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The 500 hp motor you can hold in your hand is a direct quote from John Kargul, head of the EPA HH program. He also stated that the implementation of a practical HH would be as revolutionary to the auto industry as the assembly line!
If you want I can provide a link. I have spent enough time on this to have gone from high school grad to a PHD degree over the last decade.
The cost per unit I quoted is reasonable, when you consider it in a manufacturing context with mass production, which is exactly how it will be produced for public consumption.
I think we all understand that there is a huge difference between mass produced cost per unit and what it sells for as a replacement component. You would be better off to buy the whole Prius than to buy the electric motor, battery, and planetary gear set differential as replacement parts.
3 parts cost more than the whole assembled car, about 5,000 parts. That's a perfect example of why you can't fairly compare the cost of the sum of the components to a manufactured assembly. A 2010 Prius would cost you close to $200,000 if you bought the parts individually, and you would still have to put it together.
The patent application has been published and approved. It has been thoroughly investigated by a group of students and a MIT PHD professor. They concluded it was capable of 35 HP and 380 pounds feet of torque from 0wheel speed in application and recovery. That's power at the wheel for 4 wheels direct to the tire without any gearing whatsoever. Stress analysis of the design showed no potential wear issues that would keep it from functioning for thousands of hours, and overhaul procedures that would allow a complete rebuild in less than 1.5 hours labor, per wheel.
Some people will legitimately claim that what I propose is not even a hybrid by definition.
The argument has some merit.
I don't care what you call it if it works. Are you trying to defeat inspiration with a definition of the machine?
That's the most ludicrous rejection criteria I think I have ever heard.
If you want to get into a theoretical debate about the evolution of battery technology and propose that the "miracle" battery is just a few years away, then you have missed the whole point.
Don't even consider what the miracle battery will cost, or it's potential catastrophic failure scenario in a 200G impact, something like the Peterbilt that t-boned the S10 at the intersection on TV.
You could use water as a hydraulic fluid as long as you provided some anti freeze to the water for low temp function.
What happens to your miracle battery at 50 below?
Agendas are driven by arguments that disintegrate with unbiased consideration of all the failure potential of components.
Current Americas cup racers use accumulators with operating pressures of 12k PSI. An 1/8th inch wall thickness seamless tubing can handle 300 PSI. The perfect place for the high pressure accumulator is inside the low pressure accumulator, located in the transmission tunnel where only the most catastrophic accident scenarios would cause a loss of integrity. Failures of high pressure inert gas charged accumulators would result in expulsion of the inert gas which could actually provide some protection from fire of combustible fuel.
My design contains the high pressure circuit within the low pressure return containment vessel, so high pressure leaks dump fluid into the low pressure circuit, with overpressure protection of the same circuit.
High pressure water is used to slice through steel like a butter knife.
Ingo Valentin was right 25 years ago when he started his pursuit of the HH. He certainly was not the first person to advocate hydraulic energy absorbing systems. Aircraft have been using then for over 50 years. The designs are ancient.
If a hypermiled 1970 Opel that is basically stock can get 124 MPG 40 years ago, for the love of whatever deity you prefer, just think of how different the world would be today if the resources we dedicated to battery development had be devoted to a practical HH vehicle that employed the exact same operational tactic that proved that it's not just how efficient the engine is.
The power train can be improved as proposed by Valentin, INNAS, and many others and double the mileage with the same engine. The engine can be improved to almost double its current peak efficiency which for gas IC engines is currently in the mid 30% range.
Take my VX which had averaged 55 MPG. Double that with power train improvements, then double it again with engine improvements.
Reduce the CD to Basjoos levels and the proposed system automatically compensates for the lower sustained average energy demand.
That's basically what Valentin is using in his calculations and his claim for 170 MPG has been done already with a manual transmission 1st gen Insight.
The difference is the Insight requires perfect hypermiling techniques, while the HH does it without any driver input other than the attention of a soccer mom with 4 kids on her way to a game, with a cell phone ringing, and two of them fighting in the back seat.
That's the real world, and people will never dedicate themselves to the amount of intelligence and attention to detail it takes to do it the hard way, as we try to do it every day.
regards
Mech
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