Biodiesel turbine, super capacitor, series hybrid... HUMMER! (60 MPG and 0-60 in 5 seconds)
Johnathan Goodwin is the patron saint of green cars (although as of yet, this honor has gone unrecognized by the Vatican). Last April, John was the guy behind the Chevy Impala conversion that smoked a Lamborghini in a quarter mile on the Earth Day special of MTV's Pimp My Ride. Arnold Schwarzenegger was so impressed that when he did a guest appearance on the Earth Day Pimp My Ride special, he hired SAE Energy (where John is co-partner) to make his Jeep run on biodiesel. Recently, John made the cover of Fast Company magazine for an article describing a green gearhead's wet dream.
Fast Company visited John's garage and found a 2005 Hummer H3 on jacks. John is going to put a 60,000 PRM, 1985, turbine, jet engine in the Hummer. The turbine engine will run on biodiesel or waste vegetable oil with a hydrogen-injector. John plans to make a series hybrid with this turbine engine. A beauty like that going to waste as a range extender? No, it charges a set of super capacitors in a matter of seconds, giving the car 600 horse power.
That's not all. Jon says "it'll get 60 miles to the gallon. With 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. You'll be able to smoke the tires. And it's going to be superefficient. ... Think about it: a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!" John is not just making drool worthy cars for stars like Neil Young (John is converting a 1960 Lincoln Continental to biodiesel, electric hybrid for him.) John said he wants to make a 100-mile-per-gallon car one day and he is working on a $5,000 conversion kit that make diesels run 50 percent more efficiently and emit 80 percent less pollution. John estimates his bolt-on kit will pay for itself in a year for bigger SUVs and two years for a normal car. He is getting patents hoping to license them to the big carmakers but he thinks automakers can do a lot more right now.
Go below the fold to see how John is using Ace Hardware better than you.
[Source: Fast Company]
John is clearly a genius and SAE Energy is doing really amazing things, but the conversions cost $28,000. I am no defender of the big automakers but I think they played up (just a little) the poor guy from Kansas. Without a high school education, John is a throttling loving environmentalist, showing GM things they thought were impossible at SEMA, and he just might save Detroit's image. John could probably slap together an electric car with parts from ACE Hardware (might not be a big seller, though). I also think the article is a little too hopeful about the future of diesel. Here are some quotes;
"They could do all this stuff if they wanted to. ... The technology has been there forever. They make 90% of the components I use... I've just been messing around and seeing what I can do. ... Everybody should be driving a plug-in vehicle right now. ... I can go next door to Ace Hardware and buy a DC electric motor, go out to my four-wheel-drive truck, remove the transmission and engine, bolt the electric motor onto the back of the transfer case, put a series of lead-acid batteries up to 240 volts in the back of the bed, and we're good to go. I guarantee you I could drive all around town and do whatever I need, go home at night, and hook up a couple of battery chargers, plug one into an outlet, and be good to go the next day."
It does make you wonder why we have not seen at least mild hybrids sooner though. Anyway, John's turbine biodiesel, super capacitor, series hybrid Hummer is freaking cool!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
andrew dames 12:15PM (3/26/2008)
OK Lance, looks like your calcs are wrong. Cd 0.51 x area 32.9 sqft @ 60mph gives 49.5 lb force on vehicle, 7.93 horsepower against the air, say 12 hp at the crank if you turn the AC off, needs 27% efficiency. Hey, not so hard after all.
Andrew
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david 10:41PM (4/01/2008)
This guy is no dummy, he is the co-founder of SAE energy. He is NOT going to make outlandish claims because it would make a negative impact on the company.
I think some people are missing the point, but other have already state that. Also controls for the turbine would not be a nightmare, unless you were a bad controls engineer; everything has lag.
I dont know why he uses a turbine instead of a small diesel engineer, because gas turbines are less efficient than diesel, when looking at the carnot cycle. The reason why turbines are used in aircraft is because they have a higher energy to weight ratio.
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Greasy Fingernails 2:27PM (5/12/2008)
Chrysler built a turbine powered car in the early 60's... they built 50 cars for real-world evaluation. Supposedly they were going into production in the 70s but Chrysler almost went down the tubes about then so they cancelled the program.
And if you go to the Union Pacific museum in Ogden Utah, there is a turbine powered locomotive. They built two of them, and actually used them for a time. They were so shatteringly LOUD that they took them out of service very soon.
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joe blow 5:08AM (10/21/2008)
you guys do realize that the friggin turbine has nothing to do with moving the Humvee right?? I read all of the post, and what a waste of time. 90% of you guys are missing the point. I will pin some of the confusion on the writer/editor of the story, cause it frankly sucked. But in retrospect, only one post here by D-wayne hit the nail on the head, and he even had a lovley picture for all the see.
