)= 1000 cold start/hard acceleration events per year. Short driving distances are ideal circumstances for alternative drive systems. And kill diesel motors and FE. I'm guessing that the driver doesn't run thru the maker's recommended warm up procedure as the mayor's house is burning down. I wonder if a plug in type electric drive system would work? Would this be able to move the #30-50K truck all the way to the fire? Or maybe a hydraulic hybrid system just to get the truck moving out the door and down the street. The hydraulic prototypes are powerful enough to spin drive tires and twist frames.

--Does the mpg take into account the fuel burned as the truck is used at the emergency? I'm assuming the pumpers use PTO pumps driven by the truck's motor- and the pressure/volume is regulated by speeding up or slowing down the motor. That may consume more fuel than the actual ride to the fire/emergency. I wonder if electric pumps (powerful enough?) would be more efficient and offer better control.
I'm guessing that the ladder truck has to stay running to power the electric or hydraulic system.

--10k miles / 5mpg x $3.50 gal.= $7,000/year. A 1 mpg gain would save $1167/yr, $21,000 over the 18yr life of the oldest truck.

And off the subject- but definately related to overall fuel consumption:
--What about dispatch procedures? At how many of these calls is the truck really needed? I have no idea how this works- but I'm fascinated by the amount of times I've seen an ambulance arrive at a call, and the pumper is right behind. Is this because: the city attorneys what to mitigate liability exposure by making sure all possible needed equipment is at the scene; emergency response professionals follow the "more is better"
thinking prevalent today; or is there a legitimate purpose?

See what happens when I can't fall asleep at night:o

Keith

I had a pretty long reply to you this morning but the power blipped and I lost it... :mad: I'll write it out again. When I finish formatting a hard drive ;)



Can't stop thinking about these fire trucks. These ideas/thoughts may be obvious, or competely insane but...
--10K miles / 10 miles per run (RT)= 1000 cold start/hard acceleration events per year. Short driving distances are ideal circumstances for alternative drive systems. And kill diesel motors and FE. I'm guessing that the driver doesn't run thru the maker's recommended warm up procedure as the mayor's house is burning down. I wonder if a plug in type electric drive system would work? Would this be able to move the #30-50K truck all the way to the fire? Or maybe a hydraulic hybrid system just to get the truck moving out the door and down the street. The hydraulic prototypes are powerful enough to spin drive tires and twist frames.

--Does the mpg take into account the fuel burned as the truck is used at the emergency? I'm assuming the pumpers use PTO pumps driven by the truck's motor- and the pressure/volume is regulated by speeding up or slowing down the motor. That may consume more fuel than the actual ride to the fire/emergency. I wonder if electric pumps (powerful enough?) would be more efficient and offer better control.
I'm guessing that the ladder truck has to stay running to power the electric or hydraulic system.

--10k miles / 5mpg x $3.50 gal.= $7,000/year. A 1 mpg gain would save $1167/yr, $21,000 over the 18yr life of the oldest truck.

And off the subject- but definately related to overall fuel consumption:
--What about dispatch procedures? At how many of these calls is the truck really needed? I have no idea how this works- but I'm fascinated by the amount of times I've seen an ambulance arrive at a call, and the pumper is right behind. Is this because: the city attorneys what to mitigate liability exposure by making sure all possible needed equipment is at the scene; emergency response professionals follow the "more is better"
thinking prevalent today; or is there a legitimate purpose?

See what happens when I can't fall asleep at night:o

Keith

Blake-
Still curious regarding fire trucks. My obsession is based on my belief that there is a larger opportunity to save oil overall by focusing on large road vehicles. I talk to other drivers about changing habits and emerging technology, mostly just to get them thinking. Sounds like you do the same.

Gah! I forgot all about this. I'm semi looking on the forums while I'm supposed to be doing real work. I'm actually making up an excel spreadsheet for our newly aquired mutual-aid district. If we were to get dispatched right now, it would be pretty difficult to get there since we don't know where the streets are!

I've got a couple days to get it finished, but its killing me to stare at the map for an endless amount of time... hense me slacking off and checking out this forum :D

I'll get you a reply to this by tonight ;)

Can't stop thinking about these fire trucks. These ideas/thoughts may be obvious, or competely insane but...
--10K miles / 10 miles per run (RT)= 1000 cold start/hard acceleration events per year. Short driving distances are ideal circumstances for alternative drive systems. And kill diesel motors and FE. I'm guessing that the driver doesn't run thru the maker's recommended warm up procedure as the mayor's house is burning down.


Definitely not ;) They are kept in a heated bay so they don't get super cold, but definitely not operating temperature. I could probably convince them to install block heaters in the trucks since we plug them in anyway to keep the batteries charged up. Removing all those cold starts and hard runs would most likely greatly improve engine life with the added side benefit of increasing FE. I'd say at best the trucks have about 30 seconds of warm up time before we're on the truck and driving down the road at WOT to the call. It takes the driver a few seconds to find the street so he typically doesn't start the truck until he's ready to go and then pulls out of the bay and waits for the fire fighter to close the bay door.

I wonder if a plug in type electric drive system would work? Would this be able to move the #30-50K truck all the way to the fire? Or maybe a hydraulic hybrid system just to get the truck moving out the door and down the street. The hydraulic prototypes are powerful enough to spin drive tires and twist frames.

