I heard about the diesel electric concept from a friend and he didn't have a lot of details, but from what he knew it sounded really interesting. I was wondering if someone could give me some details on to what this new technology really is, and how it works. Thanks!
Like others said - nothing new about it. Diesel-electric tries to combine the advantages of a (diesel) combustion engine with those of an electric engine. You get the low RPM torque of an electric engine without the need for a gearbox and the range of a diesel without the need for a lot of heavy batteries. In addition, you can run the diesel continously with good efficiency. Disadvantage: you have to carry both the diesel and the electric parts around. For large installations, this can make sense since you save the weight of the gearbox.
Well. first insight. If by new you mean the 1940s you are dead nut. Pretty ALL of the trains you see are diesel electric and have been since the 1950s. Here's how any Fuel-electric system works: You have a fuel. In the case of a diesel engine your fuel is Any stable liquid that burns. You burn that fuel in a chamber of some kind such that you create a physical motion. Pistons and cranks is the rule of thumb. You take that motion usually in the form of rotation, and you use it to move a magnet past a coil of wire. A magnet moving past a coil produces electricity, which you can now use to drive an electric motor, or charge batteries, or play Youtube or whatever. Diesel engines have a huge advantage over traditional internal combustion engines, (although diesel came first by like 12,000 years :). They require no spark, and they can burn darn near anything. The whole concept of a Diesel engine is that when you compress something, it heats up. If what you are compressing is flammable, and you compress it enough, it will ignite and burn. This turns out to be exactly true, and why you can run your 1982 VL Golf Diesel on a bottle of corn oil in a pinch.
