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A New Type of Hybrid is About to Debut

Discussion in 'Prius, Hybrid, EV and Alt-Fuel News' started by jkash, Aug 20, 2004.

  1. jkash

    jkash Member

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    A New Type of Hybrid is About to Debut

    By now just about everyone’s heard of gas-electric hybrids. Led by popular cars like the Toyota Prius, they use electric motors in conjunction with conventional gasoline engines to save fuel.

    Now, according to Ward’sAuto.com, a new type of hybrid technology is about to debut. It uses hydraulic pressure instead of electric motors.

    Like electric hybrids, these so-called hydraulic hybrids help out the engine by giving vehicles an extra push when they’re trying to accelerate. But instead of using electric motors, they use fluid under high pressure to do the job.

    We won’t see hydraulic hybrids in cars anytime soon, but they may have long-term benefits over gas-electric hybrids in heavy commercial vehicles that start and stop a lot, such as garbage trucks and delivery vans.

    A hydraulic hybrid vehicle co-developed by Dana Corp. and Australia’s Permo-Drive Ltd. is expected to be demonstrated in January.

    If the technology takes off, it may force us all to expand our ideas about hybrids.

    Click here to go to the article.

    This is a link to Permo-Drive Ltd.

    Jeff
     
  2. DaveinOlyWA

    DaveinOlyWA 3rd Time was Solariffic!!

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    did you see the pneumatic hybrids??

    they worked on compressed air and could store enough air to go 150 miles?
     
  3. richard schumacher

    richard schumacher shortbus driver

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    Hydraulic hybrids strike me as a solution in search of a problem. A German company, Krauss-Maffei, tried hydraulic drives for locomotives in the early 1960s. They were a failure because they were not nearly as durable as the electric drives of the time. Besides, would *you* want to have a big hydraulic cylinder at, say, 5000 PSI in your car? No, thanks.

    As for a pneumatic car with a 150 mile range: can you cite a source? I don't believe one could be built that would go that far. Even if it did, most of the energy required to compress the air is wasted because the air must be cooled before putting it in the car, and so the efficiency would be ruinously low. A pneumatic car would be nearly as impractical as the liquid nitrogen car some nut built a few years ago.
     
  4. jfschultz

    jfschultz Active Member

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    I checked the web site for one of Dana's competitors. I was looking for a desription of their hybrid transmission package that FedEx is testing on a couple of hybrid delivery trucks. (This was to add to the Ford thread that there is a level of expertise here!)

    I found a link to a similar hydrolic hybrid system there too.
     
  5. krooster1234

    krooster1234 New Member

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    I saw something on TV about some company in Europe that was working on cars powered by compressed air. They weren't hybrids though. Too bad I don't remember the details.
     
  6. DaveinOlyWA

    DaveinOlyWA 3rd Time was Solariffic!!

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    well actually these were hybrids but pneumatic-electric.

    and i will look for a link, but to be honest with ya, this was a tv thing and you may have as good a luck as me.

    the only real restrictions to the technology was that the vehicles were small, but they did regenerate electricity and pneumatic air pressure when braking. this was done using a two stage reversible compressor.

    im not sure of the technology, but it did allow one to use air pressure from a standard gas station (~100 psi)to recharge the tank. the tank pressure was something along the lines of 600 psi or more.
     
  7. Bob Allen

    Bob Allen Captainbaba

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    Check my post in this subject area. go to www.theaircar.com I think people working on this are further along than you think.
     
  8. 8AA

    8AA Active Member

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    While the Big Three were developing diesel-electric hybrids under the SuperCar Project, the EPA was developing their own concept car, which happened to be a diesel-hydraulic hybrid.
     
  9. richard schumacher

    richard schumacher shortbus driver

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    Uh, hold off on buying their stock. They take the result of a 4.5 mile test run on a flat course in their prototype with no speeds quoted, and extrapolate from that by applying corrections for various intended improvements to a range of 150 miles in a production version. When they demonstrate the production version, then let's talk. Calculating how much energy can be stored in their air tanks (400 litres at 300 bar) and how much energy will be lost after compressional heating, is left as an exercise for the investor.
     
  10. DaveinOlyWA

    DaveinOlyWA 3rd Time was Solariffic!!

