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Porsche Unveils 911 Hybrid With Flywheel Booster
MikeChino writes "Porsche has just unveiled its 911 GT3 R Hybrid, a 480 horsepower track vehicle ready to rock the 24-hour Nurburgring race this May. Porsche's latest supercar will use the same 911 production platform available to consumers today, with a few race-ready features including front-wheel hybrid drive and an innovative flywheel system that stores kinetic energy from braking and then uses it to provide a 160 horsepower burst of speed. The setup is sure to offer an advantage when powering out of turns and passing by other racers."
Flywheel drive is SciFi cool!!
http://joesaward.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/a-rumour-explained/ As this post's title says, it doesn't give much more info. Essentially it just adds the information that the flywheel system is derived from the Williams F1 Team's KERS (kinetic energy recovery system).
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Flywheels have been used to store energy for ages, but do they change the handling of the car at all?
Boats can have gyroscopic roll stabilizers, but what effect does this flywheel have?
This is very similiar to the KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System) that was used by some F1 teams last year such as McLaren and Ferrari. The system failed because the gains weren't enough to offset weight and bulk of the system. All F1 cars weigh 600kg, but the cars themselves are actually much lighter and need to be ballasted to reach this weight. The distribution of this ballast is very important, as keeping the center of gravity low on a race car is critical. Cars with KERS has a higher center of gravity than other cars because the KERS systems couldn't be placed as low as ballast. Add to that the loss of development time on other areas of the car, and the result is that all of the teams with KERS performed very poorly. This Porsche could make a hybrid system work, as it has more design flexibility and a longer race. Fuel savings will be exxagerated by the extreme length of the race, which is 12 times longer than the maximum time allowed for an F1 race.
From TFA: "This generator stores energy each time the vehicle breaks..."
If I had a Porsche 911 I wouldn't want to damage the thing to use the hybrid feature. Do they perhaps mean "brakes"?
sustainable living
PORSCHE DID 911!!!!!!!!!!!!!
UTF-8: There and Back Again
There is no substitute
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
be measured in horsepower? From article summary "uses it to provide a 160 horsepower burst of speed."
Hybrid-drivetrain racecar with a flywheel sounds a lot like this 1994 car.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
from lawnmower engines!
Actually, I'm glad to see car companies reclaiming all that kinetic energy that they were previously just radiating off as heat during braking.
I bet a flywheel is an incredibly efficient way to store it, too. Now, lets see if these brakes actually work. Hope they did a better job than Toyota.
The flywheel's attached to the crankshaft...
Call a bwaaaahmbulance! It hasn't even been ten years!
This sounds and looks like something out of idiocracy. To bad it doesn't have monster tires
...a fun time for Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May. :-)
"Bah!" - Dogbert
In a race car???
Hybrids, being more complex vehicles than classic cars or pure electric vehicles don't handle as easily, and might not perform as well in fast or extreme conditions. Furthermore, they won't save a lot of gas when driving at constant and/or high speeds, such as highway or a race track.
But they are really good in urban environment when you need to often slow down and speed up to accommodate heavy traffic, as then the brake mechanism kicks in saving energy and and the electric engines is used in those short runs/speedups that are so frequent in city driving conditions. It's perfect for taking the kids, going shopping, commute to work and back, you know things you always wanted to do with your Porsche 911.
By the way, most of not all hybrids license technology from Toyota for their operation. Can't wait to see what faulty brakes or accidental acceleration on a Porsche 911 looks like.
ok, so we have lets say 100 kg flywheel rotating at 40,000 rpm.
and we crash.
something hits the flywheel, likely destroying bearings as well.
what will happen ?
I'm not sure, but I don't think this will end good.
did you heard about lightened and not properly balanced engine flywheels ? I did. they could explode, and in cars with transverse engine layout shrapnels could even kill the driver.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSFA0ufNS_k
I get a chuckle from the cnn article on this topic, that states you could use the extra 160 hp when you needed to pass somebody (in case the standard 480 horses isn't enough)
No mention of the awesome green-light burn-outs soon to be offered to the affluent consumer?
This ain't rocket surgery.
Richard Hammond is gonna have a field day with this. I can't wait to see it on TG next season.
