Quote:
Originally Posted by California98Civic
This might be a fun way to attempt to copy Mazda's capacitor charging regenerative braking system.
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This was my thought too, including using the Maxwell capacitors (and I'll claim that it occurred to me prior to the release of the Mazda 6).
The amount of charge a capacitance can hold is non-linearly dependent on the voltage of the that it is holds. I don't know what is done in the Mazda but I would think that substituting a 24V alternator would make it easier to implement capacitor charging. (Removing/altering the voltage regulation on a 12V alternator
might work as an alternative.)
Many alternators are manufactured in 24V and 12V versions that are physically interchangeable. With that done, what is then required is voltage regulation (switch mode for efficiency) between the capacitor and battery.
In order to extract all the charge out of the capacitors it would have to both drop and boost the voltage, although the majority of charge could be extracted with just the drop.
It's not for me atm but I think it should be fairly straightforward to do.