Wednesday, February 15, 2012

New Power Supply for Car Batteries?

        Earlier in this blog, both the ideas of micro wind turbines and new, clean sources to power vehicles have been addressed. The current solution experts are trying to come up with for the amount of pollution that cars are producing is to power them with hydrogen, though, as we have seen in an earlier article, has it's flaws. But what if we could find another source to power automobiles? Micro wind turbines are small and can withstand even the worst of weather conditions. So why not mount them on vehicles? As the car drove, it would create high wind speeds that would turn the propellers of the turbine rapidly. If the Turbine was hooked up to the car battery, it may provide a sufficient supply of energy to power the car without the aid of gasoline. However, there are still questions that remain: Where will the turbines be mounted, and how will they be secured? Could a wind turbine be small enough to fit on a car (and still look sightly enough for people to purchase the car) and still produce a enough electricity to power the car?

I would like to hear other peoples' ideas on how we could make this work. Please post a reply with your thoughts.

Thank you Panda's Need to be Saved for this great idea.





5 comments:

  1. What if the wind turbines were stored inside the car itself? When a car drives, air passes through the grills. Since kinetic energy equals 1/2 mass times velocity squared, a funnel shaped grill that ends in a small hole would cause the smaller volume of air forced through it to move at much higher speeds. Since wind turbines generate energy based off of air speed rather than volume, if designed correctly, this could yield highly efficient turbines that have a gauranteed high energy output, which would get exponentially higher as the velocity of the car increased, and would also conceal the turbines from view, rendering the need to create sightly turbines obsolete.

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  2. That Makes absolute sense but wouldnt the grills limit the air flow to the turbine? It could just be a hole in the car low enough to the ground that it wouldnt draw attention or be in the way of any thing also if the wind turbines we situated so that there blades would be on their side instead of up it would still generate the electricity without having a big bulge in the cabin of the car.

    Thanks for the recognition! Also congrats on your STEM acceptance

    ~Panda's Need to be Saved

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  3. As they are now, the grills might limit the airflow, but they could easily be modified so that they wouldn't, and the bulge could also be avoided by just making the bottom of the car bigger. I wonder how much bigger it would have to be though, and how this could be avoided for more sporty looking cars. Any ideas?

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  4. The actual point is for the air flow to the turbines to be limited. The concept behind this is that the turbine relies the speed of the air rather than it's quantity; a thin stream of fast air is better than a large amount of slow air. By modifying the grills to only allow a small amount of air to pass through the end but a large amount to enter, the air would be pressurized and accelerated, resulting in a faster airstream hitting the turbine. Therefor, a reduced airflow, if managed properly with a number of funnels leading directly to multiple turbines, would actually result in an energy gain rather than an energy loss. Again, since Kinetic energy is equal to 1/2 mass * velocity squared, if the mass is decreased then the velocity must increase proportionately in order to conserve energy; this system takes advantage of this law.

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