We all know what alternators and generators do right, and we know how they do it right, magnets and wires. We get a movement of electrons across a field. We can move these electrons into some type of storage, or use them. In the above stated case, he is using the turbine to "Spin" the generator at a high RPM and thus producing massive amounts of electrical energy. That would probably fry batteries, but not capacitors. The caps are the storage, and the electric drive motor is the prime mover. So stop referencing Chrysler and their turbine car from the 60's, cause this is like apples and oranges. People see the word jet turbine, and they immediately think thrust, and movement, but this not the application for it here. You can use turbines for many applications.
Oh, and the reason why he is only calculating MPG for the gaseous fuel used is because that is all the fuel that is used!!!!!!!!!! C'mon simpletons, think about it, he is not plugging the darn thing into an outlet. He uses bio diesel to turn the turbine, that creates rotational force, that turns a generator at high speed, that creates globs of electricity, that is stored into super capacitors. That is then used in the electric dc motor in the truck the prime mover. Brilliant! If you want you can calculate how much the friggin water costs to electrolyze and then supplement the bio diesel burn in the turbine, but that's just stupid, why don't you wipp out your math there and calculate the cost of the air rammed into an ICE when calculating the MPG, cause it would be insignificant. Bingo, the only fuel he is using is Bio diesel, and that's it. He built a hydrogen generator (9th grade science on steroids) and uses it to burn less bio diesel. Achieving a better MPG.
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Nathan Scott 4:44PM (11/25/2008)
Haha, idiocy at work. It is not possible for a vehicle with these aerodynamics and wheel friction to get 60+ mpg. Maybe if you start a fusion reaction with the biodiesel, but I don't know how the greenies feel about lead as an exhaust.
Series Hybrids are indeed a great concept but this vehicle is a joke. How will charging capacitors after you spin up the turbine reduce the throttle time? You are just siphoning the energy through more wires and components that all have losses. Maybe if he added a 100% efficient solar panel to the entire surface area of the vehicle and drove it through a desert it might get 60 mpg.
Brett 4:27PM (10/20/2007)
Uh huh, it would be nice if this Hummer was based at all on just a tiny bit of reality. What happens when we run out of the few hundred cheap salvage turbines laying around? What do you do with the bumper melting hot exhaust? Turbines don't load follow well, just ask the guys that own those turbine powered motorcycles. There is a couple second lag between throttle input and engine power output. It just sounds like a control nightmare.
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cwj 1:00AM (11/11/2008)
Um...maybe you missed the part where he said he was making a hybrid out with the turbine? It will charge the caps, those power elec motor, those spin the wheels. I don't think turbine responsiveness is an issue here.
Or did I read wrong?
GreyFlcn 5:09PM (10/20/2007)
If they powered it with coal-diesel instead of bio-diesel it would be greener...
And coal-diesel puts up 2x the emissions as normal diesel.
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Dave Schmetterer 4:50PM (10/20/2007)
Maybe the reality is applying it to the trucking or train industry? They use diesels now - I know that lots of small power plants are just jet engines... maybe a turbine driven series hybrid is just the thing for those larger applications.
Instead of calling out the limitations let's figure out where the greatest capabilities are.
- Dave
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GreyFlcn 7:04PM (10/20/2007)
Also the freight train industry already does series diesel hybrid engines.
And they have since around the 1930s.
Same goes for the drilling engines used for mining.
Electric engines are the only thing which can reach the consistant and powerful level of torque needed.
http://greyfalcon.net/torque.png
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Tony Belding 6:28PM (10/20/2007)
Turbines, in theory, have advantages for a series hybrid. They can be more efficient than piston engines, and they are easier to adapt to a wide range of fuels. They take a while to start up and don't like to be throttled, but in a series hybrid your batteries or capacitors will act as an energy buffer, so that shouldn't be much of a problem.
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why not the LS2/LS7? 3:28AM (10/21/2007)
Ed Begley, Jr. is the patron saint of green cars.
And this guy seems like a charlatan. That Hummer is not going to get 60mpg, he'll be lucky if it runs at all.
GreyFlcn:
Trains are (generally) not hybrids. They don't store any significant amount of electrical energy, they just use Diesel motors and generators to create the power to run electric traction motors. Also, only some of the mining equipment uses train-style (electric) power transmission, Caterpillar still makes direct-drive Diesel mining equipment even at the largest sizes.
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Hobbes 3:59PM (12/08/2008)
Alright, maybe optimistic, but the technological standpoint is sound. My only concern are the ostensibly complicated electronics setup here. The one that doesn't get mentioned. I assume he's got someone working on it, but he doesn't seem to have the qualifications to put that together himself. That being said, that's really not much of a hangup.
GreyFlcn 3:38AM (10/21/2007)
Does it need to have regenerative braking to be considered a hybrid?
