It is actually a very good idea.
All the movement in shock absorbers are ultimately damped in the damper.
And guess what - damper's job is to dissipate mechanical movement into heat.
Which means it is lost.
The catch is:
Quote:
For a heavy truck, with six of their prototype shock absorbers fitted to it, they could generate up to an average of 1 KW per shock absorber on a standard road.
|
For a heavy truck - weighing some multitude of tonnes - requiring 100-200 kW of engine power - one is able to save only about 5kW.
So doing some very elementary calculations:
1. results in saving of about 5kW for 10 tons
2. my car is about 1 ton, therefore my saving will be 0.5kW
3. petrol calorific value is 44 kJ/gram. Petrol density is about 0.750 g/ml, therefore calorific value = 33 kJ/ml
4. which means I will save about 0.015 ml of petrol per second.
5. but since petrol engine is inefficient - i will actually save about 5 times more than that (assuming 20% efficieny of the petrol engine): 0.075 ml per second
Let see how much driving I will actually do: assuming a set of dampers will last about 60000 km:
1. Average speed about 30 kmph,
2. therefore total time = 2000 hours
2000 hours = 7200000 seconds.
I save about 540000 milliliters of petrol, in other worlds 540 litres.
540 Litres of petrol should be roughly worth Rs 32400.
As a user of this product, as long as all my 4 dampers are not priced higher than Rs 32000 above the cheapest alternative - it is profitable. Unfortunately, for most users, this figure gets lost among other things - therefore they may not place as much economic importance.
For the seller it makes sense for him to price it not more than 50% of the benefit value. That means Rs 16000 per 4 dampers. Neat profit! And this is above the industry average margin on sale of plain old dampers.