Feasibility of smaller turbines/higher wind speed

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  • solar_dave
    solar_dave Solar Expert Posts: 2,397 ✭✭✭✭
    #32
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    Re: Feasibility of smaller turbines/higher wind speed

    Any electric car worth having has regenerative braking, I know the Chevy Volts have a L position on the shifter which is not a gear but a remapping of the regen to increase dramatically. Feels lots like driving a manual shift car in a down shift mode. This leads to a driving style I like to call one foot driving. At some point the deceleration requires by law the brake lights to engage. Tesla does this, GM limits the max regen to just above the brake light threshold. The most effective regen is to use the drive motor in reverse as a generator to push power back to the battery. I think the Chevy is like 50K watts.
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  • Arqane
    Arqane Solar Expert Posts: 31 ✭✭
    #33
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    Re: Feasibility of smaller turbines/higher wind speed

    Obviously you wouldn't want a large diameter... and I know there are issues with air pressure behind the turbines. Really it would be more similar to other fluid turbines going down a tunnel, but using air as the fluid. There's quite a bit of pressure differential at that speed, but getting it to go through the tunnel by not immediately ramping up the pressure in the tube would be the big issue.

    The other part of the process I was noting that has some energy stored in it is the drag coefficient and the downforce. Cars need downforce, but hey, it's a force that leads to inefficiency. And there are multiple times where the wind (change in air pressure anyway) is the cause. I'm just looking at if any percentage of that can be regained, just like in braking.
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  • inetdog
    inetdog Solar Expert Posts: 3,123 ✭✭✭✭
    #34
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    Re: Feasibility of smaller turbines/higher wind speed

    I do not know if anything ever came of it, but Toyota once proposed an enhancement to improve the usefulness of regenerative braking.

    One problem with the non-plug-in hybrid is that for really hilly areas the capacity of the battery bank is small compared to the amount of energy you would like to recapture during a long descent. And yet you do not want to go cruising around with the battery pack near empty either.

    What Toyota proposed as a concept was to link the navigation system, including terrain data, with the battery maintenance system so that you would preferentially use the battery bank for power right up to the moment that you started a long downgrade, leaving the maximum room in the battery for regen braking. And topping off the battery from the engine before you started up a long up grade so that maximum battery assist would be available.
    SMA SB 3000, old BP panels.
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