KERS Dangers

[Belatti]

Grand Lake Native, I´ll try to answer some

1. Since the car is made up of large amounts of resin encased carbon fiber is it not a good electrical conductor?
I really really dunno. May paint conduct electricity?

2. The spinning fly wheel on the KERS system sitting next the magnetic field surrounding the engine and spinning at 19k rpm, will it not itself generate electricity or static electricity?
The fly wheel will spin at 65k rpm and its enclosed in a vacumm chamber that will also prevent it to literaly "explode".

3. Since the engine and the KERS in a formula one car are a structural member of the car, that is the engine is a load bearing member of the car, would not that allow for the electrical current stored in the KERS to be directly transfered to the carbon fiber body of the car?
There may be 2 types of KERS:
1. Electrical energy stored
2. Mechanical energy stored
If our case is No 1, current generated in a electrical moto-generator should be stored in a battery and then backwards when used, to the electrical moto-generator. That should be electrically isolated as a standard electrical motor/coils/battery system is.

4. A guy from NASA last night on TV said that a car is a capacitor traveling on insulators, is this not true?
True, more than once I served as a conductor between a car and the ground. Not a nice surprise, not a big shock anyways.

[Ray]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzaQ-t1ojPU[/youtube]

Looks pretty damn dangerous to me. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near one of those cars. Even if you ground them in the pits and when they pull up to parc ferme, the driver will ground the car out if he has to stop on track for a failure or a spin. And what about the marshalls?

One thing they could do is to use that stored electricity for running the lights at night races. Think about it. Contact strips on the ground in each sector for the cars to dump that stored energy into a cap and they could augment the power systems for the lights. Just a thought.

[WhiteBlue]

I would not over emphasise the BMW testing accident. This was a very early prototype which may not have had all the safeties on board and could have had a wiring fault. As I said before fuel storage in F1 in its early days was much more dangerous than what we see in the development of this technology.

[andartop]

i think you guys got it all wrong. this has nothing to do with KERS. it is BMW testing their new "dog repellent" system, as advertised on April 1st 2008 in the papers. it is just a publicity stunt!

[pipex]

I think that the situation is actually an overreaction. In this kind of systems, a virtual ground is used for reference, similar to the systems found in an airplane i think. When faced with this kind of systems, there are some problems because it's not standard practice to deal with this systems and this kind of problems of using a floating ground occurs. In addition there are a lot of problems and considerations when using power electronics, because at high conmutation frequencies, capacitances that are not important in the electrical model at low frecuencies (< 60Hz) are of extreme importance.
I think that ultracapacitors are incorrectly refered to as batteries by the media, as said before. Batteries are not suitable for this application i think for they low power density and they slow charge rates (we are talking about 300+ Amps charging current for a very quick time, in this condition they would blow), or at least is what i know. Or maybe there are superbatteries out there, i don't know. F1 always impresses us .
I don't think there would be any EMI related problem that couldn't be resolved, so the surrounding magnetic fields are not important IMHO. Also, if only a spinning flywheel is used instead of a electric system, there would be no important induced magnetic fields.
To solve the discharge problem, there should be something like a bleeding resistor, or braking resistor (in classical literature) that should be used to "bleed" the excess energy of the capacitor bank in case of an accident or in this case, parking.
If there is some error in what i said, please correct me .

regards

[pgj]

I have concerns about KERS safety too. I do not propose that world will come to a terrible end if KERS is used, but the dangers really do have to be addressed. I do not expect to see a repeat of the BMW incident. That was a one off IMO that can be countered with specialist equipment. My concern is for the safety of the marshals and the safety of drivers if they are involved in a heavy collision.

No one wants to see marshals being injured or unable to approach a burning car with the driver still on-board. Other suggestions have been suggested involve marshals having some kind of discharge device. Again the thought of watching as marshals struggle to render a car safe is abhorrent.

As long as the technology is safe, it should be a bit of fun. Although, I would still rather see refuelling banned, but that is another thread!

[nudge]

Also, the voltages generated in the KERS system are NOT 24V, not by a long way.
Try 300-400V.

PitLaneImmigrant

i think even thats an under estimate... id expect to be in the high hundreds. And i think they will be using some variety of lithium battery. i dont think you can use capacitors.
what was scarey about the bmw incident (i resisted temptation to say shocking) was that inspite of what the high profile engineers say about how confident they are...the guy on a first test of a very dangerous system wasnt even wearing gloves when he touched the car, without it having being grounded. that would worry the hell out of me if i were a test team mechanic.
And thats the problem. people assume that because this is formula one, the engineers know what they are doing, that they are experts ... BMW showed that they didnt even have a grasp of the risks taking a system like that out on the track for the first time.
This is extremely dangerous stuff going on. The risk of someone dying is unexceptably high in my opinion.