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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
byTodd Knarr ( 15451 ) writes:
The biggest thing about hybrids is that they allow for an electric drive-train. That opens up a lot of options for powering the vehicle since the engine doesn't need to physically drive the wheels. Gas turbines, for instance, with the turbine driving a high-RPM generator which eliminates the need for high-ratio reduction gears. Gas turbines, in fact any sort of continuous-combustion engine that doesn't need to be throttled to control it's speed, are more fuel-efficient than traditional IC engines. Add in regenerative braking to recover power and the ability to charge it's own batteries while parked and you get a vehicle that can have a much smaller engine without sacrificing range or performance. Maintenance costs would probably be lower too because with a gas turbine there aren't as many complex moving parts to break and they won't be under as great a strain.
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byceoyoyo ( 59147 ) writes:
AND it screams like the batmobile.
byWaccoon ( 1186667 ) writes:
Interestingly, virtually all cars these days already have turbines. They're called turbos, and they don't all scream like the batmobile unless they're poorly designed, broken, or installed by ricers.
byceoyoyo ( 59147 ) writes:
A compressor fan isn't really the same thing as a combustion turbine. I was joking though, you can make small, reasonably quiet gas turbines. Putting one in a hybrid isn't even a new idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
byevil_aaronm ( 671521 ) writes:
Isn't this essentially how diesel locomotives work? A diesel powered engine to generate electricity to power batteries that drive the train?
byTodd Knarr ( 15451 ) writes:
Pretty close. They don't really have batteries, mostly they run directly off the generators and have very large radiators (just large fan-cooled resistors) to deal with excess power (like when braking when the traction motors are acting as generators). The drive-train's the same though, and the amount of traction they can get despite being steel wheels on steel rails says lots about how effective the results are.
bydunkelfalke ( 91624 ) writes:
Gas turbines are not nearly as efficient as you think - they need to run at very high RPMs actually needing a large planetary gearbox, they don't downscale well and they need to run really hot. It sort of works for large scale power generation because combined cycle that can convert all that waste heat into something useful, but there is no room to do that in a vehicle.
If you insist on an internal combustion engine used as a generator, a HCCI free piston linear generator is probably the way to go - no gears
bymonkeyxpress ( 4016725 ) writes:
For the engineers out there - small gas turbines are fundamentally inefficient because the boundary layer (the layer of air next to the blades/stators that is not moving) does not scale down as you make the machine smaller. So the boundary layer becomes a larger percentage of the flow cross section through the engine. The boundary layer is a large loss component, so this means that the smaller you go the more losses you get as a percentage of mass flow rate.
There is no way around this problem. It is why all
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