Bill Freeman wrote:

The coming thing is hybrid cars.

One of the tricks that could be used by Mazda or Wankel GmbH is build
a high speed alternator that is designed to be driven by an exhaust turbine.
One could easily recover a  lot of the 50% waste energy in the exhaust
by this method.

No high speed variable ratio gears to worry about. The battery would act
a storage device to smooth the flow of power from the exhaust turbine.

No attempt need be made to recover power from the exhaust at high rotary engine
power levels when the EGT's are the highest. A computer controlled waste
gate could then be opened to prevent excessively turbine inlet temps or
over speeds thereby keeping the cost of the turbine wheel down.

Paul Lamar

Paul,

I did my master's degree work on simulation of hybrid vehicles.  Looking
back, they are silly, excessively complex designs.   The primary reason that
they were considered in the 70s was to cut emissions by running the prime
mover at a constant speed and load, which would permit optimized BSFC
and emissions.   With today's computer controls we can do it on the fly,
with variable everything.  In those days, constant RPM and load was of
real value.  Even so, nothing happened with our successful, workable
vehicles.

The idea of a power recovery turbine to drive an alternator is a good one.
Still, the hybrid is only reasonable where gov't mandates some sort of
uncompetitive design like the foolish electric cars out there now.

We built and tested two hybrid vehicles (car and bus) with multiple
configurations of controls and drivelines.  A constantly variable tranny
with a small, efficient prime mover (turbodiesel?) will probably whip
the snot out of a hybrid and cost a lot less to buy.

Been there, done that.  Didn't work very well.  I wouldn't buy one.

Bill

All true Bill. CA is proactive in this regard regardless of what it
cost the taxpayers to subsidize this nonsense.

Paul Lamar
 
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