Slashdot Mirror
New Concept Tire Could Recharge Car Battery
randomErr writes Goodyear Tire showed off its new BH03 tire that can partially recharge your electric car while driving. At the 2015 Geneva International Motor Show a new concept tire was displayed that uses heat generated while driving and converts the thermal energy to electrical power. The triple inner tube design changes pressure to maximize electrical output while adjusting to the road conditions.
The friction from the road generates heat, which is converted by the tire back to electricity, which runs the car!
The faster you go, the better the mileage you get! In fact, cars like these can achieve near-infinite mileage! (YMMV.)
What's not to like?
[clicks on link]
Rats.
I have to assume that any actual engineers at Ford understand Carnot efficiency, and that this is simply an effort on the part of marketing to generate social-media buzz. It's depressing, but not surprising, to see that they're succeeding.
has handled this so far. tires, too? compatibility or proprietary?
My Toyota with 4 120 amp GM alternators recharges my battery just fine, and powers my dual 1KW subwoofers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This Russian fellow ran short of battery reserve to reach home so he hooked his Tesla up to a truck. Besides getting a tow towards his destination, you can see that the car is charging the battery at 60 kW rate!
In Russia, car charges you!
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Making electric cars even more expensive will really help them get market penetration.
It will never work. It's not 3D printed, using the internet of things, or an Elon Musk company. How can it expect to succeed?
One that charges a battery, another that adjusts its pressure.
The one that uses that charging capability to power the pump would be OK I guess.
I doubt anybody but Batman will be using these though.
I realize this "tech" is designed for electric vehicles but if you had the ability to convert heat into a meaningful electrical source you would start with the exhaust system of a standard car and do away with the alternator. If they can't do something with that rather significant and easily accessible temperature differential (+300F) I am pretty dubious about them utilizing the relatively minor temperature differential (~30F) of tires.
But I've got a better idea: instead of having short range cars that rely entirely on electricity, why not invent a type of car that uses a sort of fuel that can be obtained at fuel stations that are all over the country, and can travel 100+ miles on each "recharge". This magic car will also be capable of using this fuel to not only propel itself forwards and backwards, but it will also be able to use it to power electrical devices in the car, and recharge a battery.
And then sell these magic cars for less than $15,000.
I'm a fucking genius. I'm going to patent this so that nobody else can steal my idea.
Or maybe someone could create a car that can run on energy floating in the aether, produced by power plants, and absorbed by the cars. They could call them Tesla Cars.
$1200 for tires?!
No. $1200 for A Tire.
You too can have the same experience as the USAF when their $85 million fighter is brought down by a guy with a rifle. Except it will be your $1200 tire flattened by a $0.0006 roofing nail. Same principle though. Welcome to the firstworldproblems club. Hope you brought that black AMEX card.
Uh, what? In theory, a car would go any distance at constant speed ignoring air resistance and friction except the curving of the earth as it's not really a straight line. But in the real world, you will have friction against the ground and that will generate a lot of heat. Part of that heat can be converted into more engine power. Unlike regenerative breaking you're not adding a resistance to the wheel, you just siphon off what's already happening. Sure if you could reduce friction that'd be nicer, but physics get in the way and you'd rather have some grip to be able to change direction. So it's energy you need to spend, but you don't have to let all of it go to waste.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Any electrical energy this produces would be ultimately derived from the car's motor. (unless you push the pile of crap off a cliff) This means if you add devices to resist flex and convert that energy into electricity you are increasing roll resistance and adding load to the cars motor. Plus, you'd have to have a complex slip-ring connection to get the electricity from the wheel to the stationary part of the car. Absolute crap!
fucking clowns. wtf. tire? are you serious?
What about a windmill on the roof! The windmill spins as the car drives, and produces electricity to charge up the batteries. Modeartors: Please mod this comment up as 'funny'. And if you dont get why, mod it up as 'insightful', then dont moderate slashdot anymore.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
The tires don't operate at infinite temperature and neither they nor the thermoelectric generators have zero thermal resistance, so no, you can't just turn the heat back into electricity for free.
OMG I can't wait... to have to pay for a replacement when I get a puncture. These things sound cheap.
