Would this car idea work?

[SZR48207]

So to preface, I'm curious if this would work. Part of me says the laws of physics would negate the effect, but it has been a very long time since I took a physics course.

The general idea is that you'd build a car that had a single or dual inlets in the front of the car. These inlets would reduce into tubes that went toward the back of the vehicle and into a turbine that is connected to the drive wheels via a clutch-controlled chain or belt. There would be an adequately sized outlet so that you were able to get the turbine spinning quickly enough while maintaining inward flow of air. The faster you go, the more air is being funneled in and the more energy you provide to the drive wheels.

As this concept cannot move a car at a standstill, you would still have a small fuel efficient engine to simply get the car moving.

I drew a crude sketch of it using a template I found on google images.

 

[eljefino]

Perpetual motion machine. You'd make a mint if you could figure it out.

But the ram air going in will equal the thrust you get out, then account for friction/ drag and you have a net loss.

 

[SZR48207]

Originally Posted By: eljefino
Perpetual motion machine. You'd make a mint if you could figure it out.

But the ram air going in will equal the thrust you get out, then account for friction/ drag and you have a net loss.


Do you mean the energy it would take to get the turbine spinning would negate any energy that could transfer to the drive wheels?

 

[Astro14]

I'm with eljefino - your tube and turbine create drag. Add the frictional losses, and the drag they create exceeds any energy they would add to the car.

 

[HerrStig]

THe only to get anything positive out of that plan would be to heat the air so that it expands as in a jet engine. The P 51 Mustang ( a piston powered aircraft) generated extra thrust from raming cold air into the radiator under the aircraft which heated it enough to cause it to exhaust at high speed. There's no free lunch, energy has to go IN to get thrust out.

 

[datech]

YEs there must be a fuel injector and ignitor for it to work.

 

[Oro_O]

Frank Whittle had this idea in the '30s. It was brilliant. In current iteration it's called a "high-bypass turbofan." Two of these units, when refined, along with a few bottles of gin and some stewardesses in skirts, will get you from London to Bombay PDQ.

So you basically just re-invented the jet engine, but in a very inefficient form. The power required from your auxiliary engine would be so enormous in order to generate sufficient air pressure to turn the turbine to power the wheels as to be not an "auxilliary" motor but rather a really large hunk o'machinery. So in reality this is a turbo prop in theory.

 

[KrisZ]

Without adding fuel and igniting it, this thing will be just adding extra drag and weight and will definitely not transfer power to the wheels, more like the wheels would transfer power to the fan, if you got moving that is.

 

[exranger06]

The law of conservation of energy states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. It can only be converted from one form to another. A conventional car uses the stored potential energy in gasoline and converts it into kinetic energy by burning it. (It also takes a lot of that potential energy and converts it to heat energy, which goes to waste out the radiator and exhaust). Then when you step on the brakes and come to a stop, you no longer have kinetic energy from the car moving. So where did that energy go? Like I said, energy cannot be destroyed. The answer: It was converted to heat. That's why the brakes get hot.

With all that in mind, it's easy to see why this turbine idea would never work. You would be taking the kinetic energy from the car moving to spin the turbine. Then you want to use the kinetic energy from the spinning turbine to move the car. It's a circular reference.