New turbo transfers power direct to the crank

[naturalextraction]

To the OP, as you hopefully already know, the Patent office will inform you on any encumbrance to prior art. If you used an attorney, hopefully he did a thorough "prior art" search and made his suggestions accordingly. So if he felt your idea was different enough to send in, hopefully he was being diligent and honest in his opinions.

To Nihomike, there are many incorporating electric and turbine hybridizing including myself. I designed a turbine engine, which is only turbine in methodology, coupled to an electric motor which can share the workload at any given percentage. Ours is going into a motorcycle. We've built prototypes and now are incorporating the working prototype combination in a 2002 SV650s frame.

That's all I'll get into. Many large companies including the labs here at Sandia are working on variations of these ideas. It's always a rush to get the idea into some area of marketability which always requires extensive testing first and lots of time. Our devices, unfortunately are destined into government use only. Getting our devices and power systems into the market place of the general public gets incredibly cost prohibitive, until they have been utilized somewhere else first.

Good luck OP, it's a very difficult road to any kind of financial return.

[Frank Lee]

Originally Posted by NiHaoMike

A 120kRPM, 8 pole alternator is only 8kHz. Common silicon steel would be quite lossy at those frequencies, but it can easily be handled with powdered iron or ferrite. Switching power supplies, the most common application of those magnetic materials, operate at tens to hundreds of kHz.

A friend of mine has built a hybrid A/C that uses a centrifugal compressor operating at 75kRPMs, driven by a switched reluctance motor. I don't know about the compressor efficiency but the overall system efficiency is about 40 SEER equivalent. (It started in the low 30s, but optimization brought it up, with no changes to the compressor.)

Good, stick 'em on turbos too!

[ConnClark]

Originally Posted by NiHaoMike

A 120kRPM, 8 pole alternator is only 8kHz. Common silicon steel would be quite lossy at those frequencies, but it can easily be handled with powdered iron or ferrite. Switching power supplies, the most common application of those magnetic materials, operate at tens to hundreds of kHz.

Ferrite and powdered iron cores won't hold at 100,000 rpm. Also high frequency switching supplies greater than 200K typically use a buck or boost topology where the current flow remains relatively constant and doesn't switch direction.

[NiHaoMike]

Originally Posted by ConnClark

Ferrite and powdered iron cores won't hold at 100,000 rpm. Also high frequency switching supplies greater than 200K typically use a buck or boost topology where the current flow remains relatively constant and doesn't switch direction.

The stator (made of ferrite or powdered iron) does not move. As such, for a switched reluctance design, the polarity of the stator could be changed so the rotor always sees the same direction of flux.

And some buck converters do have current rapidly reversing through the inductor under certain conditions. It is done to make the output noise more predictable by eliminating "period skipping" operation. Losses do increase but they're insignificant under load.

[ConnClark]

Well as someone who designs a lot of buck converter circuits I can tell you the only time that current reverses in them is at very low current loads. I can also say that until current flows in a constant direction you take a big hit in efficiency.

[NiHaoMike]

I agree that flux reversal is not desirable in a buck converter unless it is required to satisfy a noise spectrum constraint. But symmetrical converters, including push-pull, half and full bridge, and many resonant designs (the most efficient available) will reverse flux on every cycle. At lower frequencies, core loss is generally small compared to other losses.

I suspect the losses in a high speed, high ratio gearbox would not be insignificant. And if it's directly coupled to the crankshaft, the turbine will not be able to track optimum speed at all times.

On the other end, the intake, install a rotary compressor/expander connected to a motor/generator in order to extract useful work from engine vacuum under light load and provide boost to increase effective compression ratio when needed.