A theory that ignores friction isn't especially interesting in this context.
Rolling friction is a pretty small contributor to energy loss for a moving car. Of this initially small amount of lost energy, some heats the road, and some heats the tire. As someone else observed below, the change in tire temperature is typically around 30 F, or 15-20 C, much less than a 10% change in absolute temperature. That means that a perfectly efficient heat engine could reclaim at most 10% of the thermal energy from the warm tires. In practice, the efficiency would be lower still.
Here's an infographic breaking down energy loss for an internal-combustion vehicle. Even if we assume that the electric vehicle has zero engine loss, rolling friction still represents at most maybe 20% of your energy loss. That means that you'd be reclaiming less than 2% of your total lost energy. In practice, considering the efficiency of the recapturing engine, it would probably be well under 1%; considering the added weight and mechanical loads of the recapture equipment, you might well end up losing net efficiency.
I'm not an engineer, but I have a basic understanding of thermodynamics. This story appears to be pitched at people who don't. If the engineers behind this want to convince people who know anything about physics or engineering, they're going to need something a lot better than this press release.
I have to assume that any actual engineers at Ford understand Carnot efficiency, and that this is simply an effort on the part of marketing to generate social-media buzz. It's depressing, but not surprising, to see that they're succeeding.
Apparently the Ford marketing people you refer to let all the social-media glory slip through their fingers and go to Goodyear tire, the company the article is about. Ha! The fools!
Emphasis on _partially_ recharge. The second law of thermodynamics dominates here.
Uh, what? In theory, a car would go any distance at constant speed ignoring air resistance and friction except the curving of the earth as it's not really a straight line. But in the real world, you will have friction against the ground and that will generate a lot of heat. Part of that heat can be converted into more engine power. Unlike regenerative breaking you're not adding a resistance to the wheel, you just siphon off what's already happening. Sure if you could reduce friction that'd be nicer, but physics get in the way and you'd rather have some grip to be able to change direction. So it's energy you need to spend, but you don't have to let all of it go to waste.
True, but the temperature different between the exhaust gasses and the ambient air is an order of magnitude higher than it is between the tire(s) and the road. It seems to me that would be a much better place to start. Unless, of coarse, this was mostly a marketing gimmick by a tire company.
Personally, I fear the thought of a $1,000 flat tire more than I desire the small improvement in efficiency.
Really? I've thought of this years ago, wondering why nobody had tried to do it. If it's moving, try to harvest electricity out of it.
They only need to convince people who already made the very uneconomical decision to buy an electric or hybrid.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Internal combustion engines are at most 40% efficient, and a huge portion of the excess energy goes out the tailpipe as heat. You would reap far more rewards tapping the exhaust system for heat than the tires.
But then again, Goodyear is in the tire business.
Taking a basic easy to find, easy to replace thing like a tire and tripling or quadrupling its cost to replace is generally not a good idea from a consumer perspective. Who wants to be told that it's going to be 1500+ to get new tires for their commuter vehicle every year?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
They only need to convince people who already made the very uneconomical decision to buy an electric or hybrid.
Again? Your sound like a broken record. Anyway, buying _any_ new car is uneconomical, so you are left with no point whatsoever.
tires heat up a little, so this tire converts the increased temperature to electricity to recharge batteries. How much does a tire heat up? How much energy can be extracted from that heat? How complex is the mechanical coupling that moves that recovered energy to the battery?
Sure you can get some electricity from a temperature difference. It might be enough to run your wristwatch. Recharge an electric car's battery? Yeah, sure, youbetcha!
To which I say, "Derp". Not sure where in the world I pulled "Ford" from, but I probably ought to wash my hands.
Why not magnets?
seriously, if the magneto on my lawn mower can power a spark for a fraction of a second why not just use magnets on the rims to coil juice to where they want for most of the rotation?
A spinning wheel is already generating extra electricity. More than enough. This other stuff is just gimmicky B.S.
Unless your goal is to get laid or show off
Table-ized A.I.
This is incredibly exciting news. I am physicists are already rethinking their theories of the universe based on this breakthrough at Goodyear marketing.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
New car? Who said anything about a new car?
