Insight into the Future

[Baltothewolf]

Just to let you know, the ECU on these cars are unhackable. It's been tried for many years by many different people. The honda engineers made sure there will never be any tampering with the computer.

A traditional turbo has been tested and proven to be a success. Why mess with success?

[pgfpro]

Well after really digging into some number crunching with my engine turbo simulator it looks like the turbo won't happen. My plans were to run very low boost only around 2psi max. Just enough to make the computer think it was at sea level or a few feet below. My goal wasn't to make the car faster it was to make a way to generate more electricity. At the low boost there just isn't enough extra exhaust flow to produce a decent amount of electricity. The exhaust back pressure numbers and engine Delta p were good until I started loading the turbine to generate electricity.

I was also thinking about going with a after market management system but after reading through this thread and all the issues I'm not going to go there.
Turbo, w/a intercooling, alternator and MoTeC management - Insight Central: Honda Insight Forum

So for now my plans are to clean up the car and make it look brand new with some aero mods. After a month or two testing my waste solvent system on my Talon I will decide if to run waste solvent or not.

Thanks everyone with your posts!!!

[serialk11r]

Originally Posted by RedDevil

All true.

What I saw from testing my own small TEG is that the voltage is anything but constant (it varies with the temp difference, obviously); also the power output from said small TEG was too tiny to bother with.
Much better at cooling/heating than at converting a temp difference back to electricity.

A MPPT voltage regulator as used with solar panels is the way to go imho.

It will be some time before the weight/cost/complexity of this would be overcome to a level where it can compete against a battery pack, charged at home or by a solar panel on the roof/hood. Which is what I'm busy with now

I think Alphabet's TEGs are already mostly there. There are experimental TEGs with more exotic materials + nanotechnology but they are experimental and probably will cost a lot. What Alphabet claims to bring is silicon based TEGs (read: cheap) that can work at higher temperatures. There were already high temperature TEGs around but they were extremely expensive and hard to find.

A few years ago I posted a link to a commercially available integrated solution much like this one, but it used 300C limited TEGs so it is probably down 50% on efficiency compared to these, which can run at something like 600-700C, and that unit was capable of producing 300W in a reasonable sized package. So you could use a smaller unit to get 300W (making the alternator redundant), which would already be a big help for fuel economy.

The tricky thing is of course that TEGs have pretty high internal resistance and producing different voltage at different temperature, so you definitely want a voltage converter to extract the power effectively.

[MetroMPG]

Subscribed, and congrats on the Insight. There's much fun to be had with this car and phenomenal (100+ mpg US) lean burn cruise numbers when aeromodded.

[Daox]

Fun stuff. Looking forward to your mods.

Curious, how many miles are on your Insight?

There is a local guy here selling a 2000 Insight for $3k but it has 230k miles on it...

[UltArc]

Another thread I will quietly watch with envy, yet not understand at all. Subscribed

[cowmeat]

Another thread I will quietly watch with envy, yet not understand at all. Subscribed

Cool, glad it's not just me!

Good luck with the Insight pgfpro, I'll be watching with great interest! I probably won't scam any mods from you cause I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'm still interested.

[pgfpro]

Originally Posted by Daox

Fun stuff. Looking forward to your mods.

Curious, how many miles are on your Insight?

There is a local guy here selling a 2000 Insight for $3k but it has 230k miles on it...

It has 150,049 miles on it. It looks like the IMA battery was replaced around 90K.

[MetroMPG]

$2k for 150k miles and a new battery? That's a decent deal.

[pgfpro]

I did some freeway testing today with a little city driving.

Put over a 100 miles on it and got 58.2 mpg @ 60 mph avg (going by the display). I had a cross wind of 15 mph. I notice at 65 mph the charging bars were at two to three for awhile and my IMA battery started about half way at the beginning of the run and then ended at one bar below full?

I was struggling to keep it in lean burn though? The traffic was really bad and we kept slowing to 55 mph and then back up to 70 mph. I don't know if its me or the conditions or the car trying to maintain lean burn???

I wanted to get a baseline before I do anything to the car. So I noticed the car didn't seem like it coasted very well for something this light. So when I got home after I filled the gas tank to start my first full tank log, I decided to check tire pressure.
PF 25 psi
DF 28 psi
PR 28 psi
DR 26 psi

So I set all of them to 40 psi so this should help some?

Also I went to the DMV and while waiting I kept hearing the people complaining about our new registration $$ increase that happen the first of August. Then one of the employees told a guy just be thankful your car isn't a Hybrid or electric because it doubles the price. WTH !!!!
So Hybrid and Electric vehicle owners get penalized for not burning enough fuel??? Thanks Idaho