Think outside a car, this is an *electric generator*.
Your standard back up generator just got obsolete as well.
This thing could have some pretty profound implications that reach far beyond the hood of your car.
For one thing, think about the people who make the parts for the cooling systems for cars now, etc, etc.
Not necessarily a bad thing that those parts have been outsourced to foreigners.
I can't help but think about utility-scale generators as well. From what I understand you get a good chunk of energy loss going from one phase of energy to another. Current generators commonly burn something and use that thermal energy to boil water to produce steam to turn electric turbines (thermal --> electricity). If it suddenly makes economic sense to simply burn the fuel directly, that makes things like oil/gas electrical generation a uva lot cheaper. The actual economics of such a thing would be interesting to get a sense of.
It would also have a profound implication in developing countries with unreliable power grids that currently get a lot of their power from individual gas generators.
Germans invented the diesel, and this German is re-inventing the diesel.
25 Kw is 33 HP (Americans are so quaint with their non-metric, old-timey, variously defined "horse" power).
It will be interesting to see how super expensive the patent owner rents out the technology. Probably way too expensive for widespread, rapid adoption.
The problem is making such an engine function at one scale, then ramping it up to a large enough one to produce 25KW. As you double your flow size, you cannot double you vane spacing. There are certain physical realities since air has mass. I understand the dynamics, but fall short on writing an understandable explanation. As for solving the scaling issue, I fall even shorter to that task.
Trial and error, and it still may be impossible to scale past a certain size.
At least give it a chance. We aren't going to find any disruptive technologies without a venture capitalist mindset, so even if it doesn't work, move on and try to finance some other promising technology. Yeah, it's expensive, but its nothing compared to the payoff once this or something else that achieves similar goals ends up working, which absolutely is going to happen eventually.
I'll give it a chance, I hope it can happen. I just understand the complexities involved and don't think it will happen.
Looks like some type of diesel wankel rotary engine. I'll hold off my opinion until I see one on a dyno.
the oil companies will bury this and it will never see the light of day.
Yep, just like the conspiracy theory of the 100 MPG carburetor for the 2 ton cars of the 60's.
Or the fact of high capacity NMH battery patents...
Are you saying that oil companies don't routinely try to stifle innovations that would hurt their industry?
You of all people should know how the free market operates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron...or_automobiles
Last edited by greyforest; 04-12-2011 at 09:22 AM.
On July 28, 2009, Automotive News reported that Cobasys would be bought from Chevron and Energy Conversion Devices by battery maker SB LiMotive, a joint venture of Bosch and Samsung.[21] At the time of the 2009 Cobasys sale, control of NiMH battery technology transferred back to ECD Ovonics.[22] In October 2009, ECD Ovonics announced that their next-generation NiMH batteries will provide specific energy and power that are comparable to those of lithium ion batteries at a cost that is significantly lower than the cost of lithium ion batteries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_...NiMH_batteries
http://www.energyconversiondevices.com/battery.php
I'm only pointing out that there are conspiracy theories that are clearly laughable. Of course energy corporation will invest in alternate energy. That's second nature.
Here is another oldy but goody thread. Gawd I love the "subscribe" feature.
Updates, and you nerds should read them, as they are moving forward a year later.
Combine this with the new battery technology that makes existing batteries lighter and cheaper.Imagine if an American research team developed a new internal combustion engine three to four times better at burning the fuel that's needed for a power generation system in a hybrid car, and was considerably smaller than the heavy, 1,000-pound powertrain assembly in today's cars?
What if such a novel engine could be connected, for example, to Nissan's efficient, relatively low-cost 24 kilowatt battery that runs the hybrid LEAF—a battery that surprised experts when its manufacturing cost was much lower than anyone had predicted?
What if such an engine allowed Detroit carmakers—or Japanese carmakers—to save quite a bit of money because such a small engine would reduce the total weight of the car by up to 20 percent? What if those savings were then passed on to consumers? What if this engine allowed a hybrid electric-gas vehicle to go much further on a single tank of gas?