Anyway, buying a hybrid/electric new car is less economical than buying a gasoline (or even diesel) new car, which was in fact my point. There are people who drive a lot of city miles (like a taxi) who can benefit from a hybrid, and there are philosophical reasons to drive an electric - but there are also a large number of people who ignorantly think that they are somehow saving money.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Massively reducing the amount of moving parts in your car DOES save money, given you keep the car a while.
They only need to convince people who already made the very uneconomical decision to buy an electric or hybrid.
Again? Your sound like a broken record. Anyway, buying _any_ new car is uneconomical, so you are left with no point whatsoever.
Buying a new car is uneconomical if you don't plan on keeping the car for the life of the car. Buying used means that you have more maintenance to pay for. If you plan on keeping the car for 5 or 6 years, then it's better to buy used. The last car I bought I owned for 10 years. This one I plan on keeping longer.
It might surprise you just how small the temperature difference is between exhaust gasses and the ambient air, for electric cars.
Why not? Feather the blades, or use them for active control surfaces when under power.
Gather power when it's stopped and the wind is blowing.
They should install such a device on the fucking radiator!
TFAs don't say that the heat of the tire is captured to create electricity. Rather, the energy from the flexing of the tire (that would otherwise produce heat) is instead harvested to create electricity.
I remain a bit skeptical, but let's wait and see where Goodyear goes with this.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I like in Northern New England, and worry about winter weather when it comes to my tires. Normal tires I worry about how it interacts with things like snow, let alone these; 'normal' all weather tires tend to pack snow in the threads and make it seem like you're driving on bald tires, so I need to research all weather tires based on winter weather performance. When I'm dealing with cars, safety is number one on my priority and drive-ability is number two. While efficiency is important, its much lower on my priority list than most things.
Some cheap way of harvesting enough energy to power TPM sensors would be swell.
true but electric cars don't have an ICE
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Instead of a complex scheme of kneading the tires to suck off energy from the motor, just use the alternator. And if we are talking about electric cars anyway, don't put energy in your motors that you only need for kneading the special tires that are supposed to recharge your batteries.
What's next? Replacing the air-filled tires with full rubber ones so that they generate more heat when driving? Replace them with square ones and harvest the energy from the shock absorbers?
Not in the car, no... that bit goes back at the gas-fueled power station.
Coal plants use external combustion.
Not everyone thinks of money when they talk about economical. It can also be about energy. And electric cars can be economical in your sense, but not if you think of something like ordinary cars. I am no big fan of hybrids either, but that's because I would have built them more like diesel-electric engines. Small electric three-phase asynchronous motors powered by a diesel running at its optimum. You really don't have the infrastructure or distances for electric cars in the US.
You get "free extra power" from your turbo. According to your incredulity, this is UNPOSSIBLE!!!
You see, you're reducing losses, energies going where you can't use it.
This tire, if it works, would be reducing the temperature of the tire as it heats up in its action. That heat was wasted energy and is now being harvested, just like the turbo extracts energy from the exhaust fumes and turns that into more shaft power for the engine.
Seriously, this site used to be for *nerds*, now it's occupied by weenie wannabe jocks who try to be "funny" to harvest mod points and "fit in" with the "in crowd".
a LOT of static electricity. Why not use that to charge the car's battery? When the car is running low on juice, I can just pull off my sweater and harvest the power to recharge the battery!
I'd explain more, but I have to go to a meeting with a patent attorney...
The Geneva Motor Show has always been full of stuff that looks cool but can't possibly work. "Concepts" which are nothing more than bad sculpture. It is neither engineering nor art.
Let's not, a new set of good tires for my car are already close to $2,000 how much will these things cost.
Well, I did mention philosophical reasons. I can't judge people who do things that they like with their own money, but I can judge people who think that they are saving money when the objectively are not.
Diesel electrics would pay three cost penalties: 1. Diesel engine compared to gasoline, 2. Extra complexity of a hybrid drivetrain, 3. Battery or capacitor. Hybrid gasoline engines are already too expensive for most people to recoup costs - add diesel to the mix and the cost is even higher.
