Hybrid Car with Regenerative Braking

[Gary Hatt - Publisher BCM]

Has anyone considered buying an Electric or Hybrid Car as a Toad?  Or a Toad with Regenerative Braking so your Toads battery will charge when you tow it.  Of course, you have to have a brake application system installed in your Toad for this to work.  Based on Newtons Third Law my thinking on all of these is that the net result will be zero or negative when friction is taken into consideration. 

An Electric Car or a Hybrid could be charged by connecting a charging circuit from your bus to your Toad. 

Another solution would be to put a windmill on top of your car that generates power whist in motion.

However, as my mom always told me her law... "You don't get something for nothing."

How about using solar panels on your bus to charge your car whilst stationary or moving?  There is an initial cash outlay, like all of these ideas, but in how many years/miles would the break-even point be crossed?

So what  is the bottom line Physics, Math and Engineering majors?  Will any of these system create more energy than are expending or will all of them be a wash, or more likely with friction, a loss?

What are your thoughts???

[chessie4905]

Buy a diesel toad and eliminate all the extra wiring, hardware, solar panels.

[neoneddy]

Slightly related enough to where I'll chime in.   

I've have thought about an electrical KERS or regenerative braking system for our busses.  Here is how it would work in my mind.

If you have the OTR AC removed you have the mounting points for the old compressor, it's begging for something to put in there.

You mount a motor / generator in there and the pulleys connected to the engine just like the old AC compressor.   When the brake lights come on, it fips a relay to engage the generator which will put a load on the engine, assisting with braking.  Now for a KERS type system, where you'd want to then run it in reverse, you'd want to dump the power into large super capacitors,  which gets applied as you increase throttle.   Or it could just provide help in charging the house batteries and nothing more.

I don't know anything about the specifics of it all, but  if it was even 50% efficient, I'd say that's a solid win. 

[Jeremy]

Although such a 'bolt-on' system is attractive I think the weak link (literally) in the concept is the idea of trying to transmit vehicle braking forces through the engine accessory belts.

Perhaps a better re-use of existing bus systems would be to re-wire a Telma retarder in a way that re-purposed the electricity it generated - or, on buses that don't have Telmas, I expect a clever person could find a way of spinning a turbine using the compressed gases created by a Jake brake.

Jeremy

[Iceni John]

Perhaps a better re-use of existing bus systems would be to re-wire a Telma retarder in a way that re-purposed the electricity it generated . . .

Do Telmas actually produce electricity?   Aren't they electromagnetic resistance, like the resistance units in some exercise bikes?   Telmas require a hefty alternator.   So saying, I wish I had a Telma  -  maybe I can find a used Focal for cheap (Yeah, dream on).

John 

[TomC]

Telmas cannot create electricity. All they are are electro magnets around a disc. In order to produce electricity, you'd have to electrify the disc someway-and that would require brushes, stator, regulators, etc-way too much money.
Using an electric/hybrid car to charge while pulling, your bus will use more fuel because of the drag. The best suggestion has already been said-get a Diesel powered towed. I tow my Mercedes 300 turbodiesel. Course, I had to get a driveline disconnect, but have had no problems. Good Luck, TomC

[DoubleEagle]

Neoneddy's idea has some merit. The one bus that this idea could work on is the Eagle. On the older models with the miter box on the rear with two driveshafts, the unused driveshaft for the A/C could drive the device that would put a load on to retard the engine. You guys can work out the details, but keep the cost down. It could make up the difference for the weak 2 cycle Jacob's Brakes. 

[Jeremy]

Telmas cannot create electricity. All they are are electro magnets around a disc. In order to produce electricity, you'd have to electrify the disc someway-and that would require brushes, stator, regulators, etc-way too much money.
Using an electric/hybrid car to charge while pulling, your bus will use more fuel because of the drag. The best suggestion has already been said-get a Diesel powered towed. I tow my Mercedes 300 turbodiesel. Course, I had to get a driveline disconnect, but have had no problems. Good Luck, TomC

Inducing an electric current requires either stationary coils and moving magnets or moving coils and stationary magnets. So you wouldn't 'electrify the disk' since that would be getting the principle of operation the wrong way around; the confusion perhaps comes from using the term 'electro magnets' and thinking that means that they are the magnets and the 'disk' therefore becomes the coil. In fact electro magnets themselves ARE coils, so the way you'd make the system work would be to re-engineer the central disk so that it carried magnets and moved them past those coils (and they'd be no need for brushes or any of that stuff)

I'm not suggesting trying to adapt a Telma like this is something anyone would ever want to attempt, just mentioning the principle as it's probably the closest way of emulating in a bus the way regenerative braking works on electric cars

Jeremy

[Jim Blackwood]

I know very little about Telmas but in an alternator the armature current is varied to control the field winding output, which also varies the load on the pulley.

Jim

[buswarrior]

"Energy conversion losses" and "Perpetual Motion" come to mind...

If we're going to dream...

I'd be more interested in developing the methods to use the free electric car charging stations to re-charge the house bank during a discrete overnight parking lot stay...

Save money busnuts, don't spend it...

Happy coaching!
Buswarrior

[Jeremy]

"Energy conversion losses" and "Perpetual Motion" come to mind...

If we're going to dream...

I'd be more interested in developing the methods to use the free electric car charging stations to re-charge the house bank during a discrete overnight parking lot stay...

Save money busnuts, don't spend it...

Happy coaching!
Buswarrior

You never know, put some "Tesla Experimental Vehicle" badges on the back of your bus and it might confuse people enough so you could plug-in to those charging points without anyone complaining.

I have a memory of an old pre-war black-and-white movie I saw once where the main character, who was a shady, quick-talking type (imagine Sid James from Hancock's Half Hour) who got fuel to run his car by parking under a streetlamp every night and connecting a hose to the light fitting - this being in the era when streets in London were still lit by gas lamps.

Jeremy

[kyle4501]

Wouldn't using regenerative braking require a substantial battery bank to store all the energy?

[Gary Hatt - Publisher BCM]

Wouldn't using regenerative braking require a substantial battery bank to store all the energy?

The intent would only be to charge the stock batteries in the Toad, no more than that.

[Jim Blackwood]

...which under normal conditions will be at full charge?

Jim

[Jeremy]

The li-on batteries in an electric toad I assume, not the (always charged) lead-acid battery in a ICE toad

Jeremy