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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.
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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.
exactly
it's better to decrease inefficiencies in a simplified system than devise complex add-on contraptions that purport to recycle lost energy, but it's so fractional, it doesn't even make up for it's own extra weight, it's own extra cost, it's own extra maintenance
it stinks of rube goldberg perpetual motion machine
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Making electric cars even more expensive will really help them get market penetration.
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.
we'll have flying cars when
1. it is energetically manageable, so fusion
2. taking off and landing is easy, which both helicopters and airplanes, existing technology, make complicated dangerous and noisy, so a new kind of engine
3. there is coordination with other flying cars, which means centrally controlled/ effortlessly intercommunicating AI, because people would just fucking crash into each other all the time
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Unless your destination is higher than the place you started, every single bit of energy used for driving is waste. So you can get arbitrarily close to zero expenditure.
Myself, I prefer to ride a spherical horse in simple harmonic motion on a frictionless plane. It gets me where I need to go with zero energy expenditure. Traveling through the perfect classical vacuum is somewhat unpleasant though. The key insight though was the spherical horse, because normally there would be inevitable losses due to friction when compressing the hooves, even steel wheels like on trains have rolling friction from their compression.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
This is just Goodyear seeing that a bunch of people are gullible* enough to buy electric cars and hybrids. This gets them a piece of the action.
* They might not be gullible, but instead they believe that they are doing something for the environment or feel a need to appear so. Or maybe they are tired of their hard-earned dollars flowing towards hostile foreign regimes.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Tires actually get more efficient as they get hot. You don't want to be cooling your tires. Heat raises the internal pressure and it makes the rubber more flexible, both of which reduce rolling losses. Really, really stupid idea, taking the heat away for a tiny bit of thermoelectric power.
That said, the OTHER tire mentioned in the article - the concept multitube tire that can change its drive characteristics based on conditions - actually could be a major improvement if paired with a smart control system. If you could have a tire that runs on 100 PSI in smooth, high traction conditions, but can have you riding on super sticky studded rubber in bad conditions / cornering / high accel / decel, gives you the best of all worlds - a tiny rolling drag coefficient most of the time but high safety right when it's needed. Rolling losses are the largest loss factor for in-city driving and make up about a quarter to a third of highway losses, so the ability to dramatically reduce them means no small gain for vehicle efficiency.
"Are you hungry? I haven't eaten since later this afternoon." -- Primer
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.
Takeoff and landing are easy to the point where a computer can do it. You don't have to have any human interaction at all in those events. Many aircraft are already capable of automatic landing.
That's exactly what the crew of Asiana thought when they landed at SFO :)
You will still need a pilot who understands aviation in case the computer fails.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Electric and hybrid cars are better for the environment, and they already employ technology to charge the batteries with energy that would otherwise be wasted as heat (for example, the braking systems.)
It is not outrageous to explore ways of capturing energy from the flexing of the tires that also would otherwise be wasted as heat. As I see it, the challenge for Goodyear would be to show that the process is efficient enough to be worth adding to the tire design.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.