Conversation of Air Whorl Energy Produced by Fast Moving Vehicles

Consider installing larger wheels on the rear axle. Thus the vehicle will be going downhill to improve fuel economy to make up for losses in drag.

No. Maybe if you pair it with speed bumps that generate electricity? Just kidding.

The answer's still no.

No, no, no a thousand times no, and for almost as many various reasons.

Its all give and take, the "woof" is minimised at all costs on very fast moving machines like bullet trains and especially race cars . The "woof" is a result of drag and poor aerodynamics.

I bet you couldn't talk anyone in any of the fast moving industries to attach more drag to there equipment.

• That would increase the energy consuption by the vehicle.
• That would require all vehicles being of the same size and shape in order to be "efficient".
• Would cost a lot.
• Would probably NEVER pay-back.
• Would generate a depicable amount of energy.
• Would increase the risk of crashes, because you have to have to pass close to the turbine blades.
• And many, many other reasons that I haven't even considered.

Aim your efforts towards a more feasable goal; is this homework? I suggest you better think of a way of tapping to human generated metane, perhaps a portable device to make it more interesting.

Regards

I think if you found the right shape with an acceptable drag coefficient you could make an acceptable tradeoff to play with.

Consider some of the "fast" and "powerful" cars made in America. Designers go to great lengths to reduce drag to a minimum for the overall design of the car. Then us idiots, the consumers, say it's ugly and request things that are aesthetically pleasing to be stuck onto the car.

Case in point; Mustangs and Camaros (not to be biased, but they both spring to mind). In order to make them look more "sporty" we want fake hood and brake cooler scoops. They are blocked off (non-functional) and merely act as parachutes...always deployed. If you stick enough crap to the outside of the vehicle it eventually ruins the shape and increases drag...but we like the way it looks.

If you have access to a wind tunnel with a few hundred data points you could experiment...

But, don't ask me...I drive a 2007 Jeep Wrangler with a near vertical profile...what do I care about aerodynamics to increase fuel efficiciency?

Three cheers for Wranglers!

Who need aerodynamics anyway... overrated.

As far as a wind energy recovery device... Epic failure of an Idea from the start, Read all the posts above for explanation.

I heard that in China they have installed wind powered generators along roads to charge batteries to power street lights.

£5GBP says that these are driven by weather-atmospheric wind and not the wind generated by a road vehicle. Road vehicles, after all, carry their own street lighting and power sources to operate them.

Shame on you all you cynics and doubters. Vortex energy is being harnessed now, at a cost per Kilowatt below offshore wind or wave extraction alternatives. Not for high speed vehicles but for low speed water currents. Google Vortex Hyro Energy and click on Vivace

Is this anything to do with floating energy barges?

Not that I am aware of, I had not heard of FEBs until your reference to them.

Some prof. at Michigan University came up with the idea of placing an array of horizontal tubes at right angles to the flow stream on the sea/river bed and supported at each end on springs. As the current passes vortices shed alternately above and below the tubes causing them to vibrate vertically. Magnets attached to each end oscillate in coils to harvest the energy. I presume that the tube diameter and lengths are sized to create resonance but I don't know any detail.

Vivace is a spin of company set up to commercialise the idea. They have funding for trials in a river to check for durability and environmental side effects. The technology is simple and modular so it can easily be scaled up. They claim it operates down to 2 knot currents which is way below where turbines can operate. Their literature is big on how much energy is available between the turbine lower speed threshold down to 2 knots, how current flows (deep down in rivers) do not vary that much, and how fish swim around it. They are much more coy about what proportion of that energy their technology can usefully extract. I cannot find even an unsupported claim.

I have done some work on vortices generated by current swirling around the base of offshore wind turbine towers. The point was to prevent vortex damage by extracting the power rather than for pure power generation. Changes in tidal current direction and it's intermittent (though predictable) flow make energy harvesting economically unjustified, even with all the tower to shore infrastructure already in place, and it is an expensive way to limit vortex erosion damage on the towers

My comment was prompted by the respondents who jumped in to say it would never work without looking at what is already out there. The science is sound, for water currents at least, but detail on Vivace's engineering solution is too sketchy at this point to make a reasoned judgement.

I submitted this comment once but it floated off into the aether. So if it turns up twice blame the aethereal postman not me

This idea is not a new one, and has been demonstrated before (to a certain extent).

In the early days of NASCAR, legendary car builder 'Smokey" Yunick once applied a fan blade to an automotive alternator, and mounted it in the front grill of one of his race cars. With the vehicle at speed, the alternator was able to provide enough charging power to the battery, while reducing the parasitic losses on the drivetrain typical of a traditional belt driven system.

However, its more likely that it would be more efficient to take these high pressure areas of air, and redirect them to the engine intake, producing a ram air effect. This would allow you to produce more horsepower per volume of engine displacement, allowing you to achieve a desired level of performance with a smaller displacement (and more energy efficient) engine. This is, of course, 50+ year old technology.

the NASCAR example applies to the case where the rules restrict the shape of the body to less than ideal shapes

there are no such restrictions for bullet trains

the question in our little exercise in bench engineering is

can the turbulence from the optimized [less than ideal] shape of a hi speed vehicle be harvested rather than wasted?

i applied for a british patent in 1980s for wind driven alternator mounted on EV to charge its batteries but they replied already 2 patents were pending.

Well there you go!!! You've already been there and done that, sounds like...

Maybe the young inventor who started this thread would like to buy your un-"patented" idea...?

He has mentioned "a generator mounted above the vehicle track", but I said generator "mounted in front or top of the vehicle" .

So why not fit a sail on a mast instead?