KERS = Kinetic Energy Recovery System. Various means of capturing some energy during braking then using it to help accelerate out of turns. IIRC Formula 1 never fully implemented used of any KERS device due to some chassis manufacturers complaining about the difficulty and expense of cramming such things into the small vehicles, and the practical limitations on how much energy could be captured in such small space in such little time, then released just as quickly. The impact on fuel use would have been quite minimal. The impact on mechanical complexity and thus potential lack of reliability could have been as bad as their early years of electronic controls in F1 when races often had the majority of the field retire due to computer failures.
F1 has a history of making a bunch of rule changes then making so many new changes the next year that the teams must go back to the CAD workstations and start over from scratch. When combined with the F1 rule makers keeping an ear to the ground for any whispers of competitive advantage concepts they don't like then pre-banning them before anyone has so much as started scribbling on a cocktail napkin - designing F1 race cars must be one of the most fascinating and maddeningly frustrating jobs ever. IIRC F1 banned KERS before anyone began development, then flip-flopped and insisted everyone was going to have to have KERS for "saving the planet"* or whatever, then flopped back on it when KERS was proving to be mostly pointless. *Which made as much nonsense as it did the year NASCAR shortened all their races in the 1970s to "save fuel". On Monday, April 26, 2021, 5:31:38 PM MDT, Gene Heskett <ghesk...@shentel.net> wrote: On Monday 26 April 2021 17:37:10 andrew beck wrote: > i have a friend that pulled apart a old 100+ kw vfd and collects caps. > > he has buckets of massive ones > > On Tue, Apr 27, 2021 at 9:02 AM Leonardo Marsaglia > <ldmarsag...@gmail.com> > > wrote: > > From what I could understand gene is using something similar to the > > old KERS used in Formula 1. I don't know if this is a common > > practice because it's really good idea. May be the only drawback is > > the cost of the capacitors and that's why we don't see this approach > > very often. > > KERS is an unk acronym to me. Yes, I do have quite a bank of caps in that psu but the cost was zip, came from an old employee I was told to fire 30 years ago, but his building skills were very useful when my door had a nameplate with Chief Engineer on it. I refused, and he had a job till we moved the transmitter in 2008. His navy pension isn't that much, so we get into a fight everytime I go raid his junkbox because I insist on paying him, IIRC that bank of huge caps, which have to be soft started else they'll trip a 30 amp breaker, cost me a $20 bill and I had to threaten him to get him to keep it. _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
