A Review on Design and Development of Free Piston Linear Generators in Hybrid Vehicles

Abstract

The rapid exploitation of fossil fuels due to their indiscriminate use has brought us to a situation when we cannot sustain the use of fuels like petrol and diesel for more than 30 years from now. Governments and energy companies around the world are looking for some alternative source of energy to power the vehicles. A lot of research is being carried out in this field and many researchers have concluded that hybrid vehicles can be a boon to eradicating the dependence on conventional fuels and move towards battery-aided power trains for running the vehicles. Today, there are a few electric vehicles on roads but in the near future the roads are going to be flooded by them. To propel them, we need batteries which should be charged at some intervals. In absence of battery charging stations, we would need range extending devices on the vehicles itself. A Free Piston Linear Generator (FPLG) is an electric generator which produces electricity by virtue of oscillation of a free piston in a cylinder and it can be used as a range extending device and alternative energy converter in a hybrid vehicle. Using an FPLG will be a new approach to optimize combustion process and thus it can not only help in low exhaust emissions but also in using new renewable fuels due to their capability of variable compression ratios. This paper is a review on the design and development of FPLG system for hybrid vehicles as an inevitable source of energy in near future.

A Review of Range Extenders in Battery Electric Vehicles: Current Progress and Future Perspectives

“…However, FPLGs are still early in the experimental phase and have not been tested on a commercial scale. Some issues with them include detent force, inconsistent start, combustion, misfiring, and lubrication [39].…”

“…The authors outlined the process the DLR followed and indicated that best results were found when the subsystems are built separately, hence, less reliant on each other, and then assembled. Rathore et al [39] explored FPLG as a whole and by its subsystems. The authors reviewed different types of FPLGs based on piston arrangements.…”

Design and Optimization of Dynamic System for a One-kW Free Piston Linear Engine Alternator-GENSETS Program

“…The inputs were similar to the initial design points and the outputs were maximum equivalent stress and resonant frequency. The NN algorithm was then trained based on these inputs and then outputs were calculated to determine the weight functions of the hidden layers associated with the neurons [45]. For the flexure springs for highspeed and high-stroke applications, the most common materials are steel and titanium alloys.…”