> cooling system
Didn't watch the video yet, but under normal conditions the car is flying down the freeway so (I'm assuming) gets some cooling effect from that flow of air. But that's not happening in this case. Might be a problem.
Didn't watch the video yet, but under normal conditions the car is flying down the freeway so (I'm assuming) gets some cooling effect from that flow of air. But that's not happening in this case. Might be a problem.
Cooling from running down the freeway is easy to replace with a bigger fan. However the radiator itself is not large enough to get all the power the engine is capable of. (I also didn't watch the video, but I'm guessing the donor generator had a 12 horsepower engine so the radiator should be more than good enough). Of course there are other trade offs - many mechanics have a sign "speed costs money, how fast do you want to go", this sign isn't referring to the initial cost to tune the engine for max power, it is referring to max power means your engine needs a full rebuild every 20 hours of operation.
My old 2004 Opel 1.6, 105hp could deliver almost full load (car fully packed with passengers and baggage, with roof trunk also packed, going 140km/h uphill with fully open throttle, fuel usage was reported as 16L/100km, typical road usage was 8L/100km) for about half an hour without any problems.
What I mean - cars can do fine for long periods under load as long as they are cooled appropriately, not only for 10s of full power.
I literally stopped at the Ford dealer today; there, I told the sales lady trying to sell me on the F150 that, for a few more thousand dollars, I prefer the F250 because I don't want a dinky euroboost 2.7 L turbo V6.
Luckily the F250 has a 6.8L V8 base.
Basically sounds like your typical American that buys a massive car truck. Just a drive around suburbia with for no real practical reason and F-250 would be ridiculous for that.
I'm glad every American male feels compelled by Ford and GM's advertising to buy 70 and $80,000 trucks because we'll be that much easier for them to budget out for EVs when they start coming out
They sold very different cars in Europe than they did in the USA, but it was the same company.
Smaller engines are designed to operate at higher percentage of maximum capacity at lower speeds. Roll back to the days of 40hp engines and they max out highway speeds and can sustain that for hours. As you keep adding HP the maximum sustained load at a given speed doesn’t increase. So, 1000+ HP super cars can make use of that power at 200+ mph, but they don’t waste weight having radiators large enough to dissipate that heat continuously at 85mph because there’s no way the car is staying that slow while applying that much power.
External temperature also plays a role, cars need to be able to handle highway speeds at 45C adding headroom at lower temperatures. Trucks also need to be able to do that while towing a large load.
Also catalytic converters provide more complete combustion and thus generate even more heat.
In addition, I don't see why you wouldn't just buy a home battery pack and use that to store up energy. You can run the ice in the high power bursts to top off.
I just kind of like this post because there's going to be a lot of excess ICE engines out there once EVs take over the primary job of consumer transport.
Would be nice to have a DIY recipe to convert them over to leveling for your solar grid at home
Waste heat from an ICE must be way more useful than a simple 10 or 20° gradient that they're trying to use for house heating and cooling
Heating (and water) comes from natural gas, or a high efficiency electric heatpump.
Unless it is a tiny house I wouldn't not expect 35amps to be enough to run a heat pump any everything else in a house (at least none of the houses I've seen in Europe, though I've only been there for a few weeks total so there is much I have not seen). Large RVs in the US get 50 amps at 240volts, while small ones get 30 amps at 120 volts - both compare to a tiny house in size.
25 HP would be enough to power a small apartment building.
Top fuel drag racers need a rebuild after every run, which typically lasts 4-5 seconds. Their engines can produce 10,000 HP, which is about 7.5 MW.
Le Mans cars and other touring cars are famous for holding up 24hrs under very high loads, even with the engine strung out beyond its street legal spec, but I think the most impressive feat is the Baja 1000.
Modern trophy trucks make ~1000 horspower, and the load is insane. The engines are running a pretty high average throttle, at high RPM, pushing a giant, heavy truck through sand, in a blazing hot desert. The fine dust can clog the filter, radiators, and get in all sorts of crevices. The whole drivetrain is constantly being shocked as the wheels leave the ground then jolt back to the correct RPM when the truck lands. And the whole truck is constantly being G-shocked, crashing into terrain you wouldn't even want to hike over at highway speeds, over and over again, for 1000 miles.
This was impressive back when the trucks were making a mere 300-600 horsepower, but honestly I have no idea how the modern turbocharged monsters even hold up.
That seems minor, but there are no paved racing leagues where a 1000hp+ engine can run flat-out for a long time. Le Man's formerly 6 km straight was the extreme, and they eventually shortened that with chicanes.
Fun fact: the Porsche 917 still holds the lap record at Talladega, even though it was set in 1975, because no one else is crazy enough to run a 1200HP 1700lb car around it. And it got so hot (running an open throttle?) that it spontaneously caught on fire when it stopped in the pits without any airflow.
https://www.jimcoracing.com/pages/fastball-racing-spec-troph...
