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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."
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?
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.
Actually, I found another link with more info (and some interesting comments):
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2010/02/gt3r-20100211.html
It looks like the flywheel itself has an integrated magnet, so it's basically a generator. Clever, and means it doesn't need a mechanical connection, so gimbals would work.
Though it also looks like it does not in fact use gimbals... may just use some sort of spring suspension?
> 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.
Very unlike a Toyota, I think.
Note: This is a flywheel hybrid, not a battery hybrid.
... 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.
www.teslabox.com
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.
They're talking about a different flywheel you twit. All internal combustion engines including the one in your car (duh) have a flywheel on the main shaft. If they didn't then when you let the clutch out then there wouldn't be enough kinetic energy in the engine to compress the next cylinder and it would stall. You have a flywheel (for instance, a giant disc that your clutch will engage) to smooth out the RPMs and add some mass to the system.
What they're talking about is a giant flywheel that they spin up to store kinetic energy. Like a giant mechanical capacitor. Like something which, if you crashed and it was damaged while it was charged up it would make a very impressive shrapnel cloud.
The flywheel rotates at incredible speeds, tip speeds are at couple of Mach... but it's cased in balistic grade material which will protect everyone should it decide to fall apart.
FOTA limited the amount of energy that can be stored on KERSs to be tiny, thus render KERS useless. that led to the disaster.
It depends on the orientation of the axis of the flywheel. If you try to place the flywheel so that the axis is horizontal, you'll end up with needing to apply a lot of torque in order to turn the vehicle left-right, making it harder to turn. If you place the flywheel so that the axis is vertical, the amount of torque necessary to flip the vehicle would go up, probably making this a safety feature for SUVs, and would have very little effect on the torque needed to turn the vehicle left-right.
The rule with (single-axis) gyroscopes is that the only axis it isn't harder to rotate the whole gyroscope around is the one around which it's already spinning; any non-parallel axis is harder.
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.
The flywheel is a lot less then 100kg. The whole Williams Hybrid KERS system for F1 was around the 35kg mark so the actual flywheel will be a fraction of that. The flyweel and enclosure is all made of a carbon fiber composite and is made in such a way that if it comes loose it will shatter on impact.