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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.
> 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.
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.
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-- 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.
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.