You're right, he's not an electrical engineer, he can't design a way to harness unlimited dark matter...he's a mechanical engineer!. Build a belt driven supercharger that adds 3lbs of boost off idle. I would buy that.

 

Hmmm. I suspect there is a fair amount of jest in your response there, but in case you're serious (and purely for the academic interest of anyone that is interested to ponder)...

For a piston-based compressor system to be effective it would need to accumulate compressed air - like an air compressor does - is some form of tank. It would not be a practical ongoing boost method like turbo/super chargers are as the piston is nowhere near as efficient at compressing air as turbo/super chargers on a continued basis.

That's not to say it would be a totally useless idea though, as ordinarily you want to boost the amount of air (and fuel to keep the air-fuel ratio appropriate) put into the cylinder under acceleration and when engine revs are lower. After that, when the engine is in its most efficient and powerful rev range, the air tank needs to be replenished. This would be done by drawing some power from the engine to run the compressor, or by using the piston compressor as a form of braking when trying to slow the bike down. What we are talking about now is what Formula 1 has already started implementing - Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS). Now KERS on a motorcycle is an interesting proposition.

The problem with using compressed air to recover this energy and use it to assist the engine at lower revs is that it requires more weight (in the form of an air tank to store the energy, and the piston compressor assembly) and is nowhere near as efficient as other methods of kinetic energy recovery. The 2 main methods of recovery being investigated by F1, which you have to admit is near the pinnacle of automotive engineering development, is either a flywheel or the much preferred electrical method. The flywheel option adds more weight than the electrical method I believe, and is not as efficient/effective, although I believe Williams have developed a very good system that might be implemented commercially by one of the large auto manufacturers in the near future. The electrical system that uses capacitors (which are better than batteries at quickly storing and discharging an electrical charge, and are much lighter) to store electrical charge and motors that double as generators to assist the engine and a braking system.

Although a KERS system for motorcycles is probably inevitable for motorcycles in the long term, it is probably more suited to road bikes than dirt bikes (because of traction issues more than anything), and is so complicated and difficult to develop and implement successfully that it would be WAY too difficult to be a simple 1 person 1 year project.

Still interesting to think about anyway.

Again, rather than focusing on "more power" I would think you would contribute more to the KLX community and motorcycle industry at large by improving traction, so that any increases in power can actually put down to the ground. That actually brings me to another idea, in the more ambitious category again, that would be worth investigating - 2 wheel drive (all-wheel-drive) for the KLX.

In the 90's and early 00's I believe Yamaha pioneered a hydraulic system to deliver drive to the front wheel, but then abandoned it (probably commercially not viable). More recently Christini have started selling a mechanical solution for more common dirt bikes (KTM, Honda CRF, etc) which has seen some significant success in the Extreme Enduro scene (and possibly in the US GNCC too). The 2 main drawbacks of this idea is that you predominantly only want the front wheel to "assist" the rear wheel rather than totally share the drive all of the time, and secondly in order to implement a drive mechanism for the front wheel you increase the "unsprung weight" of the front end which has negative impacts on front suspension performance, cornering traction, bike balance and the ability to lift the front wheel.

Chrisiti's solution is pretty neat in the way it only transfers drive to the front wheel when the rear loses traction/drive, but it's not totally fool-proof. And it doesn't overcome the issue that sometimes you WANT the rear wheel to break traction without transferring drive to the front wheel (e.g. in very tight pivoting turns when you want to do a half donut type turn by breaking rear traction and whipping it around). There doesn't seem to be a manual override to select whether to engage front wheel drive or not. I don't know if Yamaha's hydraulic system dealt with this any better - I doubt it. If you were so inclined, maybe you could look into modifying one of the Christini frames to fit the KLX, but it would be an expensive endeavor and I seriously question how successful and useful it would be on a KLX with a 250cc engine that can hardly be accused of producing "too much" power. In fact, I have found my KLX power to be nice and easy to handle and putting traction to the ground it awesome.

Just my 2c...

 

Yes, those 2WD systems are cool. The Ohlins/Yamaha system could be compared to viscous coupled AWD in cars, whereas the Christini is more like traditional 4WD.

The Ohlins/Yamaha system did have a variable percentage of power transferred to the front wheel. That was pretty much by nature of the hydraulic driven front wheel. The net effect depends on the design specifics, but basically if the rear tire was not slipping and the front tire was rolling at the same road speed, the front drive was effectively over run (similar to the Christini system, only hydraulic) and contributes the minimum amount of drive that is designed in. However, when the rear tire looses traction and spins up, the pressure in the hydraulic motor/front hub increases and the front tire starts pulling harder. The amount of power to the front varies to an extent based on how much the rear tire is slipping.

By contrast, the Christini is pretty much 50/50 power distribution once the front engages. The Christini does have the option to disengage entirely, but I don't know if it can be done on the fly. I believe they still offer components that can be used to convert any suitable bike to their system, though it's obviously not something that just anybody is capable of doing, as it takes a lot of design and fabrication. They used to also offer conversion kits, so to speak, for specific models...maybe they still do, I haven't checked.

 

Any compressed aspiration system that is driven by anything other than scavenged energy (ie exhaust driven turbo or pulley driven supercharger) will be more complex, add more weight, or rob more power than is practical.

There's inherent inefficiency in producing the neccessary electricity simply to run a compressed induction system. Not saying it won't work, but just not as well as the systems that have already been developed.

 

Go big... its always impressive. I think people were smarter back when there were no computers. Imagine what it took to build this thing in 1936.

 

There is jest in everything I say haha . But definitely all these ideas, no matter how crazy, could be the next big thing right? It's all about design and implementation.

 

I agree with the general information posted... but one could pull AC power by adding a motor powered off of the engine crankshaft. As stated it would be hugely inefficient as you would have a motor on the shaft and a motor on the supercharger, effectively creating a 35% loss in elec power produced. One could even wind the supercharger motor to run at 2x or multiple shaft speeds of the crank very easily (that would be handy to power a turbo unit in lieu of a spinning air compressor).
This is why current practices uses belt driven (5%power loss) superchargers or turbo's (0% power loss?).

 

Lotrat...I'm seeing a definite problem with achieving CARB emissions compliance with that engine...LOL!

 

http://blog.caranddriver.com/hands-o...ris-auto-show/

It is a start. Subaru has one in the works also.


I am sure that it can be done on a bike, maybe as battery technology gets better.

 

By the time battery technology would be good enough, I fear 50% of cars on the road will be electric.