So here’s the pitch guys, and you’re all gonna have to promise me that you won’t run off to the patent office and make a mint off of these ideas, but then again most people seem to not believe some of these things are possible (but they’re also viewing it through the lens of a century of propulsive servitude). Basically, internal combustion is nearing the end of its century-long run. Biodiesel, fry oil, whatever, the idea of staying attached to a lipid substance that has to be gotten as a commodity from a certain supplier and can’t regenerate itself during transit just doesn’t work anymore. Hybrid vehicles are handy and gas-efficient, but they’re still gas-based and are relatively expensive (in the 30-40,000’s.) though they still don’t totally solve the problem of gas dependency or emissions.
What I’m proposing is an entirely electric conversion that I would like to do for my Sandtana motorhome. I found where I can get a damn good universal conversion kit from an American manufacturer for a little over 6,000 dollars. I’ve read that the most efficient e-car batteries apparently turn out not to be fancy Li-OH or NiMH, but actually old 6V golf cart batteries - 24 of 'em, in a series, producing a maximum output of 120V which the electric drive uses. So you’d have to have alot of space and available weight range, but that’s not really a problem since the electric drive effectively replaces your gas engine, automatic transmission, radiator, radiator reservoir, the whole nine combustion yards. It’s not actually recommended to convert a car that has an automatic transmission (like mine), since the losses are astronomical, but it can actually be effectively removed and the electric drive actually placed lower in the chassis to attach directly to the existing drive shaft (freeing up more space for batteries). Effectively, clutches and transmissions are redundant to an electric drive, since all speeds and modes of forward and reverse propulsion are handled within the motor and controlled by a simple lever or pad. Now, I have to admit that as it stands these battery systems don’t have a long life. As it stands, you’re lucky to get about 50-60 miles of use out of them per charge, with full voltage the whole time before it starts dying. These kits hit highway speeds easily - Here’s a Chevy S10 kit that goes 75mph no sweat. But I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here so far.
Now, the conundrum with electric cars right now is this battery life, which many scientists are fighting to improve through fuel cells or whatever-have-you. This is one solution, but in my opinion an ultimately unnecessary one. Why get into all sorts of toxic chemical models and advanced storage when these little 6V beauties still do the trick? The solution as far as I can see to available drive-time is not actually more or higher-density batteries, but the ability to re-charge those batteries during operation of the vehicle. The most common thing I see throughout all these e-machines and conversions, for whatever dumbstruck reason, is that they make little to no attempt to gather back any of the precious kinetic energy that’s being devoted to all this forward drive motion. Why this is the case, on any kind of electric-drive vehicle (including e-bikes), is something of a mystery to me, something I’ve asked others with interest, and the very stumbling-block that’s gotten me dismissed and called a kook basically.
Basically, my idea is to make liberal straightforward use of Faraday’s laws, and all that precious spinning motion of a moving vehicle, to help charge that vehicle. It seems almost too simple, too good to be true. All you would really have to do is make a circular kind of attachment, fitted radially with bar ceramic magnets, to attach to the inside of your hubs (2 or all 4), and then some kind of free-floating housing attached to the car body, suspension or axle that would be lined with sufficient copper coiling so as to re-gain significant energy from that spinning disk of magnetic force. This wouldn’t slow down the car, and it wouldn’t affect the drive whatsoever because it’s not even close. The weight effect of the magnetic disk would be negligible and would actually generate centrifugal momentum because of the radial positioning. All generated electricity (which I think might be quite a lot) would go directly into the batteries. I am not proposing a perpetual energy machine! That’s a big stumbling block. I don’t even want to try to prove a perpetual motion machine. All I’m discussing, is making actual use of the physically-spinning surfaces of an automobile, in order to generate enough power to significantly extend the operating life of that automobile - in effect, to gain back as much kinetic force as possible. I originally thought this up for the front wheel of a bicycle with an e-bike conversion, but it theoretically applies to any moving vehicle. Why there has simply been no attempt to gain power back from the fastest-moving surface in a given vehicle, the actual spinning wheels, for so long is beyond me. The experts seem to take the idea and generally dismiss it as perpetual-motion and thus impossible before even drawing it up. But anyway, there it is. This design of electric generator is totally pheasable and allowed by Faraday’s laws, and actually has a patented precedent - it’s called a claw pole generator. It may actually look like a brushless motor, and in fact the configuration is almost exactly the same - you might even be able to reverse the leads on a BM in order to create this kind of generator. In fact, if a certain density of electromagnetic coiling can force radially-aligned ceramic magnets to spin at a certain speed, then logically once those magnets are spinning at that speed the same density EM coiling on a separate generating surface might be able to gather back nearly the same amount of electric energy it put to the magnets, with some losses. If you could machine or get someone to machine a brake drum that was embedded with these ceramic magnets, you could remove the power braking mechanisms and densely coil the existing housing. You would then connect that to your charge feed, but also to a switch connected to the brake pedal to reverse the charge going to the electric coiling in the brake housing, having the slowing effect on the magnets of a motor going in reverse before causing a magnetic attraction that would close the gap between the pads and the drum and thereby stopping the car very quickly… That’s another issue in e-car conversions as well, replacing the power braking from the engine vaccuum, but now we’ve killed two birds with one stone.
- Break for allowable post length.
