New turbo transfers power direct to the crank
 

I have finished the design work on a turbo that I invented several years ago. The patent is now pending. The turbo has four pick up blades, one located very near each exhaust port of a four cylinder inline engine. A common shaft joins the four pick up blades and at one end is a compressor blade which blows air into the engine just like a normal turbo. At the other end of the shaft is a very small gear reduction box which drives a small slipage converter which drives a ring gear that is connected to the rear of the crankshaft. Once the desired amount air boost is aquired from the front of the turbo, instead of a waste gate the unit transfers the remaining energy to the rear of the unit where the gear box picks up the energy. If you want additional info call anytime 405 751 4521. Please be polite. I am not interested in arguements. Combine this with my Alternating valve engine and mileage will go the the moon.

You can't have egg, bacon, spam and sausage without the spam.

This is very old news.
Turbo-compound engine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I think you will find the efficiency gain requires the engine to be operated at a very high rpm because the turbine requires a high volume of exhaust gas to provide any benefit. Note the two-stroke diesel engines and the necessarily high rpm aircraft engines mentioned in the Wikipedia article. Unfortunately, this is the realm of horsepower and is far above the realm of torque, where mpg gains are made.

I hate to break it to you but turbo-compounding was invented many, many years ago.

Well, OK, I don't hate breaking it to you.

As above, bitof an old idea which has been sidelined for sometime IIRC it was because the net gain wasn't great enough compared to a regular turbo on smaller engines, there is a lot of work (@crank and compression) from not-a-lot of work out (exhaust)

I wonder what the motivation is? Do people send him money or what? :confused:

"Once the desired amount air boost is aquired from the front of the turbo, instead of a waste gate the unit transfers the remaining energy to the rear of the unit where the gear box picks up the energy."

Should read:

Once the desired amount of cash is aquired [sic] from the rubes, instead of a workable product the unit transfers the remaining money to the rear of the shop where my brother-in-law, Buba, picks up the cash.

:D

Ptero - In theory, couldn't you spin a smaller engine faster to get the same HP out of a similar amount of fuel?

...the R3350 engines on our Lockheed EC-121 "Warning Star" airborne radar station were "turbo-compound" where three power-recovery turbines (PRT) "collected" exhaust energy and coupled it directly back to the main crankshaft.

...good for an additional 150 hp from 3,000 hp engine...and really helped reduce their fuel consumption numbers at cruise.

Turbo compounds work best in applications with constant loads. The key draw back however is expense. Also on smaller engines smaller turbines must be used which in turn means they have to spin faster. The faster they spin the associated gearing to reduce the rpm to a usable speed gets more complex and parasitics take their toll.

...it's also a question of "...diminishing returns..." as 150 hp out of 3,000 hp (aircraft engine) would lineraly 'scale' downward as only 15hp out of 300 hp (automotive engine), etc.

Detroit Diesel currently uses a compound turbo on their DD15 diesel truck engine. The turbine uses spent exhaust gasses exiting the primary turbo to mechanically help turn the rear gear train, gaining 50 "free" horsepower, according to the propaganda. Turbo-Compound engines have been around forever. Go to the library and read all about WW2 bombers engines. Quite fascinating and terribly complicated. AKA: Cool.

Call me silly, but if you want to add an turbo to an engine for economy sake, a compound turbo is the only way to go, unless you start with an extremely undersized engine to begin with and add a turbo to get the power up to "normal" levels. And this (the latter option) is exactly what the auto companies are finally realizing.

They didn't "finally realize" it; they've known practically forever. Before, that last mpg wasn't worth the expense.

What about integrate a high speed alternator into the turbine and have it supply power to the hybrid system?

Since the crank and turbine are geared together, might as well take loads from the cranks since they are at more favorable rpms.

Integrating an alternator into the turbine means that no gearing is needed. The design of electric motors and generators actually favor higher operating speeds.

How high?

If you think a alternator or generator working above 100,000 rpm is going to be efficient you better think again. Hysteresis losses will be quite large.

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.)

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.

Good, stick 'em on turbos too! :thumbup:

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.

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.

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.