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Hei - sorry for not being clear on my idea. I was thinking that the car wastes a huge amount of heat anyway.
Even if driving eco, the gas is still being burned and the heat is wasted - is all in the way the ICE works ( the 25% efficiency for gasoline ).
I know all the threads that you provided - thank you. But I see a problem with all those approaches. The insulation on the Prius engine is fine - also the thermos. But there isn't enough heat stored. The insulation capacity is limited.
The metal from the engine and the coolant will store a good amount of heat anyway, but it still isn't enough. From my point of view, the perfect car wouldn't have a radiator.
It would maybe carry with it about 100kg of wax instead.
I did mention wax ( or paraffin wax ) for a reason. This is a common and affordable PCM ( Phase Change Material ). That means that it will melt within the engine temperature operating range. When melting, the PCM stores a huge amount of heat. Wax is cheap and easy to find, almost free compared to the Prius thermos.
I tested this with about 0.3 Kg of wax, using 3 small recipients used for portable coolers. The were filled with a glycol mix I think - because of the same principle. That glycol mix would change phase when freezing / melting - so it would absorb a huge amount of heat for it's size. With the test recipients I was able to keep the engine warm for about 4-5 hours in the summer ( to about 50 deg Celsius ) and for 2-3 hours in the harsh winter ( to about 30-40 deg Celsius ). The main problem for my test was that after a while, the wax started leaking and I was afraid for the engine not to catch fire. So I need more wax and a better recipient - a metal one.
I was saying about the perfect car. With an engineered PCM and a huge amount of it, the car would never need a radiator. Or just need it for emergency. More than that. If you could store 50% from the heat generated on a 50-100 km daily commute, when arriving home, you could just plug the car in, and have instant heat for the home.
L.E.: I guess, with this kind of tuning, the car would become a mobile co-generation plant.
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pmiulian, that is brilliant. I was thinking about this same idea, of having some material in the car that can store an insane amount of heat, but you took it to the next level. Now adding 100k of wax would decrease your efficiency by about 5% due to the weight, so maybe you could run some efficiency tests on the idea along with heat tests, and maybe you could attach some sort of reverse block heater that somehow takes that heat and uses it for something else, like heating your house. And what if that emergency radiator was your heater core? Just run the heat if the car is getting a bit on the hot side.
Taking this to even another level, what if your car ran off of heat? An LED light was recently made that somehow could turn some of the heat from the surrounding atmosphere into light. What if an engine could do the same: take heat from the surrounding atmosphere and turn it into mechanical energy? That would be the ultimate car.