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F1 Tech Is About to Make Buses More Efficient
- lucaspiller 12y agoJust upgrading to newer busses would probably help. Most of my local bus company's (First) fleet are S reg, so 16 years old.
- NickPollard 12y agoIt probably would help, but is also more expensive, and I would expect the bus companies to be quite careful planning their upgrade cycles and end-of-lifing for buses.
- mkohlmyr 12y agoAs a personal anecdote I can say that the last few times my home town have upgraded (or attempted to) their fleets of buses and light rail they have quite consistently ended up buying vehicles that cant cope with the harsher winter conditions (I believe the manufacturers were in southern Europe in both cases) and break down. Add incompetence of local politicians and the far higher cost of renewing together and upgrading existing fleets is probably often a better move. Obviously it isn't an extreme long term solution though.
- astrodust 12y agoMost companies run these things into the ground. 16 years for a bus is like 2 years for a car.
- gsnedders 12y agoAnd while they often disappear from major cities after about 15 years, they just get handed down to more rural routes where they'll keep going till they die.
- yread 12y agoHm 60kg flywheel spinning at up to 36000rpm. What if it fails? I hope I won't be anywhere near the tangent
- bfwi 12y agoWhat about a jet turbine? Plenty of stuff is dangerous if it "fails" in the worst way.
- valarauca1 12y agoA standard engine is a ~300lb block of iron containing 8-10 fuel air explosions per second. If so much as a piston rod gets over stressed its capable of destructively disassembling itself in a blink of an eye. A jet turbine rotate at speed in excess of 50k rpm. In the event a blade broke off, it could sale though the outer casing, your body, a cement wall, before you could hear the engine exploding. Yet... that's perfectly safe. All I'm saying is mechanical engineers are VERY good at their jobs.
- yread 12y agoSure it's reasonably safe, not perfectly safe. In diesel engines, if there is a runaway and it isn't stopped the shaft can get overstressed and literally explode. Jet engines are specially armored not to let any part of the turbine escape the casing in case things go wrong (yet it still happens http://www.avherald.com/h?search_term=uncontained&opt=0&dosearch=1&search.x=0&search.y=0 http://www.avherald.com/h?search_term=uncontained&opt=0&dose... quite a lot one might say). And quite a lot of R&D was put into it not happening. Is there enough R&D being put into the flywheel not failing? EDIT: my point is that stuff that is OK in a racing car might not necessarily be safe enough to put on a bus or a tram
- valarauca1 12y agoThe R&D for a race car (especially an F1) is often far more advanced then that of a buss. In F1 it literally pays to have the best testing equipment, the best labs, etc. F1 prides itself on being as close to the cutting edge as their rules lets them. The famous saying, "To earn a small fortune in F1 racing, you must first spend a large one." Is very telling of this. F1 isn't done to make F1 go fast, its done to make other cars go. :.:.: A standard durability cell for engine testing for a production engine component will typically have a ~20-30 year old sensors, and 15-20 year old data acquisition system. F1 all components will likely be <5 years.
- erjiang 12y agoI just pulled numbers from some of the public transit buses that DoubleMap tracks. I see annual usage of 40k-50k miles on a single bus. Given 2013's diesel prices and standard diesel bus efficiency, that might be about $1/mile, so let's say $50k/yr in fuel for a single bus. If they claim to save 20% on fuel, then a single bus would save about $10k/yr, and if the system can pay for itself in three years, then it would cost about $30k. These mileage numbers aren't for London, so that estimate could be off by quite a bit. Still, consider than a standard diesel bus may cost $250k in the US while a hybrid 40' bus could cost $600k,[1] and this looks like a great deal. [1] http://www.intercitytransit.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/hybrid-fact-sheet.pdf http://www.intercitytransit.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/hybr...
- erjiang 12y agoI should add that driving in dense urban areas means fewer miles, lower speed, and more frequent stopping and starting, so the savings in a smaller city would be smaller.
- wlesieutre 12y agoMore frequent stopping and starting would actually be an advantage here. If you're driving a long route between bus stops and don't brake frequently, you're only taking energy out of the flywheel when you initially get up to speed, and you're only putting it back in when you stop at the end. Regenerative braking is a lot more valuable in stop and go traffic. Every time you accelerate out of a stop light you're burning less fuel.
