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SI - Site Forums : Silicon Investor - Legacy Interface Discussion (2004-2011) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Biomaven who wrote (2654)	11/24/2004 1:41:54 PM
From: SI Bob	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6035

I don't have even a tenuous grasp on the engineering of such things, but it seems to me that if you have a turbine on the front with about half the frontal area of the car itself (gotta let some air get through the radiatior), the part of the car behind the turbine (actually, I'm thinking more squirrel cage since it's a more car-friendly shape) is running in a vacuum or nearly so. Properly designed (as in not just putting a big ol' windmill on the front), wouldn't it be possible to have a fan or turbine make zero change to drag. I would think that it'd be possible to harness some wind power from the front of a car without increasing the car's drag. If the unmovable paint and metal have to shove the wind aside, why not let the wind shove an impeller aside, instead. An even simpler application (at least one I'd be able to test far more easily) would be to replace a truck's tailgate with a pair of fans driving a generator. Lotta wind hitting that tailgate. Seems to me that a 100% efficient set of fans would have zero effect on drag and if they're less than 100% efficient, that's just less drag. In much the same way my fuel economy goes up quite a bit without my tailgate. Except in this case, rather than letting the tailgate wastefully resist all that wind, getting a little bit of juice from it.