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New Concept Tire Could Recharge Car Battery

Posted by timothy on from the perpetual-motion-machine dept.

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.

18 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Just recycle the energy! by mbstone · · Score: 4, Funny

    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?

    1. Re:Just recycle the energy! by circletimessquare · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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

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      intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
    2. Re:Just recycle the energy! by KiloByte · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

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    3. Re:Just recycle the energy! by circletimessquare · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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
    4. Re:Just recycle the energy! by GrahamCox · · Score: 5, Funny

      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

      Or its own extra apostrophes.

    5. Re:Just recycle the energy! by penguinoid · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

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    6. Re:Just recycle the energy! by MightyYar · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

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    7. Re:Just recycle the energy! by circletimessquare · · Score: 4, Funny

      apostrophe technology will recycle 20-30% of cognitive entropy in the existing forum

      instead of babbling in incoherent monotone, the insertion of slight pauses allows the speaker to catch their breath, and listeners to reflect on the last statement

      do not be fooled by cheap knock offs like semicolon, ellipsis, and hyphen- only our quality controlled and 5 sigma patented apostrophes, at a reasonable price, give you the rhetorical power, you want, and deserve

      we do not condone overuse of our technology. apostrophe abuse such as by christopher walken and william shatner leads to rhetorical inversion, in which cognitive entropy is decreased only at the cost of increase in camp, a dangerous failure of influence

      test drive your own apostrophe, today

      --
      intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
    8. Re:Just recycle the energy! by Rei · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

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    9. Re:Just recycle the energy! by ClickOnThis · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
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  2. Please be an Onion link please be an Onion link... by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    [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.

  3. This guy has a better idea by mspohr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

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  4. Awesome by LordKaT · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Making electric cars even more expensive will really help them get market penetration.

  5. This is absurd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

  6. Exhaust by Dereck1701 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. What about a windmill on the roof! by viking80 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

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  8. Re:Please be an Onion link please be an Onion link by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:Please be an Onion link please be an Onion link by quenda · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.