If there's enough gyroscopic effect to matter, then the normal engineering way to deal with it would be to use a pair of flywheels rotating in opposite directions. Then, you can think of it either way, the gyroscopic effects cancel... or the net angular momentum of the two flywheels is zero so there is no gyroscopic effect.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Quoting from http://www.dailytech.com/Porsche+911+GT3+R+Hybrid+to+Debut+in+Geneva/article17666.htm
The hybrid system in the GT3 R Hybrid uses a flywheel system that harnesses kinetic energy under braking to power a pair of electric motors mounted in a single assembly. The electric motors and flywheel assembly sit where the passenger seat of a street 911 would normally reside. Power gathered by the flywheel system is sent to the front wheels and when fully charged the hybrid system can provide a 6-8 second burst of power for passing and exiting corners activated by a button on the steering wheel. The flywheel in the hybrid system will reportedly spin as fast as 40,000 rpm.
The pair of electric motors provides an additional 161 horsepower to the front wheels supplementing the 4.0-liter flat-6 that produces 480hp and sends its power to the rear wheels. Porsche is mum on performance claims for the 911 GT3 R Hybrid, but the car will appear on May 15 at the Nurburgring 24 Hours endurance race."
So it's not too different from a normal hybrid, except instead of charging batteries to store the energy they are spinning up a flywheel. The forward kinetic energy of the vehicle is recovered as electrical power using generators/motors, which drives generator/motors that spin up a flywheel. Going the other way, the flywheel mechanical energy is converted back to electricity to drive the front wheel motors.
I seem to recall having heard that Formula 1 cars have been doing this for a while. Obviously it's just a short power burst. You can't store much energy in it without severe weight penalties.
The advantage of this over an ultracapacitor is that you keep it all mechanical. If the car were already a gas-electric hybrid, you'd probably rather use an ultracap.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
911 has four seats.
... A few years ago I heard about Tom Kasmer's hydraulic transmission. He calls it the Hydristor (also: wikipedia entry).
Basically, an invention like Kasmer's could be used to turn any car into a hybrid by replacing the transmission. Braking energy is stored in a hydraulic pressure system (the proper name escapes me at the moment).
While this system from Porsche is interesting, it is not revolutionary.
The next automotive revolution will be some form of retrofit.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
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KERS was mostly a disaster in 2009 by allowing teams to use it, but not mandating it. At the end of the season, all teams agreed to abandon the technology. The BMW F1 team bet heavily on KERS and designed their car around it. After challenging for the championship in 2008, their 2009 campaign was so poor, they quit F1 altogether.
Maybe they could slave the high speed flywheel to the steering and tilt it for cornering.
Though the common computer nerd is the most high profile and widely recognized nerd, there are in fact many varieties of nerds found in the wild. Today we will feature the mechanical engineer. The ME once dominated the high tech world creating turbines, fighter jets, and space rockets. Today it is common to find an odd crossbreed of the ME nerd and the car geek. This type of nerd stands out in several important ways. The mechanical engineer / car geek, often displays impressive social skills when compared to the meager skills of the computer nerd. ME's consider computers to be a means to an end instead of the end itself. One other common characteristic of the ME nerd / car geek is that he typically considered the various iterations of the Porsche 911 to be the very pinnacles of industrial design.
-- QED
I wanna know if I can get one of those stickers for the carpool lane with the 911 GT3 Hybrid.
-- QED
With race cars, the lighter the better -- better braking, better turning, better acceleration.
With flywheels it's the opposite, the more mass the better (the more energy it will hold at a given speed).
It looks like the flywheel will rectify only one of the above performance components that its extra mass hurts -- acceleration.
FOTA limited the amount of energy that can be stored on KERSs to be tiny, thus render KERS useless. that led to the disaster.
How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive has added a chapter on how to add on a hamster wheel.
and an innovative flywheel system that stores kinetic energy from braking
Wow, then about every subway train and bus in my city must be from the future, because they had flywheels for at least a decade.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
nerds found in the wild.
I don’t think “basement” counts as “in the wild”. Unless the mold has become sentient...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
If you put the flywheel with the axis horizontal, the car will resist turning. My guess is that this doesn't work so well for a racing car....
If you put the flywheel with the axis vertical, the car would lift its inside wheels when cornering a banked turn, right?
