50 mpg air-hybrid

Hmm, there are no pictures of completed engines (or vehicle installations) on the site yet.

-- Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't. -- Pete Seeger

Have a look on the "our media" page, there are a couple of videos of the prototype running although they don't show the engine in any great detail.

The size of the Rolls Royce with the power of a Vespa! ;) I'd like to see their power specs, though.

I'm sure the production engine will be considerably more compact.

-- Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't. -- Pete Seeger

Does this really qualify to use the term "hybrid"?

It is essentially a conventional combustion engine with a regenerative braking system added.

Mouse wrote in news:irvsg8$jni$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Let's see: a tank of compressed air in a system with fuel vapors & a nearby combustion source. All it takes is a tiny leak & the storage tank will blow the thing to bits. No thanks.

Doug White

There's a number of things out there called "hybrid" whose labeling I would question.

One of the problems with electrical regenerative braking is finding something that can accept the energy fast enough (batteries generally charge a lot slower than they discharge, and capacitors are _huge_).

Compressed air power doesn't work well in general because the energy density of compressed air is far worse even than batteries, at least once you take the size of the tank into account.

So a gas engine with compressed air regenerative braking may not be that bad of a thing, no matter what you call it.

Please run out and stop all the ignorant fools that are running jackhammers from gasoline and diesel-powered compressors, then. . . . And all those trucks and trains with air brakes. . . . Why are they not getting blown to bits on a regular basis, I wonder? . . . You're hyping something that is simply not that big of a deal. Not talking about an oxygen tank.

Tim Wescott wrote in rec.crafts.metalworking on Mon, 30 May 2011 14:31:38 -0700:

Don't forget about the heat. That kills the efficiency of most air powered cars. But as short term storage in re-gen braking, it may be workable. But I'll wait and see.

The energy recovered by regenerative braking helps you get back up to speed after the light turns green, nothing more.

jsw

Apparently that energy can be a pretty substantial fraction of the energy used in city driving. So your 'nothing more' is warranted, but the energy saving isn't to be sneezed at.

And no -- I can't quote proportions to you. Wish I could. It's probably on the web someplace. In fact, there's probably several different contradictory sets on the web*.

One thing about using compressed air for regenerative braking -- if you use the compressed air while it's still hot you'll recover more energy than you do from cold compressed air like you'd get in a shop. All it'd take would be a bit of thermal insulation on the tank, or perhaps not even that.

• If nothing else, it depends on the driver. I have a friend who accelerates like a drag racer out of stop lights, then curses and stomps on the brakes at the next red. This in downtown Portland Oregon, where they time all the lights and if you go a steady speed a bit under the limit then you hit all the lights green. _She's_ gonna benefit from regenerative braking a whole bunch more than my wife or I, who like the challenge of seeing how many greens we can hit when we know the lights are timed.

It's significant, but probably still a loss compared to driving through a green light. Compare it to coasting up a hill to a stop, then rolling back down. You won't go any faster after than you were before.

jsw

I once heard an urban legend-type story; in Minneapolis, they had the signals timed for a steady 26 MPH. So some guy says, "Well, if they're timed for 26 MPH, then 52 should work too, shouldn't it? The story is that he made it all the way through town before they caught him, but personally, I find the whole story more than 50% implausible. :-)

Anybody else heard anything like that?

Thanks, Rich

You're about half right on the implausibility. Since the timing is the delay before the next light turns green, at 52 the second light would still be red when you got to it.

Paul K. Dickman

Or you'd go 52mph and hit red, green, red, green.

Then, eventually, "crunch!".

My dad used to tell a story about a friend of his in the local Sheriff's department. The guy liked to prank the dispatchers. One day he was parked in a lot at the corner of SE 122 and mumble-mumble (South of Powell, at any rate). He saw normal traffic going through a green, and an obviously oblivious speeder heading toward the red, with no sign of stopping. So he stuck his mic out the window and keyed it at the critical moment.

Radio silence, followed by:

"Will the unit at the scene of the injury accident please advise with your location and ID".

DAMHIKT

Only if the next light goes through an even number of green cycles in the time you need to travel between the lights at 26MPH. This will only be true if there is a long distance between each light, and only

I have a Honda Civic Hybrid, and can pretty easily exceed 60 MPG in city driving. It gets about 50 MPG on the highway. This is a fairly standard looking car, nothing real special about the body, it has a continuously variable cone drive transmission with no torque converter and a semi-Atkinson cycle engine that is a bit more efficient.

Yeah, my wife gets about 42 MPG with it, so driving style may make even MORE difference with a hybrid.

Jon

Can you maintain it yourself without special equipment or subscribing to an online service?

jsw

How many hills do you have to drive over, to get somewhere?