An idea air powered
 

today while at school i got to thinking of how to charge an electric car without the use of gas. what if you where to take the air that normaly cools the engine and have it forced into what would be like a turbo that spools turning the generator to charge that batteries. tho i dont think this would work to well at city speeds but what do you guys think?

Do a few searches on here and you will find other people suggesting this same idea and you will see the math that shows that even at highway speeds you would have trouble lighting up a light bulb, you gain more by blocking off your grill all the way.

yea thats what i thought. didnt bother to look. would be great if some how like several turbos to boost up the next to spin it fast enough like guys do in twin turbos the small turbos is used to boost up the bigger one faster.

Can't work.
The air that cools the engine is a huge part of the drag of your car.

Forcing that air through a turbine to generate power, thereby increasing the drag of the vehicle, means you'd draw more power from whatever engine is powering it.

The reality of energy loss with every conversion of energy means you're always at a loss with these schemes.

You can't create energy out of the blue - certainly not by creating additional drag.

good point. it was a thought.

Don't let people tell you it can't be done. Where would we be in the world if people listened to those that say it can't be done.

Yes, if you know how to bypass the laws of physics, I'd say go for it.

Where would we be in the world if everybody kept repeating each and every previous failure over and over and over again.

Learn from the mistakes of others, rather than from repeating them.
See where that went wrong, and improve upon that.


You can't win the race against drag by adding features that add even more drag, in the vain hope to recover some of the energy lost to said drag.
You'd always lose.

With drag, the only solution is to reduce it.

If you can find a way to power your car with the air that it is pushing out of the way then you will have found an amazing brake through in wind power that could then be used in wind turbines to produce more power then they currently produce, but as it is, fallowing the rules of wind turbines, a wind turbine the size of your radiator (not the size of the smaller grill opening) would produce such a small amount of power that it is not worth while, add to that the fact that right behind whatever kind of turbine you are using you still have the solid body of the car, something that slows the air speed down and causes turbulence, just like with wind turbines on towers you don't want obstructions in front of them or behind them because both of those reduce the power output.
So you can figure out at a given speed how much energy per square foot is in the moving air and at that given speed how much of that energy you can extract from that moving air (if you extract 100% of the energy the air stops moving, no heat is produced, you more or less need a continues perfect vacuum) and you can figure out what all of your losses under ideal situations and what your estimated losses under real life are going to be, this information is what people like my self tend to look at when trying to figure out if something will work or not, so maybe you have an idea that hasn't been thought of before that wouldn't fallow the normal rules, but if your idea is to put a propeller or turbine on the front of your car, then it is going to fallow these rules and you can look up the charts to tell you how much energy per square foot of wind at a set speed you are going to have and figure out your losses from there.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented." Charles H. Duell, an official at the US patent office, 1899.

Yep its all been done, lets just go home and forget about trying anything else.