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Tim 10:55AM (10/21/2007)
A hybrid uses two or more power sources to directly power the wheels. The Prius with it’s small electric helper motor used to recapture breaking energy is an example of a hybrid. Batteries, hydraulics and pneumatics have all been used for this purpose. Cylinder deactivation and engine stop-start technologies are not technically hybrids as the motive power always comes from the ICE.
Trains are series-diesel/electrics because they don’t use batteries to power the wheels. The Tesla is a 250 mile range Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV-250) and the Volt is a BEV-40 with an auxiliary power unit in an attempt to cover 82% of all commutes with grid power with a smaller and less expensive and lighter battery while still offering the security of a easily and quickly refillable auxiliary power source. The APU is a security blanket.
Hybrids don't have to have regenerative breaking to be considered hybrids, but it only makes sense to recapture momentum energy that would otherwise be lost as heat.
Using a turbine as an APU is not a new idea. GM killed it because of economies of scale were not present. The pace of change is increasing rapidly and E-Flex will make the turbine APU more attractive. Will GM revisit the idea? Who knows.
http://www.autoworld.com/news/GMC/Series_Hybrid.htm.
http://ev1-club.power.net/newsltr/vol2_1.htm
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T2 8:27PM (10/21/2007)
A hybrid uses two or more power sources to directly power the wheels.
Then you say Trains are series-diesel/electrics because they don’t use batteries to power the wheels.
@Tim "series-diesel/electrics" is a new term to me. AFAIK a series hybrid is the use of two energy forms to power motion. I don't think there is any requirement for them both to be energy sources. Even without batteries the diesel electric is still regarded as a hybrid powertrain. And for the record that means the series hybrid can come in more than one flavor. By the way an electric trolley bus has batteries so it can perform U-turns where overhead wiring doesn't permit, does the availability of two power sources now make it a hybrid ? I don't think so.
The Prius system could be made functional without the use of its expensive NiMH battery if there was the will. The current system only allows 10kw of regen. braking. Without this battery a superior replacement Regen braking system could utilise a braking resistor with a 50Kw 10 second rating instead. Finally MG1 is not a small helper motor in fact it provides 42Hp of energy to the main traction motor MG2. That's quite some help ! For comparison the Camry hybrid uses a 100Hp "helper" to power MG2. That's where some of the 105kw needed by MG2 is coming from. Impressive Eh!
This turbine is going to need some really good control algorithms it'll be interesting to see how this turns out.
T2
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smile 5:38AM (10/22/2007)
Kelley Blue Launches Enhanced New-Car Images, 360-Degree Views. 08/15/2007. Kelley Blue Book Co. Inc. announced the addition of enhanced new-vehicle photos
thank you
-------------------------------
http://blue-book-car.info
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Owen 10:04AM (10/22/2007)
Brett, This is a series hyrbid, so the lag in the turbine is irrelevant because the motors are providing the motivation.
The idea of turbines is not new at all, Chrysler tried it in the 60's for quite some time, but like someone previously stated, the economies of scale just weren't there. The Otto cycle engine was well entrenched and there was no real need for change, like todays oil market is necessitating. The nature of turbines do not make for good direct drivetrains in autos because of the lag, however, turbines are far more efficient than any engine in use in todays vehicles because they can achieve theoretical efficiencies greater than 50%, whereas any engine with cylinders can not. They also thrive at constant revs, suiting it perfectly for series applications. They can also be made very inexpensively (take a look at the RC market, there are many low volume producers of 20-40 HP turbines that can do it for under $1K.) And honestly they are very easy to repair as they are fairly simple machines.
And lastly the best benefit... They can burn just about anything.
Combining this with capacitors and motors is genious, and although he's not the first one to think of it, I hope he's the first one to pull it off and that it gains popularity as a great alternative for a range extender. Heck, maybe Chrysler should dig out it's old files and brush the dust off and come to market with it first.
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Curt 2:56PM (10/22/2007)
The first post listed here by Brett, is exactly why America is in this piss poor gasoline situation. Old Detroit has given us a box and said here, think about fuel consumption inside here. Well Brett, congratulations, you are doing just that. Johnathan Goodwin on the other hand, said no thanks, I have my own box! Let’s just hope he inspires the Brett's of the world to think on the positive side instead of the negative.
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Dr. Kenneth Noisewater 6:53AM (10/23/2007)
It would be nice to see a standardized "range extender" form-factor so you could have your choice of battery-charging options, whether they be ethanol Otto cycle HCCI, Stirling engine, turbojet running biodiesel/kerosene, fuel-cell stack, or other. Have the standard underlying platform be electric, and have the non-electric stuff be changeable depending on your needs.
Sort of how like most GM cars between the '50s and '80s could take the small-block V8, that size and configuration was standardized.
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