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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.
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
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.
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.