[ExI] battery-less hybrid

[spike]

Cool, Chrysler is doing something with an idea I have been kicking around
for years, hydraulic drive:

 

http://alttransport.com/2011/01/chrysler-announces-battery-less-hybrid/

 

They are using nitrogen as the compression medium, but this has its
drawbacks.  Every time you compression cycle the nitrogen, it gets hot, then
cools before the decompression phase, so energy is lost.

 

My own vision of that idea uses a heavier but actually more efficient
variation: it uses big metal coil springs as an energy storage medium
instead of nitrogen.  They compress and decompress with lower hysteresis
(less energy loss per cycle) than nitrogen.  So we would have hydraulic
drive as in the Chrysler experimental vehicle, a small IC motor supplying
the pressure, energy stored in the coil springs using a cylinder with
hydraulic fluid on one side of a piston, a coil spring on the other.  We
could have several cylinders.

 

Advantages: it would use energy from the springs during acceleration, then
recompress the springs during steady state cruise or braking, with an IC
motor of about 20 kW, a twin cylinder, roughly 500cc displacement, running
near full throttle most of the time.

 

Disadvantages: that arrangement is reaaally heavy, so I don't know if it is
an advantage over this nitrogen notion.  Actually I suspect it isn't.  {8-[
Other disadvantage: it isn't a race car.  It's heavy, acceleration would be
leisurely, top speed a bit on the yawnful side too.  There would be leakage
past the dynamic seal between piston and cylinder, which would introduce
some inefficiency.

 

Lets see if Chrysler can work out the hydraulic drive.  If so, I may propose
this in place of their compressed nitrogen energy storage, or perhaps try to
build something like it. 

 

spike

 

 

 

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