Regenerative shock absorber to bump up car energy capture capabilities
According to a team of mechanical engineers from Stony Brook University, only 10-16 percent of the fuel energy is used to drive the car during everyday usage – that is, to overcome the resistance from road friction and air drag and actually transport the vehicle forward. That amounts to a lot of energy being wasted. Hybrid cars recapture some of the energy usually lost in braking but the dissipation of vibration energy by shock absorbers in the vehicle suspension remains an untapped source of potential energy. To harvest this lost energy the researchers have designed and tested a shock absorber that can be retrofitted to cars to convert the kinetic energy of suspension vibration between the wheel and sprung mass into useful electrical power.
Unlike the regenerative shock absorber system designed by MIT researchers that uses the up and down movement of the suspension to drive an external hydraulic motor the mechanical engineers built and tested a 1:2 scale prototype that relies on magnetic flux to generate power, much like the Etive concept we looked at last year, which uses kinetic energy to charge mobile devices.
In the new regenerative shock absorber, rare-earth permanent magnets and high permeable magnetic loops are used to harvest energy and could help increase fuel efficiency and help cut pollution.
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