"Ya canna change the laws of physics, Captain!" But this does sound suspiciously like the same technology GM has been working on for their large truck Hybrid project.
"It's simple, all you do is change the gravitational constant of the universe." If this is just recapturing energy during braking into a pressure vessel, this isn't new. Flywheels, high-pressure gas, super capacitors - none of this is new.
The Video seems to show the current storage vessel to be rather small. They seem to use up its load rather quickly.
Hi All, Because hydraulic pumps are constant displacement, they can recoup energy that is high torque and low rpm. Whereas electric motors are the opposite, since they act on dB/dt, they need high rpm to be effective. In the Prius this is mitigated by the having the motor at twice the voltage of the battery, and trick reverse operation of the voltage doubler that Hobbit has described. With the braking efficiency gauge on the mycanscan, its very easy to see that braking needs to be a little more agressive to get good efficiency in the Prius. One thing I noticed, is that when efficiency was good, you could hear the motor noise as the car slowed down. Still, its not super heavy braking, just a little more than I was used to in traffic. And as indicated by a Toyota engineer, as you slow, increasing brake pedal pressure increases the regereneration efficiency. And maintains the motor noise level. While the Prius Gen II has greatly improved on the energy recovery issue, there is still some ways to go. And the heavier the vehicle, the more important this is. This is probably why Fed Ex and UPS are running 100's of vehicles trials of a hydraulic hybrid system right now. The Prius works best at higher RPMs to recover energy, as anybody who had gone down a long on ramp at 40 mpg with the foot off the gas pedal knows. That will bump up the SOC faster than anything else.
for heavy stop and go traffic, even a modest boost will greatly increase the mileage. it would not be a system designed to store enough energy for any range or speed. it would just be used to help the vehicle get going from a standing start... look at toy cars, the ones that are spring loaded, roll em backwards a bit and then they spring forward going much farther forward then they went backwards... same principle.
