Insight into the Future
 

Well I'm starting my new build, 2000 Honda Insight.
I just purchased this today August 29th 2015.
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Did some test driving today and had a blast!!!
Still learning how to eco drive this thing.:o Everything seems to be working great, lean-burn, IMA assist, etc.

My plans are to go through everything and eventually do a rear mount turbo, that will have a generator/motor on the turbine side. I also want to incorporate waste solvent fuel like I did on my Talon. I'm not going to mess with the computer for now.:rolleyes:
I'm also going to purchase a extra engine to dissect and see what improvements can be made?

The car needs some body work and a repaint. The interior is in great shape but could use some cleaning and a new carpet. The under body panels are all there but some need some Love.

Anyway here we go!!!

The 29th?

You sire are from the future!
As i recall. Today it is the 23th....

Crap!!! Thanks for the correction.lol:o

Unless it's REALLY cheap to get an engine, I wouldn't get a spare. The best you can do is probably raise compression ratio, then keep a jug of E85 on you as anti-knock additive.

Also a rear mount turbine generator would be ineffective for increasing efficiency, you want it before the cat. You probably want to modify the turbine housing for reduced backpressure.

An easier way to collect waste energy from the exhaust would be this: http://www.alphabetenergy.com/product/powermodule/

If you use that AND a turbine, you'd be looking at some ridiculously high thermal efficiency though.

Nice find!

Just a few things with that:
- The minor pressure drop (9.3 mbar in the example) means you lose about 6000 Joule pushing the 6.3 cubic meter of hot exhaust gas through, so the increased back pressure would cost you about 100 Watt of engine power.
- Key data like weight, size and cost are not listed.
- The need for coolant means you need a separate radiator and pump or a way to link it with the current radiator. It could use the back flow from the main radiator, but you need to either tweak the radiator valve to be stuck permanently open or have separate pump to flow the output of the module to the hot end of the radiator. It might even be necessary to keep pumping a while after engine off...!
- As the module needs to be located behind the last cat it means very long coolant lines. It may be hard to find space for it, not knowing its size.
- You obviously need a voltage regulator. It could back feed the hybrid pack on a hybrid car but will seldom match up nicely. Or it could feed a 12 V converter and be used as an alternator replacement.

All in all this is the most useable exhaust heat recovery system for car use I've seen so far.
If anyone developes complete installment kits for common makes it might take off big.

A rear-mounted turbo takes more time to start generating boost, but due to the longer plumbing required to deliver the charged air to the intake there is more area to dissipate the heat developed during the compression. Anyway, have you ever considered to make an exhaust-driven air conditioner similar to the ones used nowadays in most modern airliners?

Trying solvents as fuel I would be kinda worried about lube oil contamination.


Which features do you already consider to upgrade if you eventually get an extra engine to mess with? Would you eventually consider to get an engine from another brand to swap into the Insight?

Remember these are meant for semis producing a continuous several hundred hp, on an Insight the backpressure would be insignificant.

Yea, and I think it's probably too big but the thermoelectric units themselves are finally viable and it might be possible to convince them to send some test units not in an assembly for a price.

The way to go is probably a larger radiator and plumb the water coming out to cool the generators, since there's a substantial heat load.

These are pretty easy, plenty of mid/rear engine cars have used not only long coolant lines but long hydraulic lines (not that it's a good thing). For conversion, you probably wire the TEGs in series for ~15V or so, use a boost converter to have it constantly charging the hybrid battery, and running some of the 12V electrical load in parallel.

When this technology matures I really hope we can start seeing it from the OEM. If that doesn't happen I'm going to figure out a way to get a hold of some and build one myself, one day...

Seems to me that anything on the exhaust side would consume more power than it generates unless existing exhaust components such as the muffler are moved.

Has anyone considered a turbine generator on the input side to generate power? It may be less power, but, seeing as a gas ICE needs that restriction anyway, why not put it to use? If you really wanted to get fancy, it could double as a modest turbocharger.

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 :)

Turbochargers are often quoted to provide some noise suppression, and nowadays that water-cooling is a common feature on them it may also be useful to provide some heat recovery. Possibilities seem nearly infinite...

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?

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!!!

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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

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:mad:

That sucks about the jacked up registration!

If they are RE92s and they have no cracks, try 50-65 psi FTW!

I forgot to mention I had to leave the DMV due to a work emergency so I didn't get the car registered. I'm will try again tomorrow and let everyone know what the cost is.

Probably needs the egr passageways cleaned.

regards
mech

Thats on my to do list;)

Woo 28psi? I would recommend going 45. 28 to 45 is probably a 5mpg increase itself.

Ditto to Balto's advice. Maybe an alignment or at least a tape measure check. EGR plays a huge part in lean burn. Maximize the gliding.

regards
mech

I'm going to take your advise Mech and do the EGR cleaning this weekend. I drove it around this morning after fixing the tire pressure and it still seems to be still struggling keeping in lean burn. I also did a compression test and everything checked out fine.

The EGR plate is pretty easy to clean, and I re-used the metal gasket with no issues on mine. More than likely the problem is the EGR valve itself, though. I got one for Ron Burgundy for like 55 bucks with a gasket and it works great, here's the link http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...tml#post474729. That's a five minute fix, while the plate cleaning takes about an hour

You'll need one of those knuckles to be able to remove a couple of those bolts on the EGR plate btw, and keep a magnet handy for when you drop one into the bottom pan

I keep my RE92s at 60 psi with no ill effects, I kept the Maypops on the Festiva at 50 psi and never had an issue with them either.

I also run 60, but I don't recommend it to people as you lose A LOT of braking grip at 60 vs 45.

