Well, it says "electric current passes through the apparatus as necessary to provide acceleration..."
The electric current has to come from somewhere. The car's regular alternator sure can do it so he has to generate electrical energy somehow.
Posted on 10/23/2008 6:24:32 PM PDT by wildbill
He was a junior in high school when the routine shower generated his first thoughts about harnessing the power of magnets to propel cars and trucks in a more fuel-efficient way. Before going to bed, he sketched out a few rough ideas.
Gonzalez, now 21, has since turned that idea into a proposal that last week netted him the $100,000 first-place award in the ConocoPhillips Energy Prize competition, which offered cash to aspiring young entrepreneurs with ideas about energy-conserving technology.
In the typical motor vehicle, Gonzales said, just 20 percent of the energy generated by the engine actually makes it to the wheels to propel the car. Magnetic technology, though, offers a more fuel-efficient approach that propels the car with layers of magnets in the wheel. His design also eliminates friction during braking and includes a system to recycle and store energy that gets produced during braking. It also has a transmission with no moving parts.
The ideas generated accolades from industry experts and academics on the judging panel.
(Excerpt) Read more at mysanantonio.com ...
However, this kid got $100,000 from some reputable people in winning this prize so maybe he's on to somethin. You really need to read the whole article and see the pictures.
Ping...
Nope, sorry. Not unless he has discovered a ‘loophole in the laws of physics’.
Conoco-Philips no doubt considers the $100,000 a cheap price to pay for making the greenies think that they are actually doing something that will magically cut down on gasoline use.
This is a little off the subject of magnetic cars but i just replayed the Youtube segment at the top of this thread.
My God, how have we let the Dems get away with their coverup of the greatest financial corruption in history that led to our current economic crisis?
The best use of (electro)magnets wold be to latch onto the car in front and turn off your engine. Problem solved (for you)!
Both electric generators and electric motors are routinely made to high levels of efficiency and recapturing power through braking is doable,a really good battery is still the issue.Quickly slowing a ton or two of fast-moving mass means a lot of energy must be dumped as heat or stored somehow.
With the IC engine always running in its best rpm band and transmission of power modulated by PWM controllers,it should be possible to boost the typical car mileage by 50 to 70%.To do better requires an entirely new way of burning the fuel.Such a car really need be no more complex,and perhaps simpler,than current hybrids.Basically this is just a variation of the proven diesel-electric railway locomotive.
Well, in all fairness, the article suffers from (as usual) being written by someone who knows nothing about engineering.
The “90% efficiency” that is being talked about here is for the wheel-motor drive mechanism. That, I believe. Three-phase induction motors easily achieve a tad more than that for efficiency. It is the overall thermal efficiency that you and I are looking for, and are not seeing here.
But let’s think outside the box for a sec here. Let’s say that cost were no object for a moment (I know, you cringe when you hear an engineer start with that assumption...)
The central problem here is that the Otto-cycle gas engine has a pitiful thermal efficiency - of about 29% for a naturally aspirated engine with fixed valve timing. Kick in the Miller Cycle or Atkinson cycles and we might get that up into the mid-30% range.
But what if we could assume that all we were ever going to drive was an alternator? ie, that what we needed was a small electrical power plant under the hood, not something to convert fuel into rotation fed into a mechanical transmission system?
So let’s dispense with recip engines completely. Let’s build a small combined cycle gas turbine power generation setup and stuff it under the hood. We generate power, which is then stored in some Lion batteries, and we drive highly efficient wheel motors like this? We’d need some motor controllers, a bunch of power switching gear, but the turbine setup could actually be lighter than an aluminum block recip engine now used. We’d get rid of the liquid coolant, we’d get rid of the recip barrier on thermal efficiency. By using a combined cycle and scavenging the exhaust heat of the gas turbine to run a steam turbine, we could achieve over 50% thermal efficiency. Run that into an alternator (and thinking outside the box here, I’m thinking high frequency alternator at that - reduce the amount of iron needed for transformers and copper needed in wiring - ie, raise the frequency and voltage, reduce the current) and whaa-la, we could have a pretty efficient car.
Right. They always ignore little details, such as where does the electrical energy come from to run the magnetic wheels? It comes from a generator or alternator. There's another energy conversion, therefore a loss in energy due to heat, sound, etc.
You are correct. Just a 'cheap' PR stunt, but it makes the kid think he really has something. Too bad.
Sure,
I’ve been building special purpose Lithium battery powered electric bicycles for the last year, and have to deal with similar problems. Because of the applications that I build them for (long range, off road use in very steep terrain) I have learned to use the top of the line, most efficient technology components available.
They are coming out with some pretty impressive new hubmotors, that combined with good battery technology and a small ICE engine, there is some pretty good potential for some super efficient hybrid cars at a reasonable price, which will minimize transmission losses from current technology.
And over at the EV and alternative energy forums, I keep seeing people come up these magic magnet solutions all the time... that never pan out at all in the real world. Every one I have seen are pretty much recycled ideas from the perpetual motion machines that have been around for decades. This one seems even less workable than a lot of the other ones I have seen... although admittedly the details in this oneare lacking...
I don’t care what kind of magnets you have and how you stack them, there is no way that they will do anything but add weight and produce no more than an ephermeral amount of energy, unless they are subjected to either electricity flowing through coils around or between the magnets, or through an even greater amount of mechanical force to spin them.
And there is no way that spinning magnets will make a more efficient drive system than a good old direct drive metal shaft.
There is just no there - there.
Very expensive and a maintainence nightmare.
Oh, sorry, I missed your post before I replied to the other one... I sort of addressed your ideas even without seeing them, though, I think.
Yeah, we have been kicking around similar ideas lately. There are some new, fairly inexpensive hub motors that have come out in just the last few weeks that look like they are a good step in that direction, although no one I know has actually tested them to see if they are efficient or well made. But they do have a bunch of people’s minds thinking hard about applications for them.
If I wasn’t so far behind on my other projects, I’d have ordered one or two of the new hubmotors just to experiment with.
Yeah, Thanks.Seems like something like this crops up every three months, gets some press that makes it seem like a breakthrough, then it fades away.
The more excitable people will then blame the oil companies for either buying the technology or ‘disappearing’ the inventor to keep it from being implemented.
Maybe one of these days they will find that loophole in the laws of physics,... but it will be through a quantum mechanics type discovery, not stacking magnets.
Nope, sorry. Not unless he has discovered a ‘loophole in the laws of physics’.
You are correct. Just a ‘cheap’ PR stunt, but it makes the kid think he really has something. Too bad.
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Reread the article. He is not generating any power with this.
The magnets in the wheels act as an electric motor to transfer power to the wheels and return power to the system generated by braking forces.
This is just a more efficient transmission/braking system.
They didn’t give him $100,000 for nothing.
You have described the railway locomotive.
And pretty close to describing the Volt.
Just shows you there are very few really new ideas,just new applications of old ideas.
And he’s not an illegal alien either..
He should see “Flash of Genius” before he gives the design over to Ford or GM
Well, it says "electric current passes through the apparatus as necessary to provide acceleration..."
The electric current has to come from somewhere. The car's regular alternator sure can do it so he has to generate electrical energy somehow.
Read the article, they don't make such claims. He has put the equivalent of an electric motor in the wheels. There is no claim of "free" or "unlimited" energy in this design.
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