Toyota Self Charging Hybrid Works

 

Atkinson cycle internal combustion engine connected to a planetary gearbox which in turn is connected to two electric motors. An Atkinson cycles is a special engine setup that lets the intake valve be held open a little longer than it would be on a standard internal combustion engine. This allows the engine to be little more efficient in its running at the expense of a little bit of power window. Toyotas HSD does everything it can to keep the car’s engine running in that narrow power band at low speeds it takes any excess power made by running the engine at its optimum speed and captures it using are or both of electric motors. They that then turn that energy into electricity which is then stored in a small battery pack as chemical energy for later use when the car is driving very slowly and the battery pack is enough charge the car uses just the electric motors to power itself along switching off the entire combustion engine when is drained the engine kick back in and recharges the battery pack and at periods of really high power demand like accelerating or climbing the steep hill at speed the engine and electric motors work in unison to push the car along provided of course there’s enough charge in the battery pack. If the car us plug in hybrid like the Toyota Prius prime, there’s an onboard charger that can be used to charge the car’s battery pack as well when the batter is empty the HST reverts to using its gasoline engine and then operates like regular hybrid. Hybrids do charge themselves or rather they use power from the internal combustion engine to charge the car’s battery pack but in order to do that they’re not creating energy. They’re turning the chemical energy from petrol into kinetic energy inside the engine that kinetic energy is then transformed to electrical engine inside the motor and then to chemical energy inside the battery pack. In order to do this however, there are a lot of energy losses in the system, and you still need to provide to the system for those all to happen petrol or if you prefer gasoline. Toyota’s simply cashing in on the electric car trend by renaming its hybrid drivetrain as being self-charging and its on the electric car.