UBC engineering students raced to recover energy wasted when vehicles grind to a halt in a competition Thursday at the Fred Kaiser Building. As part of a second-year course led by mechanical engineering instructor Peter Ostafichuk, students worked in teams for the past four weeks to design and construct model vehicles that incorporate regenerative brakes, which recovers, stores, and reuses energy that would otherwise be lost when bringing the vehicle to a stop. Regenerative brakes are currently outfitted in hybrid vehicles such as the Toyota Prius and are estimated to recover 20-50 per cent of the energy wasted when braking. Model cars were released from the top of an elevated test course and must use energy recovered from braking at the bottom of the slope to complete the rest of the racetrack. Winners were also judged on their ability to travel efficiently over long distances, to stop reliably and to use regenerative braking to propel the vehicle after stopping.
I haven't heard much lately about the hydraulic accumulator system which could be incorporated on all vehicles but was especially more practical in large vehicles driven in mainly stop and go areas. Essentially a hydraulic motor and its accumulator are coupled with the drive train and controlled through the brake pedal much like the Prius's . The hydraulic accumulator would store a large amount of energy used from a deceleration and then release that energy from the accumulator back into the drive train when accelerating. I wasn't sure if it was economically practical but keep in mind a 50,000 plus truck coming to a stop even from 30 or 40 MPH requires a dump of a tremendous amount of waste heat from the brakes, a large amount of energy to get that vehicle up to speed, and that is not even taking account the maintenance and upkeep of these massive braking systems which would be saved from a lot of wear if such a system was implemented. Rick #4 2006
