What if the Hybrid Battery was located, not in the rear of the vehicle, but instead under each axel, front and rear. Instead of the battery(s) being charged by the gas motor or braking, why not let the rotation of the wheels do the rechargeing, and that way while the car or SUV is moving the battery is constantly being charged. In fact the vehicle could proably run longer just on the battery and wouldn't need the gas motor to kick in until it was really needed, let's say going up a rather steep hill. I'll bet the vehicle could travel up to around 40 or 50 mph, before the gas motor would be needed. WoW!! just imagine the gas mileage improvement. I know it sounds impossible or is it? The battery pack could be split into two different locations. If not behind the axles, then position them inside each of the axles. They would still have to be connected to the gas motor, so as to run the vehicle until at which time the gas motor would kick in. I've thought about suggesting this to the toyota people for consideration. Anyone have any thoughts about my crazy idea? If this sounds nutty, then so be it, but anything that can improve gas mileage I'm I'll all for it.
You are kidding, right? The power to turn the wheels would exceed the power required to charge the batteries....You're proposing that there is no extra power required to charge the battery, but that isn't the case.
I wouldn't have used the term 'nutty', but since you did.....
Evan E. Fusco, MD
'04 Prius/BC moded to the T
'06 Highlander Hybrid Limited AWD w/NAV
First, charging the batteries by the rotation of the tires has one problem. generators add phyisical resistance. You have to supply more power to the wheels to get them to go the same speed if you add the extra load of fighting against the generator. Basicly thats why HCH charge usualy while breaking (I think they use the generator to do some of the breaking and then divert that power to the batteries).
As far as mounting the batteries around the axles. It might work, but then again there may be some law somewhere in the DOT that says they can't do it.
. Instead of the battery(s) being charged by the gas motor or braking, why not let the rotation of the wheels do the rechargeing, and that way while the car or SUV is moving the battery is constantly being charged.
I need to introduce you to a guy I work with who is convinced that he could power his house using clocks powered from weights. If a 5 lb weight can keep a grandfather clock turning for a month than a few 70 lb bags of concrete up about 10 foot high should be able to run a house for a day, right?
Or maybe we should put windmill on top of our cars to harness the "free" wind generated from traveling down the road. Heck just stick your hand out the window while driving down the interstate. That free wind must be blowing like 70 mph!
My grandpa invented a free wind harvester but big oil bought him out and "lost" the design.
OK seriously. Anything you strap onto a car that makes power is going to get that power from the car somehow and cause extra drag. The extra drag is going to need to be overcome by the ICE or whatever is the main source of power for the car.
It does not matter where the batterys are as there is not much resistance in a few feet of wire.
BTW I tried to tell the "clock" guy that my garage lift uses about the same power as the central air. That the lift wil pick up a 3000 lb car in about a minute. That in order to power your house from falling weight that you would need to lift a car's weight in concrete bags every minute to a height of 5 feet or half the weight of a car to a height of 10 feet, at least while the air is on. Same goes for the heater in the winter. He looked at me like I was the crazy one.
Then show him the equation to convert horsepower to KW hours.
Then ask to borrow his power bill to calculate daily power consumption in KW hours. Then calculate how many 10lb rocks he would need to lift to various distances so he knows exactly what he needs.
Maybe it would convince him to conserve power after he knows how much work is involved in generating it.
Heck. I'd like to see the the calculation. It sounds like it would be a good article if someone would write one up based on this premise.
...ask to borrow his power bill to calculate daily power consumption in KW hours. Then calculate how many 10lb rocks he would need to lift to various distances so he knows exactly what he needs.
Heck. I'd like to see the the calculation. It sounds like it would be a good article if someone would write one up based on this premise.
I just happen to have a power bill handy.
This month I used 2265 kwh. My average monthly usage for the year is 1773 kwh and the peak month was 2677 kwh. Lets use the average, knowing that some months will take more rocks and some less.
1773 kwh in a month divided by 30 is 59 kwh per day divided by 24 hours in a day is about 2.5 kwhs every hour. How many hours a day do you want to lift rocks? If you have a wife and kid you could be on shifts so you could do it 24 hours a day right? If so you will need to generate 2500 watts all the time. Shorter shifts would mean more would need to be done per shift. Just for fun lets say you can find enough people in your family to lift rocks 24/7. How many pounds of rocks need to be lifted how high to generate 2500 watts? Well I don't know off the top of my head but stay tuned, I'll be back shortly after doing some research.
Well it's pretty easy to calculate, really. 1 horsepower is 550 ft-lbs per second. 1 horsepower is also about 746 watts. Thus, since your electric bill is in kWh, we want to know how many ft-lbs per hour a kW is. Without further delay, here we go:
I grabbed a copy of my last electric bill. It's cheap in the winter since heating bills in Arizona in winter are next to nothing. At any rate, my $68 electric bill says I used an average of 28 kWh per day. Since we were able to calculate what 1 kWh is, 28 would be 742,89,600 ft-lbs. Since this guy wanted to use 70 pound bags from a height of 10 feet, that would still mean he'd have to lift 106,128 70-pound bags 10 feet every day to have any hope of generating enough power.
p.s. - As one further datapoint, a quick google search for power generator bicycles seems to indicate that the average human doing a 1-hour shift on a power generator bicycle will only put out about 0.1 kwh of electricity. If you used that bike for an hour a day, every day, that would be about 3 kWh versus your monthly total of 900-2000 kWh of electricity. Looks like humans can forget about powering their own homes!
My electric usage is about twice what yours is. 185 lbs a second divided by 70 lb bags is 2.64 bags a second, times 60 sec/min times 60 min/hour times 24 hours in a day is 228,000 bags a day which is just about twice your 106,000 figure so it looks like we agree.
Relocating the Battery pack!!
