Naturally, merely enough to help sustain the battery charge longer.
Why aren't automakers making wind turbines?
- Thread starter Bill Morris
- Start date
Naturally, merely enough to help sustain the battery charge longer.
In the long run you are quite right, the US car industry needs to modernise to survive.
In the short run the short term massive economic consequences of the big three going bust worldwide really demands action, keep the buggers going until they start building sensible cars or downsize to the point of non-existence.
GodThingFormerly
A Different Kind of Asshole
You would probably want companies with aerospace experience to design and build wind turbines that can fully exploit the jet stream:
TGT
TGT
No. Any energy you gained from the wind turbine installed on a car is offset by the increased drag produced by the blades. You are not going to gain any in the overall efficiency. You are still essentially using the Internal combustion engine to produce electricity and that is very poor in efficiency compared to large scale Rankine cycle based power generation plants.
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I'll grant that such a turbine would increase drag. However, I have a hard time imagining the drag on a small turbine being less than the energy generated by the wind. Especially if it's mounted somewhere unobtrusive, such as just behind the engine cooling grill.
It doesn't matter in the overall scheme where the turbine is mounted. You aren't going to extract more energy than it was already produced by the ICE in making the car move.
Forget about ICEs for a second. Let's say this is an electric car, or a hybrid running on the battery. I'm not looking for a perpetual motion machine here, as I already said-----I'm simply thinking that mounting such a turbine could slow the rate of battery drain. Under that view, there's no need for it to produce more energy than was used to make the car move; only for it to produce more energy than the difference in energy required to move the car with and without the turbine mounted. I can't really imagine that difference being very large.
Rÿcher
Fleet Captain
spinners
hubcap spinners as turbines, the air intake manifold as a turbine!
I'm calling GM and the patent office!
(seriously)
Still not going to happen; there's no way that the vehicle using the energy can also produce any surplus above what it's using. The best that can be done with any energy-user is to maximize its efficiency so that it uses less energy for the amount of work it performs.
However, there is something that vehicles can be a part of, on a massive scale and with a huge initial investment: inductive generation. We have millions of cars and trucks in constant motion along our highways and roads. As mentioned upthread, each of them has a generator, which functions by passing an electromagnetic field over a coil of wire, producing an electrical flow. Now, take that concept on a larger scale: install magnets in the undercarriage of the car, and bury wiring in the road surface. As the cars drive along the road, the magnets in the undercarriage pass over the wire in the road, stimulating a flow of electrons as they pass. The entire automotive grid thus becomes an enormous generator. The magnets don't have to be especially powerful - it's the aggregate of all of them that makes the system work. Like I said, huge investment, but it's a passive system that recovers energy that is otherwise being wasted, from an activity that is going to continue no matter what.
Maybe I'm not thinking of it correctly, but I don't believe my concept requires this to happen. In order to achieve speed x on a given surface, a car without a turbine requires E energy to be produced by the ICE. To achieve the same speed a car with a turbine requires E+e energy from the ICE. All I'm requiring is that the turbine produce e' > e energy; it doesn't have to come anywhere near E. You can avoid the problem of asking "what if you have lots and lots of turbines" by observing that as you modify size and count of turbines, there's probably a global maximum of e'/e at some point. The only question is whether that global maximum is over 1 or not.
Hmm. What about turning that around? Put magnets in the road, and let the induction add to the car's own energy supply. It would probably yield notable results faster, which could give it greater political impetus.
Depending upon the time/distance traveled, it's conceivable that more electricity could be generated in the car than the car can actually store, wasting a great deal of energy. That's actually what happens even now with ICE-powered cars and trucks - their generators are running, whether the batteries can accept any more charge or not; we could actually recover a significant amount of electricity if only all cars and trucks had some sort of auxiliary batteries or capacitors to store what they generate and can't use. By generating the power externally, it can be returned to the overall grid immediately and either used or stored, more effectively than by making each vehicle a storehouse.
But even that gets to the point of the conservation of energy principle. I doubt you could more energy than is caused by the drag of the wind turbines, which you would have to do is it was going to supplement battery charge.
That's what I kept yelling at Barack Obama during the campaign. He kept saying that we need to go to wind and solar, but for some strange reason, my truck doesn't fucking run on the wind. I wished it would, but it don't.
It's just ashame that Nitrogen isn't combustible. At 78% of the atmosphere, we could have vehicles that burn air.
GodThingFormerly
A Different Kind of Asshole
There is no doubt that the engine would continue to push the car forward and that energy would in fact be produced by the wind turbine(s) on the car. But you cannot produce more than you lose from the extra drag of the turbine, meaning that the extra charge to the battery from the turbine would be off. That simple point is all I am getting at. Look into it. I can imagine all the neat designs we would have with vehicles that had various fans underneath and angled to the sides if they could improve mileage, even by five or ten percent. Part of the problem is also with the aerodynamics. You cannot shield the turbines from drag or they don't work, and the better they work, the more exposed to drag they have to be, continuing with the offset. Again, with the conservation of energy problem....
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