When battery costs come down or gas prices go up, electric will be economical. For now, they are interesting and practical - even compelling for certain philosophical reasons - but not economical.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Not if you have to replace a battery pack that costs more than a new (gasoline) car.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
We needed a new car last year. Our top two choices were a used Camry ($17,9000) or a used Leaf ($15,800) + TTL. After doing the math, I calculated that a used Nissan Leaf would pay for itself in fuel costs alone over a five year period. The calculations were based on electricity cost, the price of gasoline, and the distance that the car would be driven daily (~40 miles).
So far reality has matched the predicted math, even with gasoline dropping to nearly $2.00 USD/gal. I would not call that gullible.
As far as the tires are concerned, a bit of overinflation increases mileage if you can live with slightly decreased grip. Keep an eye on the tire wear patterns though.
441N x 26.8 m/s = 11.8 kW
Using wikipedia figures the Tesla seems to require approximately 22kW at 60mph but it is extremely low drag and probably has lower rolling resistance than the typical value above. However I'd bet most cars are using 40kW (~55hp) or less to cruise at 60 resulting in the rolling resistance being responsible for 25-50% of the power requirements. I'm not convinced it would be worth it in many cases but recovering 10% of the energy could provide 1kW, the same as a 70A alternator.
Instead of trying to harvest it.
The internal pump idea isn't bad. Optimize tire pressure for operating conditions is a pretty good idea. But one that vehicles with portal axles have used for many decades.
Have gnu, will travel.
Friend, we live in a day and age where 'wireless charging of devices' is an actual thing, because marketers! Never mind that it's wildly inefficient, it sells so who cares about the silly old technical details, right?
Technical details of these tires aside (of which the 'article', if you can call it that, had essentially none): How do you think everyone is going to feel about it costing $4000 to put tires on your car, just to squeeze a little more efficiency out of the equation? Also, triple inner-tube? Sounds to me like 'no repairs possible' for this sort of tire. Maybe it would be better to just keep working on developing better synthetic rubbber compounds and tire designs for lowering rolling resistance without sacrificing traction and road handling characteristics, so less heat is generated in the first place, thus increasing efficiency that way?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I just checked the aeodynamic drag for the Tesla S (0.24cd) using the formula here.
At 60mph the air resistance will be about 85N or about 2.3kW. This is far less than I would have thought and appears much less significant than the typical rolling resistance.
First, I'd mod you up if I could for posting numbers.
Having said that, though, most of the efficiency breakdowns I've seen indicate that aerodynamic loss is higher than rolling-friction loss, especially at highway speeds -- drag goes up as the square of velocity.
Looking at the page you linked, I'm a bit surprised that it says rolling resistance is two to three times higher on "tar or asphalt" than on concrete surfaces. I didn't think there was that much difference between standard, mature asphalt surface and concrete, and I imagine friction on fresh asphalt or tar would be much higher than either concrete or older asphalt. The numbers for cruising on a concrete freeway are smaller by a factor of two or three.
From the other direction, that 10% of the energy is a theoretical maximum; it assumes that your recovery process cools the tires right down to ambient temperature, that it imposes no additional drag (due to its weight or its contact with the tire), and that it sustains no losses in its own operation. None of these three assumptions seems reasonable.
It would be up to the engineers at Goodyear (not Ford) to post the actual measurements of energy that they can reclaim, and the effects that this system has on overall vehicle efficiency. I haven't seen those numbers. I suspect that we won't, or that if we do, they won't be very impressive. I'd love to be wrong, though.
You may be doing as well on average right now, assuming you're in an area that matches the average in terms of mass generation emissions, but one of the key advantages of an EV is that because it takes its power from the mass generation system after conversion, it is 100% fuel-agnostic. It doesn't know, and it doesn't care. In an area that is generating power from hydro, for instance (as is the case where I live), the regional contribution to CO2 from mass power generation is zero; and in this type of area, you are not doing better, you are doing (far) worse.
