Kenetic Energy Recovery Systems

[sheribuchta]

in 07 there was an electric motorcycle at el mirage called re-volt at the may race --i havent seen any this year --to bad with the price of gas and all   willie buchta


and there are no records at bonneville or el mirage for the electric motorcycle  classes

[1212FBGS]

not yet!
kr

[Ratliff]

A fuel cell vehicle has an exhaust pipe. Battery vehicles don't. A battery can go from a full charge to dead with no loss of the chemicals inside. Anytime a fuel cell vehicle is generating electricity it's getting lighter because vapors are going out the exhaust pipe.

How does any of this bear on my simple statement that batteries do not store electricity?

Electrically powered vehicles, whether the electicity is supplied by fuel cell or battery, are still electrically powered. If you wanted a sort of "vintage" class, I guess you could restrict it to lead-acid batteries, but this seems premature, given the state of LSR electric vehicle competition.

When going for an FIA record, existing battery technology doesn't allow the car to come back within the hour at full power. Fuel cell cars can.

[panic]

"anything of the ilk would be considered another power source -- just like adding a second engine -- and therefore not allowed"

.....

I raised that very point - that a large battery, compressed air tank, etc. is already accepted without question by every sanctioning body, and that this is (of course) energy not supplied by or subtracted from the displacement, and not monitored or regulated in any way...

...and was completely ignored. I should be used to it by now.

Except for space considerations, running the legal engine for 5 minutes before the timed contest while it spins up an internal 40" flywheel to high RPM through a gear box would be just like another engine. And right now there's nothing to stop it.

[tortoise]

When going for an FIA record, existing battery technology doesn't allow the car to come back within the hour at full power. Fuel cell cars can.

I hadn't heard about the rule disallowing swapping out battery packs. Would you care to cite it?

[Ratliff]

When going for an FIA record, existing battery technology doesn't allow the car to come back within the hour at full power. Fuel cell cars can.

I hadn't heard about the rule disallowing swapping out battery packs. Would you care to cite it?

That's why the Buckeye Bullet I doesn't hold an over 300 mph FIA record.

[Malcolm UK]

FIA Sterwards in the USA permitted e=motion to use this 'refuelling' method - battery pack changes in about 20 minutes.

UIM and FIM do not allow battery changes but do allow re-charging (boats - 20 minutes between runs, bikes - 120 minutes between runs).

The Buckeye Bullet did not to my knowledge ever attempt an FIA record.  Glen - was the best effort made on a two way Bonneville International?

How can we recover Kinetic energy from a parachute??

Malcolm UK

[Dean Los Angeles]

So I picture Costella running with a 40 foot trailer loaded with batteries and a 7 mile extension cord.

That doesn't violate any rules, does it?

[Stainless1]

Dean, Jack would only need a 2.75 mile cord, he would park the trailer on the access road past the 2 1/4 and just rig a cord release in the parachute system...    Starting to get easier all the time 

[Glen]

Naw, that ain't gonna work, his cord would drag across our timing sensors and we would have a delay before the next car or bike could run.

[Super Kaz]

not yet!
kr

or V-ROD'S !

[Blue]

Suppose if a few hundred pounds of ballast added to a car were instead of inert dead weight a flywheel? Suppose before leaving the starting line the driver stored energy in the flywheel by using the engine to spin it up to 8,000 or 10,000 rpm. It wouldn't change the cubic inches, or the induction method, or the type of fuel. The current rules say nothing about it.

Such ideas are fine for transient applications and are, in fact, critical to improving mph on city driven vehicles where stopping and starting consume massive amounts of fuel and create lots of waste energy in the brakes.

LSR, by nature, is a constant power output over a long distance (at least at Bonneville).  Any secondary or stored power source would be transient, ineffective, and justifiably protested.

[comp]

Speaking of kinetic energy recovery systems, I seem to remember reading about a much simpler method of same on this site, at El Mirage, I think, involving the push car pushing the race vehicle to a speed much greater than the race vehicle was capable of, and using the race vehicle's motor to merely retard the rate of deceleration. As I recall, the "nothing in the rulebook against it" argument didn't fly.

 hmmmmm doesn't seam right

[Ratliff]

Suppose if a few hundred pounds of ballast added to a car were instead of inert dead weight a flywheel? Suppose before leaving the starting line the driver stored energy in the flywheel by using the engine to spin it up to 8,000 or 10,000 rpm. It wouldn't change the cubic inches, or the induction method, or the type of fuel. The current rules say nothing about it.

Such ideas are fine for transient applications and are, in fact, critical to improving mph on city driven vehicles where stopping and starting consume massive amounts of fuel and create lots of waste energy in the brakes.

LSR, by nature, is a constant power output over a long distance (at least at Bonneville).  Any secondary or stored power source would be transient, ineffective, and justifiably protested.

LSR is not spec car cookie cutter clone homogenized pasteurized road racing.

If LSR is not moving forward with new ideas it's moving backwards.

And have you ever really sat down and thought about the amount of ballast some of these cars carry? There are cars out there with a thousand pounds of just dead weight. Why not actually do something with that?

[Rex Schimmer]

If you really want to recover some of the lost energy from an engine, like the heat energy that is going out the exhaust, I would think that building a compound engine would probably be legal and not a big technical challenge.  Use a big belt driven centrifugal blower and the hot wheel from a really big turbo connect the two with a shaft that has a simple "sprag form" one way clutch. The motor turns the blower the exhaust gasses turn the turbine once the turbine speed reaches the speed of the blower it will start to drive it and if you use a big enough turbine it will then over come the power required to drive the blower (so now you have effectively a turbo charged car) but if the turbine is big enough it will develop more hp than is required to drive the blower and that horse power will be feed into the engine crank thru the blower drive gears and belt. Bingo!! compound motor!! Don't laugh this set up was used on the B29's engines. Remember at 60,000 rpm every inch pound of torque thru the connecting shaft is one horse power so if you could make a couple of hundred more inch pounds of torque than is required to drive the blower that would be an extra 200 hps!!

This is also one of the ideas that the FIA is considering for the next F1 engines.



Rex