I think the main issue is compartment space. There are lots of really cool things on fire trucks that make it easier/safer for us to do certain things (like repacking the hose bed, hydraulic ladder racks. etc) but for every one of those things we add, we lower the amount of compartment space we have to carry equipment. We're pretty packed as it is right now, and we're driving custom cab trucks, unlike commercial cab trucks (ie freightliner) I have no idea how realistic it would be to get the truck moving with a hybrid system, but its bound to be very expensive, sadly.


--Does the mpg take into account the fuel burned as the truck is used at the emergency? I'm assuming the pumpers use PTO pumps driven by the truck's motor- and the pressure/volume is regulated by speeding up or slowing down the motor. That may consume more fuel than the actual ride to the fire/emergency. I wonder if electric pumps (powerful enough?) would be more efficient and offer better control.
I'm guessing that the ladder truck has to stay running to power the electric or hydraulic system.

No, the MPG figures I posted do not include idling at fire scenes, using the PTO for the pumps on the engines, PTO for the SCBA compressors on the truck companies, or hydraulic systems on the ladder trucks. Granted not every engine that responds to a fire will be actually using their pump and our compressor system for the SCBA's on our truck companies is also a cascade system so the truck doesn't always have to run to fill bottles. The ladder trucks are not always used as its often difficult to get close enough to buildings to make them useful, but when they are used its typically not for the entire duration of a call.

I'd say on any given working structure fire with my department we have anywhere from five to seven trucks on scene (Not including safety officers or battalion chiefs) and of those trucks maybe 2 or 3 actually need to be running. These incidents take normally several hours to finish up and get back in service so you have these huge trucks sitting there idling sucking gas like no tommorow. I mentioned this to some of my coworkers the other day and if we could maybe think about turning off some of the trucks that are not being used. Their response was... What if the truck won't start back up?

ROTFL, what kindof question is that, what if the truck won't start up in the bay when we got a call? Same deal... if we properly maintain our trucks and get preventative maintance done on a regular basis then it wouldn't be an issue.

The second issue was, we need to keep the red lights going so people know we are there and its an emergency scene and turning off the truck would run the batteries down. Now I call complete BS on this one. As if the giant plume of smoke coming out of the top of a house wasn't enough of a sign to tell people its an emergency, but when there's 6 huge fire trucks, an EMS unit, and several police cars all at one place, logic would dictate that somethings up!


--10k miles / 5mpg x $3.50 gal.= $7,000/year. A 1 mpg gain would save $1167/yr, $21,000 over the 18yr life of the oldest truck.

And off the subject- but definately related to overall fuel consumption:
--What about dispatch procedures? At how many of these calls is the truck really needed? I have no idea how this works- but I'm fascinated by the amount of times I've seen an ambulance arrive at a call, and the pumper is right behind. Is this because: the city attorneys what to mitigate liability exposure by making sure all possible needed equipment is at the scene; emergency response professionals follow the "more is better"
thinking prevalent today; or is there a legitimate purpose?

See what happens when I can't fall asleep at night:o

Keith

The reason you see multiple units responding is because of several factors. If its a medical call, they will dispatch fire and EMS units because there are more fire stations than EMS stations (some fire departments provide ALS care, but no fire department does that I'm aware of anywhere close to my department) Basically the fire department is a first responder to provide BLS (basic life support) care to the patient until EMS arrives to transport to the hospital. This is a good thing in the outlying districts (Like mine) where sometimes it takes EMS 10-15 minutes to get to the call, when we can typically be there in 3-5 minutes. These few minutes can make the difference between life and death if its a cardiac call, or choking, or allergic reactions... the list goes on and on.

As for fire related calls, I think if you could ride along with your local department you'd see that for the most part, nothing thats unnecessary is dispatched based off the information that we have when the call goes out. The majority of the calls my department gets is medical calls with fire alarm activations being right behind that. Now if we get dispatched to a fire alarm were going to assume the building is on fire. Thats what the fire alarm is designed to do. If we sent only one truck to check it out and turns out it actually is on fire, then we're screwed because its going to take an additional amount of time to get all those other trucks to the scene. Fire doubles in size roughly every minute. You can see how rapidly that might get out of hand!

Now for a fire alarm activation, only one truck is running with its lights and sirens on.. the others that are coming run just like normal. If the first truck gets on scene and says that its actually burning, then the other trucks will step it up, but they should be not to far behind because they have been coming the whole time. If the first truck gets there and there is no fire, then the officer in charge will cancel the other trucks and they go back to the station. Thats why you may see a fire truck run through a red light with its lights on and all of the sudden turn them off... its because they got updated info that says the either don't need to run emergency traffic, or they can return to service.

More is better when it comes to actual fires. The more people you have on scene, the safer it is to do our jobs. The big thing is safety, if one fire fighter goes down inside a building it takes several to get him out. There have been numerous studies conducted talking about it takes on average 3-4 firefighters to get one downed fire fighter out. Its that risk that means we need as many people on scene as possible. But I agree, on the BS calls, more is not better... hence the canceling of other responding units if there is no need.

As for not being able to fall asleep at night... I wish I could have gotten some sleep. I would have responded to this last night but I was busy with calls... I'm going to lay down now and get some sleep... maybe :)

Thanks for the information and indulging me. Interesting.

Imagine how much fuel we'll save when we finally conquer that "better just to keep them diesels idleing" mentality.

I still see the potential for hybrid technology- but in hydraulic drives instead of electric. The power they offer has a legitmate use in your field.

Keith

I agree...

As for the idling issue... don't think its a dead issue with me ;) I fully intend to bring it up again. Next time I'll have more data to support my point.