[ExI] Electric cars without batteries

[John Clark]

On Oct 23, 2010, at 3:09 PM, Keith Henson wrote:

> The obvious way is to direct couple the turbine to an AC generator.
> No gears.

You're still going to need gears, expensive and complicated ones too. A gas turbine, especially a small gas turbine like you'd have in a car, would have a very very high RPM but have little torque, too little torque to operate an electric generator, you'd have to gear it down, way way down.

> Just incidentally, that's the way diesel electric locomotives work.

As the name implies in that case the electrical generator is powered by a diesel engine, a device that produces a huge amount of torque but has a slow RPM, the very opposite of a gas turbine.

 John K Clark 

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