Quote:
Originally Posted by LostInMoscow
Having spent 4 years of my life learning about electricity in engineering school, one of the tortures of graduation was learning everything that you never wanted to know about electric motors. Suffice it to say that you can wind an electric motor in a fashion to blow away just about any fossil fuel motor in existance today in the 1/4 mile. If you created a car with a battery, a power control system and a motor on each wheel, and the right combination of know how, you would be pushing 300 MPH in the 1/4. The car would be very very light in comparison to any other car since you would have no drivetrain other than cables and a battery only big enough to go 1/4 mile.
Is that a practical every day car? No way! But, don't underestimate electric motors for performance. You can do amazing things with them, as the industrial world already knows.
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That would require several thousand kilowatts, for a span of a few seconds. That still works out to a few kilowatt hours of battery, which would would probably weigh 100-200 lbs, give or take. For an internal combustion drag car, the fuel cell only weighs a few pounds.
Then there is the electric motor itself. I don't know of any electric motors that pump out thousands of horsepower that are particularly light weight, though I'm sure some of that is because most such engines are industrial units and don't have a reason to be light. Never the less, the power to weight ratio for electric doesn't scale up all that well, at least in comparison to combustion engines. A 5000 hp internal combustion race engine doesn't really weigh that much more than a 500 hp engine. And since it has to haul around all those batteries, the electric motor would have to weigh substantially less than the ICE, and to do so it would have to have a power to weigh ratio on the order of 10 hp/lb. To my knowledge, they're not even halfway there yet.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BigDan
^ What if it didn't have to rely on stored energy like a battery but something like overhead power like a street car or bumper car or 1/2 mile extension cord. Just an idea for quickest ET
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That would help, but there is more of a problem with the motors than the battery for such a short race.