Yeah, what he said!

I rarely use the brakes considering my commute and the fact that I have a regen button on my shifter that does the braking for me, but there definitely is a fine line between max mpg savings and safety that you don't want to cross just to save a few bucks. Even when I ran mine at 45 psi I did okay.

Ahh, I see it the way James May does. It's easier to push a car to its limits when it has much lower limits. I respect the view, but love 60 PSI in the Insight.

Update:

OK I deiced to go ahead and clean the EGR plate. Everything went well with out any issues.
The plate wasn't to bad, all the channels were still open.
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I used some waste solvent for my cleaning solvent.;)
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The last pic is where I do all my testing out on the flats. Welcome to my neck of the woods lots of forest fires and no rain.

So on my test run after cleaning the EGR plate it is still acting the same.
I did some 45 mph runs and some 50 and 55 mph runs. The car feels like it doesn't' have enough power to stay in lean burn??? I tried different rpm and use 4th and 5th gear but either one will stay in lean burn. The FCD just stays around 50mpg and when in lean burn it goes to 75 to 85 mpg. Maybe this is all it can do? I thought these cars could easily run 70 mpg at 45 mph on a flat road?? Its probably something still not right????

Nah, at 45 mph I average way over 100 mpg on the FCD, and even at 65-70 mph I'm averaging over 75 mph on the FCD. If I'm following a truck on the highway I'll get 80 mpg at 75 mph. You still definitely have an issue, unless the cross wind is always there where you live, since that will automatically rob you of mpg.

If it's bucking at low load I would replace the EGR valve (seeing how old and crusty it looks in the pic). You might want to also check all the ground straps, the 12V battery, and throw a new PCV valve on it. Pop the IMA cover off and click off the big battery (or install a clutch switch) and see what it does then, in case it's background charging while you're on the road. Torque the plugs to OEM specs. Other than the EGR valve those are all cheap/free checks. I always start with free, then cheap fixes when I'm doing guesswork.

If it's out of alignment or the brakes are dragging it will rob you of power. Loose under panels or body parts could do that if they're catching the wind at speed. AC clutch, tensioner pulley, etc . . . can bind up, although those usually make some noise as a warning. Bad plugs, wires or coils, fuel pressure . . . . the list goes on and on!

First a foremost thanks everyone for all the advise.

Well there are times I can give good advise then their times I forgot to go by my own advise that I have given.lol I started out this morning trying to locate the engine grounds and this is what I found.
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I tell all my friends when they are having engine issues to start with the basic and first check the battery connections and the engine grounds. Then I turn into a little excited kid with a new toy and forget everything I have learned. So it takes you guys on this forum to wake me up and look at the basics and one by one do the process of limitation based on ease and low cost amount.
So as you can see one of the ground wires is completely broke and not connected to anything on the engine/trans. The other ground cable looks like its holding on by a thread. I can't find anymore grounds, just these two???
So I did a test that has worked great in the past and took a set of jumper cables and connected them to all different points on the engine and then to the the cars frame work.
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Then off for a test drive and guess what we have lean burn in a lot more load cells. So I start checking the 12v battery cable positive and negative and both cables are loose> I tried tightening earlier but the bolt was all the in as far as it would go. After further inspection I see that both post the cables are just on the top part and can be turned by hand. So I loosing them up and move them to the lower part of the post where its wider and now we have great clamping pressure and no more loosey loosey.:thumbup:

So I went to the parts store and bought 3 new 4 gage cables and mounted them is these locations.
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Also while I was at it I decide to do the EGR cleaning with WD40 and let it set until I got back from work then blown it out. It now even runs better then the last test run.:D
I think what happen the car has a new transmission and when they replaced it they broke the ground cable and never event tried to fix it. The good is the transmission shifts like butter. The bad chasing my tail trying to figure out whats with lean burn.

I did some freeway testing in the middle of rush hour.:eek: What a pain just trying to stay a live. Anyway I got behind a 5th wheel trailer that was going around 60 mph average. I did just a slight draft and the car responded like no other I ever driven. The FCD would read up to 100 mpg and keep pretty steady. On my way back I had to go 65 to 70 mph and the FCD drop but if the traffic was all around me and tight it would run around 70mpg on the FCD.

These cars are amazing when it comes to feeling the wind drag. They remind me of riding a motor cycle in traffic. You feel everything.:cool:

Anyway sorry for the long post but I'm very excited to start racking up some great FE numbers now. Thanks again everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nice to hear you have revived it's potential, now keep away from those morons. You know getting it running perfect means it now has a moron magnet under the rear bumper. I know drafting is frowned upon here but when the traffic gets heavy here, the question is not do you draft but can you get a 3 stripe margin without having someone fill the gap or have a proctologist F350 behind you.

regards
mech

Always nice to get the PO to build the tranny then goof up the grounds so they sell the car and you fix it quickly. :thumbup:

regards
mech

So well said Mech!!! Rush hour is a War zone!!!:eek:

I live in the LA area. Rush hour isn't just an hour.

I have to drive the 210 freeway every morning, I feel your pain.

US101-CA23-CA118. I get up at 530 so I can avoid the worst of the idiot parade, downside is that I'm almost falling asleep on the drive home (not enough stimulants in my blood after 6 PM), upside is that I do my coursework while I'm awake and then I'm able to just cruise in the right or middle lane at 60 MPH and hopefully starve off the tinnitus that is getting worse every day.

I've had days where I literally drove on every single highway in ventura county trying to avoid traffic and go places I had to go for my side gig. I'd take the train but it costs twice as much to take the train as it does for me to drive and pay for parking.