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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?
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"?
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PORSCHE DID 911!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Hybrid-drivetrain racecar with a flywheel sounds a lot like this 1994 car.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This sounds and looks like something out of idiocracy. To bad it doesn't have monster tires
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In a race car???
I hope you realize that outside of NASCAR, most race driving is not constant high speed. It involves a great deal of braking and acceleration, when maneuvering through corners. This is why track cars have really, really good brakes, and being able to reclaim that kinetic energy lost is potentially an enormous benefit.
They haven't been popular to date because of the impact on vehicle dynamics, but it's just a matter of time until the engineering issues are solved.
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)
Or 1910s era cool!
http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/gyrocars/schilovs.htm
No mention of the awesome green-light burn-outs soon to be offered to the affluent consumer?
This ain't rocket surgery.
> 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.
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.
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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.
... 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.
Furthermore, they won't save a lot of gas when driving at constant and/or high speeds, such as highway or a race track.
Clearly you missed part of the summary: this is not a NASCAR race.
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.
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.
If you read the article, you'll see the car in question is a petrol/electric hybrid. It's got a regular petrol engine driving the rear wheels and electric motors driving the rear wheels. They use electrical energy to spin up the flywheel, and tap the kinetic energy in the flywheel as electrical energy to add a boost of power to the front wheels.
The energy density of ultracapacitors is not as good as a 40k rpm flywheel...
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FOTA limited the amount of energy that can be stored on KERSs to be tiny, thus render KERS useless. that led to the disaster.
Shhhh ... don't tell him that. Watching a race that has more than four left turns and 0 right turns per lap requires more than 5 seconds worth of attention.
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.
As a fan of the Stainless Steel Rat I want to see flywheel powered motorbikes.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
BMW made them over 50 years ago; I'm told they had "interesting" handling.
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.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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
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...
Due to the gyroscopic effects of the flywheel?
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
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.
In the book you could leave them standing up without a stand.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Find a bike that doesn't have an angle on the front wheel fork that's acute where it meets the ground going back toward the bike. Well, you won't find one because it would be extremely hard to keep it up right. You're wrong.
XML causes global warming.
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.
The Bible talks about flywheels?
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
Not that book.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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,
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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.
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No because they were shaft driven. "Everyone knows" you cant wheelie a BMW - because they use a shaft instead of a chain :p
I have never owned a motorcycle so I have no idea what you mean. Why would a shaft drive bike not be able to pop a wheelie?
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
Oh it's an old "vi vs emacs" type argument in the motorcycle world. Shaft driven bike riders spout how they are so much easier to maintain, because there is no chain you have to lube on a regular basis. Chain driven bike riders generaly retort something about not being able to wheelie a shaft driven bike - because they aren't quite as efficient (there are more drive losses going through a shaft vs a chain) but mostly because the shaft is spinning in line with the bike, it's moment of inertia supposedly stops you being able to wheelie it, or makes it tilt sideways if you do. BMW bikes are nearly all shaft driven.
I wonder if you can use the enormous torque of ["ac"]||["de"]+"celerating" a pair of counterrotating flywheels to give the car out-of-this-world handling, and use the gyroscopic effect to make active suspension pointless. It's probably a good idea to get rid of the ICE and put a decent NiLi battery. To top it off, you remember Toyota Hybrid Synergy Drive? Two electric motors attached to a planetary gear reducer? Now, remember that there are two self-synchronous motor geometries. One with an enclosing (around the coils) rotor, and one with the rotor within the coils. Well, why not make an engine with two rotors? Like two engines in one, with shared components, making it much lighter.
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