So let’s use a microturbine more suitable for powering a hybrid (PDF):
I could live with 70 miles per gallon, and that’s just a prototype, with off the shelf batteries and motors.
It’s also just a bunch of claims. The prototype isn’t the hard part; it’s putting it into production.
I’ve been having problems researching it so if anybody has cites for the micro-turbines in use please post them.
Of course it is; but it does demonstrate that microturbines are efficient, clean, reliable powerplants for hybrids.
I would like to see the claims por favor. I’m having a hard time envisioning an industrial turbine running cleaner than a positive displacement diesel engine. Are these single cast compressor wheels, are they riding on air bearings? I’d like to read up on them.
If it actually does all the things they say it will, yes.
They meet California emission standards with no add-on emission controls. They use air bearings, eliminating any conventional lubrication. I have no information on compressor manufacture. This is the same 30kw microturbine used in hybrid car prototypes. (PDF)
Yes, spelling mistake. Thank you.
Thanks. I couldn’t get any of their stuff to load the last time I looked at it and thought maybe it was a scam site. Anybody seen one of these buses on the road?
Neil Young’s Linc Volt, being rebuilt after damage from a warehouse fire, uses a Capstone microturbine.
That makes no sense. Unless it is an ultra-lightweight, low-profile car, I can’t concieve of an engine that would propel it at 90 mph, delivering 70 mpg, by generating electricity.
from the lincvolt site: A new ultra clean, light and powerful hybrid engine called Rotapower is announced which is so advanced that the exhaust gases coming out of the engine can be cleaner than the air going into it.:dubious:
Just stick it in an old pinto and drive it around and stop talking about it. If it’s so freaking great then build it. We’re absolutely starved for something spectacular and financially viable.
I’m still dubious. They could easily do that for an hour using the 20 minutes of battery power, but all day it seems like a stretch. They may be getting close to that, but it sounds like numbers extrapolated from ideal condition tests.
Oh, that’s right no cars have air-to-air heat exchangers. Except, ya know, the single most produced car in automotive history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Type_1
And even though every engine has some instant heat, it’s not the instant 1000+ degrees Fahrenheit you get with a turbine engine! Even if there were a safety issue with air-air heat exchanger (which there isn’t), if you had a separate water-based heater it would still warm up much, much faster than a piston engine.
nonsense. First off, the VW heater was a joke (which probably saved a lot of lives). And secondly, a standard ICE engine produces engine heat instantly as in you couldn’t hold the exhaust manifold 10 seconds after it’s started. Using an air to air exchanger off the exhaust is a huge liability.
Have you ever actually owned an air-cooled VW? If you kept them working (made sure the thermostat was working and that the paper hoses were intact), the heater was more than adequate for a Bug or a Ghia. The only real problem with them was that they didn’t have a separate blower fan and instead relied on the main cooling fan. Since the fan was belt-driven, it didn’t move much air at idle, but they worked just fine when you were driving around. But this had nothing to do with them being air-air exchangers. The later Superbeetles did have a blower motor and their heaters work just as well as any liquid-cooled car.
I say this as someone who lived through many deep northern Rocky Mountain winters driving a '69 standard beetle and was perfectly happy with the amount of heat it put out. It also started putting out useful heat a lot faster than a water-cooled car.
The safety concern is also more rumor and innuendo than fact. With the way the VW heater system worked, it was practically impossible for the seal between the fresh air and the exhaust gasses to fail in such a way that it was still flowing air into the cabin (basically the heater boxes would need to rust from the inside out). Of the 21 million Beetles sold (plus who knows how many vans and Ghias and type III’s), I don’t think there was ever a documented fatality resultant from the heaters leaking CO. So this is pretty darn low on the list of automotive hazards, and it’s pretty easy to design a safe heat exchanger system.
And, yeah, an exhaust manifold gets too hot to handle pretty quick, but it’s only a couple hundred degrees not over a thousand. This is a huge difference. I’m not just making this up-- instant heat was one the biggest things the test drivers loved about the old Chrysler turbine cars. It’s patently absurd to suggest that not having liquid coolant means you can’t have cabin heat!
Yes. It was a major complaint among owners. Even in the days of the Vegas and Pintos the car was a POS from every mechanical standpoint.
Carbon monoxide is a real concern in the aviation community and the cabin heaters are checked regularly. I’m not sure why you think 1000 degree’s of heat means anything in particular because a person could only handle a couple a hundred degrees which is what you get from any engine.
Yeah, I don’t think 1000+ F is accurate. That’s a lot of wasted energy. I may have this wrong, but I thought the Chrysler turbine had a fairly high idle speed to avoid hesitation from a dead stop, and the exhaust temperature was a little higher during idle because the turbine wasn’t doing much actual work. But I don’t recall 1000F as the output.
I think an air to air exchange would work, but you could just use an air to liquid to air exchange to make it safer and deliver heat almost as fast.
That’s because the heaters broke and nobody fixed them. The guy I bought my '69 off of swore up and down that the thing had never had heat and that VW’s just didn’t have heaters. Of course when I open the back, only the ends of the paper duct tubes were left. $6.00 later the thing was belching hot air.
They definitely took more work to keep working properly than a regular car heater, but that was true of most things on a VW. The trouble was that a mechanic who was used to working on the detroit iron of the day could generally keep a VW running (as could anyone with two brain cells to rub together), but subtleties like keeping the heater working required a bit more specialized knowledge.
That’s true of every single object on an airplane, though. And the real reason why carbon monoxide is such a hazard in airplanes has more to do with the age of the general aviation fleet (which means out-dated designs and worn components) than any unavoidable hazard presented by air-air exchangers. They can be dangerous (for example early Corvairs’ heaters were genuinely hazardous), but they needn’t be.
We’re talking about warm up time. Which do you think is going to warm up whatever heat exchange medium faster, the 200 degree exhaust manifold or the 1000 degree turbine?
The Chrysler turbine cars used a regenerator system that passed the exhaust gasses back through secondary turbines, which helped capture some of that heat energy and cooled the exhaust. At full throttle the exhaust gasses going into the regenerator were well over 1000 degrees. After they passed out of it, they would be reduced to “only” 500 degrees. See here: http://www.allpar.com/mopar/turbine.html
I suppose it’s possible that the heater ran off the cooler post-regenerator gasses, but at any rate it is clearly true that there was enough extra heat kicking around seconds after the engine started to provide full cabin heat.