Animated Interactive demo of PSD

I ran across this page yesterday and was fascinated by the inner workings of the Power Split Device (PSD).

I also noticed that there was enough information there for me to put together an animation and working interactive demo of the PSD with controls for input from ICE and MG2, so I spent a couple hours putting it together in Maya and Flash. Here's the result (it's a flash 8 swf, so I can't show directly in the post ):

Power Split Device demo [edit: broken link removed]

If anyone has suggestions or technical corrections I'd happily entertain them, and I'd also be glad to hand it off for use on technical info pages like the one linked above. I've just been getting a kick out of playing with the sliders... trying to find pulse, glide, and dead-band settings with the sliders and seeing just when MG1 will change direcitons (as in hard acceleration from a stop or very slow roll).

[edit]
I've created a new version based on input from this thread, and I'm posting the new link here so you don't have to hunt for it I'll leave the old one up for a short while for comparison, but meanwhile, the new link is:

Toyota Prius - Power Split Device

 

Good suggestions.

I started with a slider for MG1, but realized that because it starts the ice and is used for regen it would be redundant with the ICE slider... seems like it would only add or subtract from the ICE speed, and the resulting animation would be the same as just increasing or decreasing ICE RPMs.

As for modes (EV, regen) and fuel economy, and speed feedback, there's a lot more that goes into making the HSD work than just this part, and I honestly don't know enough about it to realistically represent those things

But I might just add a "fuel consumption" bar that shows when more or less fuel is being used... which would just be the ICE slider position modified by the MG2 slider

 

I was just thinking about that Evan. I do like the idea of putting in a realistic representation of the relationship between those pieces, not just completely independent sliders...

I also considered adding a HSD-like display with arrows, but initially rejected that because of [a] lack of technical understanding and I thought it might be nice to keep this very abstract just to show how this one part works.

Now you're all gonna challenge me to make this VERY realistic, but that's what I get for posting here I'll do my homework and see if I can figure out how to make it work, but if you have links that might help, please post them.

If I listen to you guys I'll probably end up reverse-engineering the entire HSD. Just wait for the version with only a gas and brake pedal instead of sliders!

 

I guess that means you're SOL, because it is, as we say in Boston, WICKED AESOME!!! Seriously though, if you have any version of flash, you might as well get the latest version. And I think you can get extensions for Firefox that will selectively block things like SWF files, but allow you to see them when you choose to.

I read up a little on the nomograph, and I'm putting in some of those features now. I'll probably post a new version tomorrow. I'd love for this to be a useful tool for explaining the PSD. Wayne's site is a little too in-depth for the kind of help I want to provide to the average mechanidiot, and the only other demo like this that I've seen was very confusing and under-explained.

 

Thanks John, I've seen those pages before, and even that seemed overly complex when I thought a nice interactive piece might help people understand it faster.

From that page, and eagle's suggestion earlier I think I'm also going to add some buttons that will demo some specific modes of operation by setting the sliders automatically into a configuration, but still allow you to manually move the sliders around.

 

I have seen that demo, deh2k.

That was one of the ones that I thought was both too simplistic to be useful to technically-minded people, but too complex and ill-explained to be useful to simple-minded folk like us.

I've created v1.5 of my demo with some of the suggestions from this thread incorporated. I have yet to put in the Energy Monitor screen, but I think that will be fun and make this much more useful to the average Prius driver. Here's the new link:

Prius PSD demo v1.5

Take a look and let me know what you think!