Translation: They just needed to fit the accelerator gear with Toyota-built pedals and now they're all set.
They allowed the KERS to store only 80 HP and it could be used for at most 6 seconds per lap.
Add to this that none of the teams that planned to use KERS designed a car with a double diffuser, an aerodinamical device allowed by a loophole in the rules initially exploited by only three teams. The double diffuser turned out to be far more important than the KERS for the performances of the car. Brawn GP got an expecially good implementation of the device and won 6 of the first 7 races. After that they coasted to win the championship as the other teams struggled to catch up. KERS teams got on par only on the last races of the season.
By the way, BMW abandoned KERS quite early in the season and it used it only on one of its cars.
I've got a 911. From the late 80s. This is an amazing machine. It's right there in hacker folklore alongside IBM Model M and HP LaserJet 4M+: indestructible machines of outstanding quality.
Speaking as an ME who switched from CS I agree wholeheartedly with the social skills part of your comment. You're also spot on with computers being a means to an end but that might have something to do with the computer part in CS, what? But when it comes to Porsches it's all a matter of taste; personally I think the shape is pleasant enough but the shape isn't designed by an ME. It's a nice bit of design but the pinnacle you're talking about is getting really rear-engined cars to handle as well as they do.
When people say industrial design these days they usually mean the outside appearance (I'm looking at you, Apple). MEs are the ones who actually make things work, usually involving a lot of sniggering at the faaarr-out and totally impractical designs that designers come up with. Rather the same as the difference between the ridiculous crap that's paraded down "fashion" catwalks and what people actually wear.
As an aside, for some reason I noticed the MEs drink a lot more than CS peeps, but that might be down to the perceived social deficiencies.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Williams had both a double diffuser and planned to use their KERS system but never got it operational before FOTA announced the decision not to use KERS in 2010.
A porsche supercar, that is green. He will twist himself in so many idiotic claims, he might just croak.
So, no downside to this then.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I am a sanitation engineer for Waste Management Industries. Like MEs that can't get away from their jobs and so choose hobbies similar to their profession, I also like to play with kitchen refuse in my spare time. And the Automated Receptacle Lifter Assembly (ARLA) is a pinnacle of industrial design.
Pssstt...Social skills include knowing when to stop talkin about your work.
Just think of what this technology could do in the hands of Ford!
Better yet, Toyota. Their cars already accelerate out of control - with the added energy from the flywheel system just think what they could do.
Putting moderation advice in your
that doesnt help
youre still changing the angular momentum of the gyroscope when you alter the axis of rotation. change of linear momentum corresponds to a force, change of angular momentum corresponds to a torque, the greater the change the greater the torque. two counter rotating flywheels would just double the amount of torque you would have to provide, so it makes it worse.
And a bunch of us (well, technically I'm an EE, but still a fan od Porsche) who do like Porsche consider their latest two hybrids (see also the Cayenne) to be sort of a "sell out." Then again, they've been breaking from their expected image a lot in the past decade: an SUV, two hybrids, a {gasp} 4-door (see Panamera).Whatever is this world coming to?
(((dB)))
Physics 101: Energy = m * v^2
ie. mass is far less important then velocity (RPM in the case of a flywheel).
No sig today...
changing the angular momentum of the gyroscope when you alter the axis of rotation. change of linear momentum corresponds to a force, change of angular momentum corresponds to a torque, the greater the change the greater the torque.
angular momentum is a vector quantity, so when it requires a torque to change the tilt of the bike, this provides the stability, but i dont see how what youve said is true, that it is not due to the angular momentum.
what is the difference between an unstable stationary bike and a stable bike in motion? A: the wheels have I omega angular momentum (where I is the moment of inertia of each wheel)
aspurgers?
Easy way to solve problem
..........FULL STOP.
Seriously -is it that hard to think about.
And I'm sure that whatever is made will work F'ing fantastically - after all it's Porsche, and not uncle Earl in his shed.
..........FULL STOP.
Huh - that's a nice thought. probably the tech has been worked out for something like that with the tourbillion watches already.
..........FULL STOP.
actualy its Civils that drink the most - I rember a semi serious discusion about which types of computer cleaning fluid where best for making bootleg hooch.
Given that accidents are the most popular aspect of car races, it will be hugely popular when a small imbalance makes the flywheel fly out of the car.
