Mercedes hits 50% efficiency in IC engine

[JackMcCornack]

Pretty amazing. It's in a F1 car. Formula 1 racing is interesting in many ways, and one way is they don't do fuel stops--all the gas they get is what's in the car at the start. And according to the Road & Track article (linked below), they're putting one in a street car.

Mercedes-AMG's F1 Can Make More Power Than Waste Energy

Here's more of the techie details off the Mercedes/AMG web site. Among the clever things I wish I'd thought of myself is the turbocharger with a generator/motor between the in-and-out turbines, providing electric power boost to the turbo when needed, and turbine powered battery charging when not.

https://www.mercedesamgf1.com/en/mer...s-engineering/

[Grant-53]

Glad to hear from you. How close would the old Cobra GT coupe, raced in the 1960's, come to mating as a body for the MAX?

[JackMcCornack]

:-) You might need a thicker seat, but I don't see any other problems. If you took the windshield off MAX first, you might not even have to remove the current body to put the Cobra Coup on top of it.

[JackMcCornack]

Originally Posted by Grant-53

How close would the old Cobra GT coupe, raced in the 1960's, come to mating as a body for the MAX?

I think it would work fine. Heck, you might not even have to take off the current body to drop the Daytona Coup body on top.

[EDIT--Ok, that's a slight exaggeration. I think the tops of MAX's front fenders <might> be higher than the CC front fenders, but lordy, there's plenty of room other than that.]

[RustyLugNut]

Good to hear from you, Jack.

It would be interesting to see the breakdown of actual percentage energies accounting for actual combustion efficiency, exhaust scavenging and braking energy scavenging. It is all in the accounting.

[JackMcCornack]

According to one of those links, it was done on a dyno, and that shouldn't include braking energy recovery if they're talking about the engine (should it?), but I think exhaust scavenging is fair--in this century, I think a turbo in the exhaust counts as part of the engine efficiency package. In my opinion, it's "actual combustion efficiency" if the combustion energy that's otherwise wasted gets recovered in the exhaust.

PS: Sorry about the double post re Cobra Coupe body on MAX. I was cleaning my computer, and it went off.

[Grant-53]

To error is human, to really screw things up requires a computer
The steam turbines that drive the generators in an electric power plant are multi staged.
Use every bit of heat energy you can. BMW looked at using exhaust heat to create steam.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

The turbocharger with an integrated motor-generator is one of those features that could have already been deployed on production vehicles, and it doesn't sound like rocket-science at all. More like aviation science, if we consider the usage of turbine shaft-driven generators in aircraft

Originally Posted by JackMcCornack

I think exhaust scavenging is fair--in this century, I think a turbo in the exhaust counts as part of the engine efficiency package. In my opinion, it's "actual combustion efficiency" if the combustion energy that's otherwise wasted gets recovered in the exhaust.

Since the energy harvested at the exhaust by the turbo is reverted in forced induction and a power supply for the ignition and EFI, that might be quite fair.

[Stubby79]

With the kinds of RPMs they spin at, getting higher voltages would be really easy...kinda annoying that they haven't put these on hybrid production cars by now.

[markweatherill]

50% efficiency on racing fuel; 41% (estimated) on road fuel, it says.
No doubt other compromises will be needed. I think a stop-start system would be a good idea, seeing as an F1 engine idles at 6000rpm or so...