Later this year, an engineering research team led by Dr. Norbert Mueller, an associate professor at Michigan State University's college of engineering, plans to have just an engine generating power through a 25-kilowatt battery, which will be capable of driving a full-size hybrid electric-gas vehicle.
(Edit--the batteries refenced here were from Envia, and they are mentioned in another thread recently, as well as the article linked in the post below this one-RG)
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/at-...rid-powerplant (blog from Dec 2012)And because it's small—Mueller can hold the bench prototype engine in just one hand—it would, in fact, be relatively easy to manufacture and reduce the overall weight of a car by as much as 1,000 pounds, enabling hybrid vehicles to be 20 percent lighter and 30 percent less expensive.
Making the batteries alone lighter will pull along hybrid mileage itself.
Factoring this in, along with the possibility of directly manufacturing power from the tech itself.
I see some game changing things for cars within 10 years, possibly as soon as 5.
If this kind of tech would also lend itself to miniturization, we could very well see cheap fuel cells.
Last edited by RandomGuy; 03-12-2012 at 09:00 AM.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science...mit/53490924/1These ideas are a few of the dozens being funded by the Obama administration as part of a little-known program that encourages "high risk, high value" energy innovation that swings for the fences.
They were spotlighted in a recent, gee-whiz showcase, complete with high-powered lasers and microscopic transmitters, hosted near Washington, D.C., by the Department of Energy's ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy). The program is modeled after the Defense Department's larger, decades-old DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which says it invented the Internet.
STORY: Tenn. professor cruises cross-country on 2.15 gallons of gas
Yet the third annual Energy Innovation Summit came amid debate about the federal government's role in funding clean technology. Critics, including many Republicans, cite the DOE's half-billion-dollar loan guarantee to bankrupt solar manufacturer Solyndra and its $10 million L Prize last August to Philips Lighting for developing an "affordable," efficient, made-in-America LED light bulb — that costs $50.
"The government does not have a good track record of funding research for commercial development," says David Kreutzer, an energy economist at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. He says it should fund only basic research and leave more commercial ideas to venture capitalists. If something is promising enough, such as advanced batteries, he says, the marketplace will take it.
Not necessarily so, ARPA-E's supporters say. Energy Secretary Steven Chu says the program, established by a bipartisan 2007 law, gives small, two- to three-year grants so researchers can get over the development hump and attract private funding.
Heh. I am willing to accept a Solyndra or two, if the return is a paradigm shift on a scale unimagined just 10 years ago.
Yeah, I went there.
n/m, I misread the original article as '09 when it was '11. Hope it works.
Maybe this will help those anemic Chevy Volt sales.
hopefully! This will increase the range AND lower the cost of the vehicle, so I don't see why not. Chevy should be applauded though for beginning to build a market segment. Hopefully this will be their prius.
I was thinking that the way to make hybrids practical would be to have a turbine type motor coupled directly to a generator that fired on demand as the batteries drained. Sounds like this could be the next step. Bet it's a high RPM noisy little .
it is small enough that they could cheaply pack a large amount of soundproofing and still have a substantially lighter car
Fox's Vold slander campaign, obviously to detract from Obama's success in saving GM, has worked. Volt sales are way down.
Fox/Repugs don't care who or what they hurt or destroy, It's All Destructive Politics, All The Time.
No . It would make the current power plants obsolete. An efficient local 25KW generator (running on cheap natural gas) can power 4+ average houses during peak summertime A/C loads in Texas.
This is BS boutons. Fox viewers were not going to buy Volts anyway.
It seems very strange that the LAST mention of this thing on any internet link is a year old, especially since the prototype was supposed to be ready three months ago. Whats up with that?
Really? Ok, this thing just got a whole lot cooler.
they should find a way to get the same mileage on little use of oil...fkn nobody gives a how m uch emissions a car makes....everyone is more concern with can they afford to pay at the pump
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