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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"?
sustainable living
Hybrid-drivetrain racecar with a flywheel sounds a lot like this 1994 car.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
Or 1910s era cool!
http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/gyrocars/schilovs.htm
> 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.
Whenever I see somebody doing a burnout, I always feel bad for them because their poor tires are not properly matched to their car. After all, with a properly matched tire set, if you tromp the gas, the car goes fast. I love embarassing ignorant rednecks in their hopped up Camaros by beating them for the first couple of hundred yards in my all wheel drive GMC Safari minivan while they sit their and spin their wheels like idiots. They don't seem to realize that they can only beat me once their wheels stop spinning. They think that their inability to maintain traction is some sort of advantage.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
... 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.
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
Two counter rotating flywheels will NOT cancel out each other! Only the reaction (precessional is the official term i think in english) forces are canceled out!
Let's say the three axis are x, y and z. Then when you have a single flywheel which is rotating about the x axis it will resist rotating along the other axis and while react with a force that is perpedular to the the rotation and the force. When adding a second counter rotating flywheel it will cause a reaction force opposite to that of the first flywheel so the reaction forces are canceled out. However the combination still resist rotating along any axis other then it's axis of rotation.
That's true, and why I personally think hybrid sports cars don't generally make a great deal of sense. However, from what I've been able to find, the Porsche system is apparently lighter than the equivalent battery-based hybrid system, and in a 24 hour endurance race like the one this car will be competing in, efficiency becomes really important, probably more so than being able to overtake in the corners. That's one of the reasons diesel cars do so well at LeMans, even though many of the gasoline-powered cars can corner faster, over the course of 24 hours the efficiency and straight line speed advantages allow them to win.
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.
Maybe they have 2 counter-rotating flywheels
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Are you kidding? Porsches are only fast in a straight line, or on roads with a lot of big wide corners. Find a road that's less than glassy-smooth and you're not going to go above about 50mph before the car becomes unmanageable because the suspension is too stiff and doesn't have any travel.
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.
Small addendum: some cars have enough power to spin any set of tires when the driver stomps his foot down. One point of skill for people who own such cars is to be able to launch your car from a halt as fast as you can without spinning the tires.
(((dB)))