I dunno if that counts the spares, the fuel cell and such, but thats in the ballpark of an F150.
Cars are already designed to run A/C and alternator almost continuously, and the AC not only generates load, it pumps a lot of heat into the air coming through the radiator because the condenser is in front of the radiator. They're designed (if the manufacturer did their environmental testing properly) to do that even in ~110+ degree weather.
Methinks you should stick to things you know something about.
PS: Many cars, even regular passenger cars - can handle being driven around a track, where you can go through a full tank in under an hour's worth of driving, and are either on the gas or braking during most of the session.
There are also things called hills and mountains, which may take minutes to climb, or more. Plenty of cars make it up the Mt. Washington auto road (where the challenge is making it back down without overheating one's brakes; engine braking must be used.)
There's something called "towing", which lots of people do the world around with minivans and passenger cars (not just pickups and SUVs.)
(Why peak torque? Because that’s peak efficiency, for petrol engines at least. Makes sense if you think about it.)
Sometimes a truck will be designed to run near peak torque while towing uphill on a hot day (AC) with a headwind, but when you do that it takes a long time to accelerate to highway speed and so truckers typically just buy more peak power (trucks are already notorious for slow acceleration). Running at less that peak torque isn't too much a loss (and diesel engines don't suffer nearly as much from running at less than peak torque so the savings doesn't add up very fast for trucks)
Trains can use overhead wires, but running that on roads is tricky when people expect to pass.
I'm no expert, but I can't imagine that this is true. I agree that is "average driving conditions", but there are plenty of times you're driving way outside of those conditions. That can't be how the cooling system is designed. I've never seen a car even tick up in temperature, under all kinds of tom foolery.
I've towed large loads up extended grades (hello shasta and grapevine) and you absolutely will overheat on a hot day. And that's with an uprated towing rig that had a radiator sized for the job - imagine that same horsepower of engine in a passenger car with 1/3rd the radiator surface area.
This, it can be done.
Afaik, that won't help your transmission though. If you run that at high loads often, you'll want enhanced cooling for that; often part of a factory tow package, but often available from the aftermarket as well.
Highway cruise for a compact car needs around 7 to 20HP, so a reasonable target output is in that range. That's 5 to 15 KWh. Seems small, but as others have pointed out, auto engines have peak outputs far beyond their continuous rating.
1800 RPM 60Hz generators are available, and larger generators tend to run at 1800 RPM. Or you could do something with belts or gears to keep the engine RPM down, as others pointed out. Running at low RPM is good if you want to run for a long time.
Probably a good idea to have the system disconnect output power until the frequency reaches at least 50 Hz, because this thing needs quite a while to reach operating frequency. Bringing up something like a refrigeration compressor (a likely emergency load) from 0 Hz to 60 Hz over the course of a minute may burn it out. Under-frequency operation is very bad for AC motors; they draw way too much current and overheat, because the inductance of the motor isn't able to oppose the lower frequency. Put an ohmmeter across an AC motor and note how low the DC resistance is.
Unless you're in Colorado doing 80 mph, uphill for ten miles, fully loaded with cargo - then you engine brake (ie dissipate your KE into the engine block) on the way down. Or you take you car to the track. In both situations your cooling system is still expected to deliver, and does, since its not that big an issue to size it properly and a massive reliability issue if it isn't.
From what I was able to dig up[1][2], the generator (that the alternator came out of) has a 1-cylinder, 4-stroke, air-cooled, 305cc engine.
A Toyota Sienna minivan's[3] engine is around 3L, so it's basically 10 times as big.
---
[1] generator product listing: https://www.lowes.com/pd/Troy-Bilt-5-500-Running-Watts-Porta...
[2] similar engine: https://www.briggsandstratton.com/na/en_us/product-catalog/e...
This engine is capable of around 150kw of power, and the cooling system is capable of keeping up with that at highway speeds.
My guess is that if they are using the standard cooling system, it isn't even close to being taxed with a 5.5kw load even at 3600 RPM. That's less power output than you would expect while running the ac in stop and go traffic.
Best efficiency would be to use the fact you’re not moving to have more radiator surface area available but it’s probably not worth it.
One nice side effect of using car as generator - free heat in winter if you extend cooling loop to your home.
I don't have any idea if it's relevant at all (or how much the number can be trusted), but when I floor the accelerator in my Bolt, the dash indicator says it's using about 120kW.
1. install larger fans on to the radiator.
2. use a big shop fan to blow air over the radiator.
3. remove the mechanical thermostat on the engine, so that it takes longer to get to operating temperature.
Modern engines are designed to work at preferred temperature. They have two cooling loops, one small which is constantly cooling cylinders and one big (with radiator) which cools the small one to keep engine at proper temperature, not too high and not too low, by mixing some of small loop coolant with large loop coolant.
Point 2 is the best solution.