- erjiang 12y agoRight, that's why I said in a smaller city (less dense, more long stretches of roads) there would be fewer savings from a flywheel or hybrid.
- wlesieutre 12y agoSo you did, I must have misread your comment before.
- adambard 12y agoFirst hydroelectric water towers, and now vacuum-sealed spinning flywheels? Come on, batteries, get it together!
- adolph 12y agoThe emergence of kinetic energy storage in the shadow of chemical storage is pretty interesting. Oftentimes I think of progress as moving away from mechanical things and toward electrical solid state things.
- exDM69 12y agoFormula 1 cars have energy recovery for kinetic energy (regenerative braking) and thermal energy (motor generator unit in turbocharger shaft). Both of these technologies have potential to be used for buses and other heavy vehicles that move in an urban environment. As an example, my regular bus route is 50% highway at 80 km/h and 50% urban start-stop traffic. The city buses have a huge turbo diesel or natural gas engine, and the turbo takes about 3 seconds to spool up. At 80 km/h, drivers tend to be pumping on and off the throttle, purging the turbo pressure repeatedly. This is horrible for fuel efficiency. Ideally, an electric motor should do the initial few seconds acceleration, while the turbo is being spooled up using the electric motor attached. When the turbo is spools up, the internal combustion engine should be slowly introduced by adding fuel according to the correct stoichiometric ratio. At cruise speeds, engine power could be regulated by harvesting energy off the turbine rather than pumping the gas pedal which purges the whole turbo. A city bus should be able to operate at or near optimum stoichiometric conditions at all times, saving a ton of gas and emissions. Currently there's a huge puff of black diesel smoke every time the bus leaves a bus stop. These are very exciting times for anyone who is interested in motor sports technologies applied to efficient transport.
- fr0sty 12y ago>city bus should be able to operate at or near optimum stoichiometric conditions at all times Diesel motors operate quite differently than gasoline engines in this regard, actually. A diesel motor is only operating at the correct stoichiometric ratio at full throttle and is running lean for the rest of the time because there is no throttle plate to modulate air intake and power is only modulated by the quantity of fuel injected into the cylinders.
- cynicalkane 12y agoBecause diesel fuel burns as soon as it's injected, you don't even want a stoichiometric ratio of fuel because you can't get an even air-fuel mixture.
- Gravityloss 12y agoWhy now? Flywheels have been around for a hundred years... meanwhile, batteries have improved a lot. There have been long articles about flywheels every now and then, yet you never see them in buses. http://discovermagazine.com/1996/aug/reinventingthewh842 http://discovermagazine.com/1996/aug/reinventingthewh842
- InclinedPlane 12y agoFormula 1 was changed recently to encourage development of high efficiency automotive technology. That change has apparently already started to pay off.
- Gravityloss 12y agoYes, that's possible. But no technical reasons are presented on why it should happen now - compared to all the false prognoses in the last fifty years or so.
- InclinedPlane 12y agoTechnical problems tend to fall rather more rapidly when billions of dollars in R&D spending is put into play. Just the top 10 Formula 1 teams spend something like $4 billion annually, and now a significant amount of that is being funneled toward research on highly efficient vehicles.
- Guvante 12y agoMy naive assumption would be that implementing flywheels in high performance situations without negatively impacting the engine is difficult. At least that would be my assumption given the trend of hybrid vehicles and lack of comparable change in larger ones. F1 uses much stronger engines so maybe the tech is more directly usable.
- josh-wrale 12y agoVolvo is on a similar path: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/154405-volvo-hybrid-drive-60000-rpm-flywheel-25-boost-to-mpg http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/154405-volvo-hybrid-drive...
- Lagged2Death 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrobus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrobus Motorsport is arguably a latecomer to mechanical batteries, which have been used in vehicular, transport, industrial, and aerospace applications for a long, long time.
- bgarbiak 12y agoJust a note: the system was never actually used in any Grand Prix. Williams had problems with packaging and weight balance (safety was also a concern). They later followed other teams and settled on battery-based solution. Flywheel had only one significant advantage over these: lower operating costs. That's what makes it feasible for use in public transport, I guess.
- gsnedders 12y agoThe R18 e-tron quattro, now three times winner at Le Mans, actually uses the Williams Hybrid Power flywheel system — so it might not have F1 pedigree, but it certainly has top-level motorsport pedigree.