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    i bet if they put a thousandth of the R&D they put into ICE technology, they would have an acceptable product.

    there are weak areas to be sure, but the technology is sound and it is in the demo mode. no doubt if someone with money got behind it, they would have commercial products very soon.

    that will just give the oil companies two targets to shoot for.
     
  11. daniel

    daniel Cat Lovers Against the Bomb

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    The air car is a gag. A Joke. This outfit is in competition with The Onion.

    However, hydraulic drives are in common use and are practical in certain applications. When I worked on the farm I drove a hydraulic loader. It's a good solution to the need for extreme manuverability in a vehicle that already needs a hydraulic pump to operate the bucket. I can see a diesel-hydraulic hybrid garbage truck maybe being practical. I cannot imagine a military application for it though.
     
  12. plusaf

    plusaf plusaf

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    it's really old news....

    i can't remember how far back this was, but i'm sure it goes back at least 15-20 years:
    a vo-tech school connected with the Parker-Hannefin (sp?) hydraulics company and put a 25 or so horsepower garden tractor engine onto a hydraulic pump, and tied it to a high-pressure tank (yes, something like 5000psi, and they're not that unsafe...) and through some valves, etc., to a hydraulic motor mated to the transaxle input shaft of a VW Bug.

    they got 75MPG in all-around driving, and zero-to-60 in something like 7.5 seconds. it was just the VW's pan, no body to speak of, but it proved to me right then and there that hybrid propulsion was the future, and i've put that in front of electric-car proponents ever since.

    dresser industries, playing on a project, was featured in Car&Driver many years back, with a carburetor that created sonic shockwaves in its variable-size venturi, to completely atomize the fuel mixture. they did something like double the gas mileage of the test car.

    i think hydraulic hybrid would be a natural for heavy start-and-stop applications like the proverbial garbage truck, and maybe even for the ubiquitous FedEx and UPS trucks, too, let alone the small mail-delivery buggies used in suburban cities like mine. and as for how off-the-shelf and developed the hydraulic technology is, most of the heavy lifting in everything from cement mixer trucks to backhoes and the things that squish the garbage in the trucks today is done hydraulically.

    to think they can't safely put a pressure tank on a garbage truck safely is silly. getting the thing redesigned to put the whole transmission under hydraulic input and control will be the leap. just think: never have to replace a clutch again!

    and.... if you put smaller hydraulic motors on each axle, or even each wheel, that car or truck will go anywhere the tires have traction.
     
  13. Mirza

    Mirza New Member

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  14. Eisenson

    Eisenson New Member

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    To understand what's really going on here, you must first recognize how a Prius really works. It's just a very efficient low-emission ICE-driven car. Period. However, the ICE is Atkinson-cycle, which meets the efficiency and emission objectives, but fails abysmally at the stoplight.

    Add electric motors, which have max torque at zero rpm, and it's a marriage made in heaven. Use regen to capture some of the kinetic energy investment, and the system becomes slightly more efficient.

    Remember: this is just another gasoline-powered car, but the design has such low torque at low rpm it must be augmented. Toyota does it with an electric motor.

    You can store energy in any other mechanism (flywheel, gas under pressure, springs, etc.) to overcome that startup problem, replacing the stored energy once at speed so it's available next time.
     
  15. daniel

    daniel Cat Lovers Against the Bomb

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    "Toyota Prius gains 5-star Euro NCAP accolade. Hybrid car gets class-best 34 points and highest ever child protection score. Prius is first ever hybrid to be tested by Euro NCAP. A further 125 actual crash tests confirm optimum passive safety."

    And:

    "Its 34 points equalled the highest score ever awarded in its class and ensured a maximum 5-star rating."

    So 126 people are still waiting for their Prius because they got driven into brick walls, etc.

    They also talk about the active safety features. Good article!
     
  16. DaveinOlyWA

    DaveinOlyWA 3rd Time was Solariffic!!

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    plusaf:

    i think i saw that experiment you were talking about. wasnt the thing nothing more than a dune buggy?

    i remember something in a lightweight tubular aluminum frame. it was impressive to a point, but i thought the drawbacks was the range, recharge time, and the overhead caused by adding required safety features that waylaid the project.

    or i guess it could be that one of the big 3 bought the design and buried it... hmmm that does sound more likely.