Friday, January 8, 2010

Hybrid Cars

Gasoline-electric Hybrid Car (Combined Battery and Gasoline powered car)

WHAT'S INSIDE THE HOOD that makes the hybrid car fuel efficient and low emissions?
A gasoline-electric hybrid car composed of the following structure:
Electric motor - this motor acts as motor and generator

Generator - this is similar to electric motor but only produce electrical power

Batteries - Batteries in hybrid cars acts as the storage device for powering the electric motor.The electric motor puts and withdraws energy from this battries

Gasoline engine - like most of the conventional cars, hybrid cars use also gasoline engine but just have different design.

Fuel tank

Transmission - the same basic function as the transmission on a conventional car.
Electric motor and Gasoline engine Teamup

Parallel hybrid - on this combination, the cars has a fuel tank that supplies gasoline to the engine and a set of batteries that supplies power to the electric motor. Both the engine and the electric motor can turn the transmission at the same time, and the transmission then turns the wheels.

The batteries and electric motor also connect to the transmission independently. As a result, in a parallel hybrid, both the electric motor and the gas engine can provide propulsion power.

series hybrid - on this setup the gasoline engine turns a generator, and the generator can either charge the batteries or power an electric motor that drives the transmission. Thus, the gasoline engine never directly powers the vehicle.

Below are some hybrid car products made by Honda and Toyota


Honda Civic Hybrid








Toyota Prius



Thinnest and Powerful Battery(made from algae)



Can you imagine battery which is as thin as paper to power up your gadgets? Scientists from all over the world trying to develop thin, flexible, lightweight, inexpensive, environmentally friendly batteries built totally from nonmetal parts. Conducting polymers are among the most promising materials for these batteries but until now this hasn’t been quite likely because they couldn’t hold a charge for a long position.

A green algae known as Cladophora seems to be the explanation for this new battery. This plant can be found on beaches all over the world



Cladophora is a hairlike freshwater plant and causes bad-looking, bad-smelling beaches – maybe you’ve had the unconscious opportunity of meeting her. Cladophora is an alga characterized by producing a kind of cellulose with a very large surface area (of course, in its microscopic details). Scientists say it has 100 times the surface of the cellulose found in paper.



If you have such a wide surface, then it’s easier to understand you can put more conducting polymer on it, and have it recharged. Not only the battery’s capacity will be enhanced, but also its lifetime, since the power is distributed over that huge surface.

A nanotechnologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, Maria Strømme, declared: “We have long hoped to find some sort of constructive use for the material from algae blooms and have now been shown this to be likely.” She continued: “This creates new potential for large-scale production of environmentally friendly, cost-effective, lightweight energy storage systems.”

“This creates new possibilities for large-scale production of environmentally friendly, cost-effective, lightweight energy storage systems.”They new Cladophora-based A1078’s polymer layer is very thin: 40 to 50 nanometers, and its own cellulose fibers are only 20 to 30 nm, so they were collected into paper sheets.

The charging capacity battery is extreme compared to present batteries we are using now: the Cladophora paper battery could hold 50 to 200 percent more charge than usual conducting polymer batteries. Once optimized, the scientists say, they could even surpass the capacity of lithium batteries.