Recently I saw an video of a guy taking an electric power steering pump from a c30 to be used in another car for a belt driven PS pump replacement.
People commonly do the fan replacement for efan to release some HP amongst other reasons. Would it be possible or worth while to, replace PS pump for electric, air conditioning for electric compressor and efan to release more HP?
In a 240 for example.
I realise the alternator might need to be beefed up because of extra power demands.
Thoughts?
Cheers
Cheers
Electric pumps & air con
Electric ancillaries are more about emissions & not needing to use as many hydrocarbons to run them when they’re not needed … ie. can be turned off ‘cos they’re electric. For max power, I doubt there’s much gain to be had … you might measure a kilowatt on a dyno, maybe, but you won’t feel it when driving.
People also go electric power steering to make room for a supercharger.
As above, probably not worth the effort for what power you'll gain. A good service may net more benefit.
It would be difficult to justify the work, complexity, and expense of changing those things to electric unless there's significant gains to be had from weight loss, system efficiency, or space. How much current are the electric replacements going to draw? And, how much more efficient is the electric replacement device over the mechanically driven one, if at all?
AFAIC, that's what it comes down to.
Other improvements in technology aside, usually you can just count the number of times you have some kind of energy state change, the higher the number the harder it is to win the efficiency race.
Electric power steering has a distinct advantage over hydraulic in that it can be packaged much more compactly, and for modern cars also plays nicely with assistive technologies that want to make direct inputs to the steering, whereas to retain a hydraulic rack you would need to still add electric servos to have those features. So why have both when you can just drive it all with one electric unit, and have the electric unit be simpler and smaller and cheaper to manufacture and more flexible in its packaging. Electric also allows for all sorts of other modern fanciness, like you can dynamically control steering feedback.
A/C is a heat exchanger system, so however you approach it, you have to compress gas. If you drive a compressor with the engine directly, you are burning fuel, producing kinetic energy, and then using that to energise the refrigerant. If you had an electrically-driven compressor, you burn fuel, produce kinetic energy, convert that into electrical energy via the alternator, then convert it back into kinetic energy using the compressor motor, then use that to energise the refrigerant. It's the same but with more steps, which usually means more entropy.
The case for electric AC in an ICE vehicle is that you can operate the compressor fairly independently of the engine. This means you can amortise the load of the compressor, and maybe exploit different driving modes (e.g. you could load down the alternator on decel, similar to regenerative braking, and unload temporarily when you want max engine performance).
But, modern compressors have already thought of this, and modern cars these days tend to all use variable displacement compressors. This means the ECU can exercise fine-grain control over the compressor load based on cabin demand and engine demand.
jamesinc I'm happy to say I got through all of that and only reached for the dictionary once, amortise??!. Lol.
Interesting, I can see both sides of the pros and cons.
I guess the idea of freeing up some space in the engine bay is what would be of most interest to me. For the clean look and extra room for a supercharger. I'm still intrigued enough to find out more..
- Edited
You need an alternator that can handle the load, if you’re running all these ancillaries off the electrickle system.
It doesn’t necessarily save space THAT much, but it does mean more flexibility in terms of where you can put stuff - doesn’t need to be run from a drive-belt off the crank.