In addition, as more non-emission sources (wind, fission, fusion, solar, hydro, tidal, geothermal and so on) come online to replace the emitters, the EV's that were contributing by using mass emissive power transition, without any effort on the owner's part, into zero-present and future emissions vehicles. Your vehicle, however, will continue to emit until the day it cannot run any longer.
So, pollution-wise, EVs are always better.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Thanks, my gut tells me the rolling resistance figures given there are too high. The 11-16% aerodynamic drag given in your two links matches up nicely with the 2.3kW which I estimated was required to overcome drag in the Tesla.
I've got an EcoBoost Fiesta and during the winter here (Canada) the pressure gauges on most of the air pumps at the gas stations seize in the cold and so are practically useless. When it was finally warm enough to accurately check the pressure in my tires they were all around 30-32psi. After inflating them back to the recommended 38psi I noticed my economy improved from 6.5 l/100km to 5.5 l/100km although admittedly the average temperatures had also warmed up from around -15 to -5C. Even so it was enough of an improvement that I was surprised and will be checking tire pressures more frequently in future.
Depends on if a politician is driving.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Thankfully wind speed and direction are always predictable, especially near buildings.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Is it because you love your ICE car so much and you need to rationalize its continued use? Is it because you hate people who like electric cars because their politics are different than yours? Why are you so desperate to believe something that is so obviously silly?
Incontrovertible facts:
1. Electric cars are 3x as efficient as gas cars. 100mpge+ is common for electric cars.
2. The grid is dirtier is some places than in others, but it gets greener everywhere over time (through the introduction of renewable energy sources and improved efficiencies & scrubbers located at energy plants). So, the installed base of electric cars immediately become *greener* each year while ICE cars only become greener when the car is replaced--and it is *much* cheaper to make grid power cleaner than ICE cars.
With these two facts in hand any sane person would be very skeptical of claims about ICE cars being greener than electric cars--VERY skeptical.
Your link is pointing out that the grid is currently pretty dirty in some places in the world--and then you say that in 80% of the world it doesn't reduce carbon footprint to buy an electric car.
For one, it doesn't matter where all the people live, it matters where all the miles are driven--and there are about 3x as many miles driven per year in the US than in all of Asia, despite Asia having 10x as many people: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+auto+miles+driven+per+year+vs.+asia+auto+miles+driven+per+year
Secondly, as I said earlier: the grid gets cleaner every year and it is *much* cheaper to improve the carbon footprint of a handful of power plants than in a couple billion individual ICE cars.
Looking at the fueleconomy.gov link and only considering the useful output power which is what I was really imagining above; probably less than 55hp for the typical car at cruise and ~22kW for the Tesla. Then while maintaining a cruise the useful power is only split between:
Depending on speed either drag or rolling resistance are going to dominate the power required. I really had never considered rolling resistance to be of great importance to a car despite my experiences on a bicycle.
Could mandating that all cars install Solar panels in the roof not solve the same problem better, using already-proven technology?
Compared to gasoline (according to wikipedia), 300kJ is about 0.01 Liters of gasoline = about 1 cent worth. So 1 penny worth of kinetic energy is lost every time you have to emergency stop on the freeway with your SUV? At normal highway speeds its less than half that energy (E=1/2 m v^2).
Sounds lik something that could be useful for scavenging enough energy to power in-wheel instrumentation that communicates wirelessly. The part about recharging he far batter sounds like hy
Which was rather my point: energy taken from exhaust and put into more power from the engine. As opposed to electrical generation.
[citation needed]
My bad, it's "only" $5400 with trade-in (which is a subsidized price for PR reasons). At which point you'd have a 100,000 mile car with a brand new battery. I was thinking of the Tesla battery, which apparently goes for around $12,000.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The engineers do. Unfortunately, the company is managed by the marketing dept.
There are reasons to buy new, but saving money is very definitely not among them. If you're looking for economical transportation, buy used. If you want to order it the way you want it, or be absolutely sure about the maintenance, or you want the best years of the car, and don't mind spending the money, go for it. (BTW, of what use would my Civic be, when new, to get laid or to show off?)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
This is yet another greenwash idea/excuse to keep fat, middle-class idiots behind the wheels of their cars and the car industry wheels in motion.
Not if you're a dude.