And I wonder what they were thinking when they named this "911"...
...fix accidental incorrect moderation (damn scroll-wheel focus!).
MEs consider 911s to be the pinnacle of industrial design? uhm, speak for yourself clown. I would take a modern CHP turbine, any modern turbine really, a 50yr old nuclear propulsion system, or even a hundred pieces of drilling/mining/excavation equipment designs over a funny little consumer toy.
um also don't hold us to your dinosaur view of computers either.
It's crazy troglodytes like yourself that drive enrollment into other engineering programs.
AM I STANDING ON YOUR LAWN? CAN YOU EVEN HERE ME?
ME's DO IT ALL. THERMO/TRANSPORT/POWER TRANSFER. We built the world and uhh, although you were perhaps laid off be refusing to adopt new skills, the rest of us will still be building it tomorrow. IT seems easier to teach semi conductor fab to MEs than thermo to EEs and o-chem to MEs than correct transport to CHEMEs. And all of us polished our CS skills, uhh, over one long weekend in 9th grade.....
I like the Panamera, one of the better looking modern Porsche designs, though not nearly as drool-worthy as the Carrera GT (why does that car not photograph as well as it looks in person?)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Approximation is a social construct. Most of the kids who are frightfully accelerated end up in math or computer science or some hard core discipline which can be done with no recourse to social constructs whatsoever. A 14-year-old prodigy doesn't have much social context to fall back upon. There's too much social context in engineering to appeal to many of these kids: what part of the equation to cross off and ignore today because it typically ends up being a rounding error on a safety margin.
These are the same kids who might have preferred engineering had they entered university at a more mature age. That's a selection bias that doesn't have much to do with it. I'm only interested in comparing people who have the engineering temperament with people who have the math/computer science temperament. There are some fairly deep differences in how these tribes approach simplicity, another social construct. It doesn't interest me much that math and physics are the best holding tanks for a certain type of person on an extreme cognitive development path.
The other bias is how you count sobriety. An engineer has roughly the same amount of social skill, divided into fewer sober hours. How much skill is involved in drinking six pints? How much social skill is involved in counting binge drinking as a social skill? After graduation the engineers look around the room and go "we're all relatively normal" not counting their fallen comrades who succumbed to life-long alcoholism i.e. those who continue behaving the same way after leaving school.
More of the attrition from math and computer science is by way of the psychiatric ward. A fallen engineer might end up turning a wrench in a pit crew (not at the F1 level). A fallen mathematician might go around knitting an imaginary blanket patterned after a Turkish fractal.
I was thinking about cognitive bias earlier today. We're all pretty good at cooking the denominator, which seems to be a prerequisite for social acceptance. Social skill is most impressive when least understood. We're a strange species.
So, let me guess, they're going up against Rutan et al for the next X Prize? Cool!
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Valentino Rossi can ride and piss all over your GT3 Porsche. Buddy Carl Foggerty the "Blackburn Bullet" will eat you for breakfast on a bike. The only person that is almost 31337 can break the world record is my beautiful baby Sabine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabine_Schmitz she is ready for the world record. that woman is awesome and she can put cars through their paces and you WILL PASS out as she knows how to pull pull devastating G-Forces more than a tornado jet.Sabine Rocks *hugs*
All cows eat grass!
Ein Blitz, eine Wolke von Staub und ein herzliches HALLO Ho Silver "the mark of the intellectual is anyone while hearing the "William Tell Overture" doesn't think of the Lone Ranger"
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
Sabine must take the world record. Michael Schumacher aka "The Stig" has zero power on this woman. She is devasting, Who said she cannot race, with Valentno Rossi in front of her or if the "Blackburn Bullet" Foggy comes out of retirement to lead her as a pace maker or Rossi, I swear she will do a world record. If we can have Paul http://www.redbullairrace.com/cs/Satellite?c=RB_Profile&childpagename=RedBullAirRace%2FLayout&cid=1238611549646&pagename=RedBullAirRaceWrapper to hit this and he is going to do this.GOD BLESS the RAF! if he hits the g-forces my baby Sabine can do it too.
All cows eat grass!
...not only are Porsche drivers a bunch of wankers - not they can be smug like all the other hybrid car drivers.