electric automobile repowered by small wind turbine ?
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at
9:53 pm
as the electric car is driving could a small wind turbine be deployed up say from the trunk or through the grill area and allowed to spin to create new power made from the car moving forward to repower itself ?
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Tagged with: electric car • small wind turbine
Filed under: Small Wind Turbines
Dana is correct. The wind turbine would force the electric car to expend far more energy than you recover from the wind turbine.
With respect to going downhill, an electric car can use the electric motors to generate electricity to recharge the battery.
That is what modern hybrid vehicles do.
For a car traveling downhill, the wind turbine would merely be a very cumbersome way to do the same thing the electric motors of an electric car do.
The wind turbine would create drag and force the car to use more energy to maintain its speed than the turbine would create itself.
You’re basically talking about a perpetual motion machine. It’s simply not possible without violating the laws of physics.
go ahead it will work. If the car is set at the top of a hill, you will be able to go slower down hill with the turbine on and charging a battery than a car with no brakes. NOW, if you want to go up hill, you will two engines to get you bsack whereas the car will only need one.
Your car will consume more fule going up, but hey, you did it.
Nope.
Won’t work.
It would be more efficient to power a flywheel while going down hill to have some power to get up the next hill or travel on the level at the bottom of the hill.
Now cars with gas engines will have a flywheel to keep the engine spinning between power strokes, and this is just the same principle. But it would not be economically feasible, and the wind machine would act mostly as a flywheel propelled by the wind then returning part of the energy lost previously.
You might be better to use some kind of sail to get power from cross winds and tail winds, but you can not use it on a public roadway. I can just imagine you surfing down the interstate using the wind off the front corner of a big truck.
A car with a parachute deployed might be able to be pulled along with another vehicle’s wind. I use the principle on the interstate to cut my fuel consumption. It does not add to the fuel consumption of the truck, but as we approach a hill I pull just ahead of the truck, a lane over, and provide turbulence to help the truck over the hill. Symbiosis.
While employed in New Zealand as a design technician in an electronics company 35 years ago, and excited man came to me with exactly this proposal.
He was utterly convinced it was a great idea.
He was 100% wrong.
Defies the basic laws of Physics. It will not work.
This is not as ridiculous as it sounds… In short, putting a fan on a car to generate power is analogous to driving up a hill apply regenerative breaking to generate power. Of course, more energy is used than is created. Having said that, the concept is sane enough for Mitsubishi to put fans on a concept electric car (see http://www.evworld.com/news.cfm?newsid=16166 ). Virtually everyone in the industry agrees that if it does anything at all, it will do only very little to convert wind into energy for the car — perhaps not even enough to justify the cost of implementation. The thinking is if the wind was hitting a flat surface to create wind resistance, it would create less resistance going through a fan. My opinion, anyone that puts fans on cars for this purpose is doing so more for a marketing gimmick than anything else.
SCREW THE PEOPLE WHO SAID IT WON’T WORK! I THINK FREE ENERGY IS POSSBILE IF YOU ACTUALLY THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX!!! THE ONLY WAY TO KNOW IS TO TRY!!!
go try it!!!
Check http://www.whynot.net/ideas/720 . A lot of comments.
Practically 1 needs to look both at positive and negative angles before going for implementation. If folks are having a long drive down a mountain, it makes real sense to turn on the wind power conversion.
Once the product comes to market, it can inspire for better creative ideas