Jaguar-Land Rover to develop F1-style energy recovery tech

Reg Hardware has never really shared Formula One President Max Mosley's belief that the Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS) technology that will be allowed in the sport from this year will filter down to road cars. Just goes to show how wrong we can be. Today, Lancashire-based transmission expert Torotrak announced it is …

[Anonymous Coward]

ooh err missus

What a bunch of F1 KERS

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad...

...that F1 is now essentially a spec series - A1GP with a little more power. It appears that Bernie and Max won't be satisfied until they've completely eviscerated 100 years of motorsport tradition, and relegated Grand Prix racing to the same category as Big Brother and WWE.

KERS is nothing more than a gimmick, heavily regulated and effectively a spec system from the get-go. Mosley has apparently been addled by the whippings and goose-stepping, because he's claiming on the one hand to want to foster innovation and technology development, while on the other turning F1 into a kind of glorified template league like NASCAR.

I'm sure that drivers like Clark and Senna would have been proud to give their lives to drive in a series with push-to-pass buttons, spec engine power, and a promoter salivating to sell out every historical race to the oil-rich potentate du jour. Right.

[Steve]

flywheels

I can see an interesting side effect for F1, since for a given track the cars are almost always turning in the same direction (left or right). The gyroscopic precession effects of the flywheel could be used to make up for the reduced wing size now permitted.

Not sure it would be so good on a road car, though...

[Pete James]

Shop shutters rattle down

It's a good to read that JLR are working on developing some limited hybrid ideas to cut emmissions, although my sources indicate this is part of a wider project that also involves Ricardo, so there's more in the pipeline to come.

[Will]

where da pic?

I only click leccy tech articles for the pic

[Geoff Johnson]

But will it have stupid rules?

The F1 rules seem to have been designed to prevent innovation in the KERS system. It's limited to 82BHP and is only allowed to be used for for 6.8 seconds per lap. So, apart from tweaking the size and weight, there's no technical innovation allowed.

Maybe Bernie doesn't have shared in the right companies to make it worth his while.

</RANT>

[spam]

KERS system could result in fuel efficiency being increased by between 20 and 30%

KERS recovers energy which would otherwise end up as heat in my car brakes.

When I think of the size, air flow around, and temperatures of my car engine and radiator and exhaust system and compare it with the size, air flow and temperatures (barley warm a lot of the time) of my brake discs I am expected to believe 20 to 30% of the energy my car uses ends up in the brakes?

I don't think so, not even close. For most cars and most usage I doubt a KERS system would recover enough energy to justify lugging around the extra weight never mind the cost.

Buses on start/stop town routes? Maybe, just.

KERS in F1 is just greenwash to fool the stupid.

[John Smith]

fuel efficiency increased by 20-30 in a road car

I suppose I'm just easily impressed but knocking 1/5 to 1/3 off your cars fuel bill sounds pretty good to me.

Still petrol prices have gone down a lot recently so whose bothered. Unless they go up again.

I think even knocking off 2/3 of the potential to allow for corporate BS a 6-10% reduction would still be quite good.

[Jon Hulatt]

Ca$h recovery?

Perhaps they should focus on some cash recovery tech instead. So they're still in business next year, like.

[Ben Pope]

30% Efficiency gains...

...but only if you drive your road car in F1 driver mode... i.e., hard on the accelerator after hard on the brakes. I doubt the typical urban cycle would see such efficiency improvements. Nice to see that optimism still prospers in these hard times, I suppose.

Paris, because she likes to be driven hard.

[Bruce Hoult]

This is only the beginning

The KERS systems being used in F1 this year are almost insignificant on an F1 car -- they are by regulation limited to 60 KW charge or discharge rate, for a maximum of about seven seconds (400 KJ capacity, to be precise). That's fairly small when you have a petrol engine putting out 600 KW as well.

But for conventional cars it is quite a lot of energy. It's enough to accelerate a small car from 0 to about 70 km/h using the KERS alone. It's about one third of the battery capacity of a Prius, but a flywheel will take vastly more charge/discharge cycles than a battery will -- and at far higher rates too.

If this year's F1 experiment is successful and safe then they will allow larger amount of energy to be stored in later years. That's when it becomes really exciting for road cars, but even this year's units are quite a useful size for stop/go city driving in smallish cars.

[Richard Lea]

Ferrari

I know pretty much for a fact that Sony and Ferrari started collaboration in this way over 16 months ago? Have to say would be quite funny to see a Porsche, Ferrari even a Range Rover beat the congestion charge

[Alistair]

Been tried before

The flywheel type of KERS has been tried before in busses and so on. It sort of works but you need a big heavy flywheel running very fast to be any good, which makes it both expensive and difficult to use, and the added weight puts it at a disadvantage.

Maybe it can be made to work better with some very clever computer controls that those F1 transmission jonnies have proven themselves so good at.

But surely the best way forward is to have electrical (battery) storage for recovered kinetic energy in an electric/hybrid vehicle.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me???

Or does mechanical energy storage just sound stupid...

Difficult mechanisms for energy input and output and maintaining a flywheel with all its forces in a moving vehicle just sounds dangerous..

I'd prefer batcaps...

[Andy]

to spam

yes, the amount of heat and size of radiator is due to the internal combustion engine's poor efficiency. Approx. 30% of the available energy (and that is being generous) is actually extracted from the fuel and turned into motion. the rest is lost as heat through the cooling system, exhaust, etc. etc.

according to newtons laws of motion, a body will only slow down when acted on by a force in the opposing direction to motion... in the case of the car, be it wind resistance (negligable) , transmission drag (meh) , or, your brakes (fairly effective - i hope).

so all the energy used to push you forwards, has become the momentum of the car, and is dumped into your brakes in order to stop, and dispelled as heat. (assuming a non-skid scenario).

so, if they are claiming about 30% of the energy lost through braking is reclaimed, that roughly equates to 10% of the original fuel energy used, and so i would guess they can claim a corrisponding 10% increase in fuel efficiency? yes? no?

year 3 maths lesson over. jesus christ. someone get this guy some crayons.