In a few months, First Mode will bring the hydrogen-fueled engine to South Africa, where it will be converted into a large 300-ton haul truck to create one of the largest zero-emission vehicles on the planet," said Chris Voorhees, company president and chief engineer. Say.
It's part of a three-year, $13.5 million deal First Mode signed with global mining giant Anglo American in 2019, and part of a new direction for the spacecraft and Mars rover company.
"Robotic exploration of the solar system is in the company's DNA," Voorhees said. But the way they solve space engineering problems - "You'll never have enough mass, you'll never have enough volume, you'll never have enough energy, you'll never have enough data, and you're operating in a trying to kill you" — which led Voorhees and his team to think they could tackle engineering challenges in other extreme environments.
The Super Transport Truck is a very different vehicle than the Mars rovers that the First Mode team has developed in the past.
First, they're three stories tall and weigh "about a million pounds," Voorhees said. They were built to transport 300 tonnes of ore from the open pit mine to a nearby processing plant. Anglo American operates a fleet of dinosaur-sized handling trucks at its mines, each of which burns thousands of gallons of diesel to power a 2MW on-board generator.
“It takes a lot of diesel, and there are dozens of machines running continuously on site,” he said. Taking just one hauler out of service can save as much carbon emissions as 10,000 diesel cars. .
First Mode is designing and building a hydrogen fuel cell generator to do just that.
Fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity through an electrochemical process. The only by-product is water vapor. Such fuel cells are now used to power forklifts and buses; Toyota, Honda and Hyundai already have hydrogen-powered vehicles on the market.
There are two main differences between these fuel cells and First Mode's approach. One is scale, Voorhees said. The 2MW generator for the haul truck, he said, was "a utility-scale power unit that just happened to fit on a vehicle".
Another is that it is a renovation project. To be successful, First Mode must fit generators into the available space and convert them "in a way that creates a good combination between the existing platform and this new energy source," Voorhees said.
For a group of space designers, it was a very different challenge, he said.
"I've been working on designing vehicles for Mars, and I think (mining) is worse," he said. "The constraints are different, the environment is different, but the approach is similar."
The goal, he said, is to have the generator assembled in Seattle within the next few weeks, test it, and then ship it to South Africa for installation and field testing starting in June. Armed with the field test results, First Mode will revise the design of its subsequent transport vehicles.
Voorhees said they will also start looking for other customers who need mobile large cleaning generators.
"The application of haul trucks is not an easy goal," he said. "If we can make it work in that environment, we can make it work anywhere, and there are a lot of industrial applications that could benefit from it."
