A/C condenser protection?

Post by **acmotor** » Thu, 09 Jan 2014, 00:15

Good to see you are keeping busy Bruce

I trust the R&D team at Mitsubishi went for laser printed text on their fan blade.

Is the fan Volts linear with air speed ?
Looking forward to your final grill selection.

Post by **CometBoy** » Thu, 09 Jan 2014, 20:31

Ok here are the results from the Grill-O—Meter on four different style grills. Briefly the best grill from my tests for the i-MiEV would be NO grill. Acmotor is spot on in early comments about basically any form of grill restricting airflow to a reasonable degree. Kind of interesting to test.... I falsely assumed I could achieve something under 5% but not so in the end. The best grill in my tests (open plastic style) still had a 25% reduction in airflow.

The Grill-O-Meter mounted

The four grills selected for testing in the end

The final results

The winner but still %25 reduction @ 60km/h!

My favourite but really unusable....

Fun exercise! And I have now removed the flyscreen from the VW T4 campervan frontend and will only use it when really necessary on the open road.

Bruce

Post by **Johny** » Thu, 09 Jan 2014, 20:42

Nice. Useful data not just for iMiev drivers.

Post by **BigMouse** » Thu, 09 Jan 2014, 21:30

That open plastic grille actually looks pretty good in there!

Post by **weber** » Mon, 13 Jan 2014, 22:31

Hey, why not hook the fan up to help charge your batteries? In fact if you mount a big enough wind generator on the roof of the car you'd never need to stop to charge!

Sorry. I couldn't help myself. I had a solar power system customer ask me today if she could use some solar panels and batteries to pump water from her bottom dam to her top dam a kilometre away and then run it back again through a turbine to generate electricity. It was hard to keep a straight face while calmly trying to explain.

Seriously, CometBoy, I tips me hat to yer. I love to see examples of low cost improvised ways of doing real science. That improvised anemometer gave you just enough evidence to make your decision, at the lowest possible cost.

It brings to mind the time Jack Rickard made fun of Coulomb and I for using random bits of copper wire in a bucket of water as our dummy load for testing lithium cells at high discharge rates.
http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/sh ... 08p21.html

Six months later he admitted we were right, but not in so few words and not on the same forum.
http://evtv.projectooc.com/index.php?showid=5 (about 8 paragraphs from the end).

Post by **offgridQLD** » Mon, 13 Jan 2014, 23:06

"
Sorry. I couldn't help myself. I had a solar power system customer ask me today if she could use some solar panels and batteries to pump water from her bottom dam to her top dam a kilometre away and then run it back again through a turbine to generate electricity. It was hard to keep a straight face while calmly trying to explain.

I do get where your cumming from and while a basic understanding of physics and the various laws and numbers involved can make a lot of peoples ideas look real silly.

This one springs to mind

and

Though the customers idea of the pumped hydro isn't a physics fantasy it's actually quite common and can be useful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-sto ... lectricity

Even on a small scale. Pumped hydro can be usefull living offgrid when you have full battery's on float and excess PV energy going to wast. If you have the land and elevation head to build a pumped hydro then having your charge controller trigger a pump when your on float and pumping water up hill during the day using otherwise wasted energy (PV would just be idle if not) Pumping to a large holding tank then letting it run back through a turbine to a lower holding tank overnight is a way to get a few kwh back into your battery and lower your DOD overnight. Sure its not efficient but if the PV was just going to sit idle anyhow.

More handy for the good old days of lead acid and all the obsessing over low DOD and cycle life. But the concept is still viable.

The 1000m distance in the two dam example would make it cost prohibitive though. Personally I have a 80m head just 10m from my house and good mono pump that I already own so I was considering pumped hydro at one stage before the EV solved the excess pv output issue. Well that and getting the 25,000lt tank to the bottom of the leach infested hill without using a chinook helicopter.

Sure there are other things you could do with the excess pv output like heat water or better still what I do (charge my EV

)

Kurt

Post by **weber** » Tue, 14 Jan 2014, 04:22

New Pumped Hydro topic started to stop the drift in this thread.
viewtopic.php?p=48788&t=4023#p48788