X-Prize team is looking for advice

[AD5OS]

Those are some good points and quite honestly we do not have all of the facts of different products to give you a good answer other than to say that capacitors in general are just as efficient at storing energy as a battery. I am not saying that we will not have a battery or fuel cell or some other technology available, but we believe that these ultracapacitors are Key to our energy recapturing techniques.

I believe the data sheets expressed the leak as a ratio of charge... but it really is minor.

Yes the discharge and charging characteristics are very different from batteries... however it is not hard to regulate the power draw from these devices. our biggest concern is losses from wires and other components from resistance.

[trebuchet03]

I don't know your experience or anything... But from my own experience, be very careful with those super/ultra caps.... Look funny at them, and they're dead...

Do you plan on using boost converters at a lower cap array voltage? Or making the output of your cap banks at working voltage?

[AD5OS]

just depends on the requirements of the motor we are using. We are talking to some engineers at Siemens about what type of motor would best work for what we are trying to accomplish. in fact we might be using 2 or 3 smaller motors to accomplish what we want to do as far as acceleration vs coasting vs regenerating...

We are planning on using a polyphase motor so that complicates things 3x as well.

[SVOboy]

There's actually a chop top electric metro running several motors (I think it can run up to 8) that's been posted some where around here. What's the advantage of 1 v. many?

[AD5OS]

well the main advantage in our thinking is we can use them all for increased torque and acceleration and decelerating.. fewer for coasting. It might be that we use one up front and one in the rear. or perhaps one or two per wheel... it is all still up in the air as to what will work best. But then again we might just use one big honkin efficient motor...

it does seem that larger motors are more efficient than smaller....