Part of me wants to agree with Stu's assessment, but on the other hand, this
is a good approach to actually making a significant improvement in the basic
thermal efficiency of the gasoline engine. Since 1/3 of the BTUs in a given
quantity of gasoline go straight out the tailpipe, anything you can do to
recover part of that lost energy is significant. A turbogenerator that
extracted enough power to replace an alternator (let's say 1.5 kW - that's
130 amps at 12 volts) wouldn't be very big - it would probably be about the
size of an RHB5. For those of you that don't know, that's the turbo used in
the Suzuki Sprint, early Subaru Turbo's, and the Honda 500 Turbo bike. It's
about the size of two fists.
The article kind of goes off the deep end later though. They talk about
using the electrical power generated by a 6 kW version of this thing, to
(among other things) power an electrical supercharger. Hello? Why not just
use a mechanical turbocharger? An electric motor that is sufficiently large
to actually provide significant boost at high engine RPM would be BIG, and
the wiring and control system for it would likewise be big.
Theo
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