Honda Power Unit Hardware & Software

[godlameroso]

I do, power unit is in adolescent phase. Big changes happen during adolescence, the step forward you made from infancy to childhood was a big step even though all the adults had far more performance. But the adolescent stage is huge, successfully completing adolescent stage let's you compete with the adults. Honda will enter adult phase towards the end of the year, or the start of 2019.

[Wazari]

Thanks for the info @ Wazari.

Is the peak Hp north or south of 900?
I guess it would be very difficult to guesstimate the Hp figures for McHonda as they cannot compare and correlate with data from other cars, unlike with competitor engines.
Overall the general trend seems to be an average of 50hp gain every year since 2015. Given the gap to the top engine is quite big, do you think Honda will catch up with the other two by next year?

Let's say a little south....

[wuzak]

I do, power unit is in adolescent phase. Big changes happen during adolescence, the step forward you made from infancy to childhood was a big step even though all the adults had far more performance. But the adolescent stage is huge, successfully completing adolescent stage let's you compete with the adults. Honda will enter adult phase towards the end of the year, or the start of 2019.

Or maybe just in time for the engine regulation change....

[godlameroso]

That's a possibility.

[PlatinumZealot]

Thanks for the info @ Wazari.

Is the peak Hp north or south of 900?
I guess it would be very difficult to guesstimate the Hp figures for McHonda as they cannot compare and correlate with data from other cars, unlike with competitor engines.
Overall the general trend seems to be an average of 50hp gain every year since 2015. Given the gap to the top engine is quite big, do you think Honda will catch up with the other two by next year?

Let's say a little south....

There was a report from a japanese source that Honda did make over 900hp at a certain instant. Was that true?

Something to the words of "we can make over 900hp now"

I have Honda at 895 hp in my calculations. This is running at self sustaining mode. Does the electric supercharger mode give a little more power in qualifying? ( that is if Honda has an electric supercharger mode)

[godlameroso]

Imagine enough electrical energy to both remove the compressor as a load on the engine, with the MGU-K going at full tilt. There is no regulation as far as the capacity of the ERS, just how much you can harvest or deploy per lap. It's a no brainer to take the 5kg weight penalty and stuff as many exotic battery cells as you can in the ES casing. Particularly since power from the ES to the MGU-H Is unlimited.

I wonder what the maximum power the MGU-H is capable of in motor mode?

If it takes ~100kw for ~5 bar MAP. Does that mean the MGU-H needs to be that powerful? Or does it only need to be powerful enough to create a lag free environment? ie maintain a minimum and maximum turbine speed.

If so it allows you to size your turbo for extreme efficiency as the turbine doesn't have to be efficient over as wide a range of efficiency islands. Provided of course you have enough electrical energy.

Again if your combustion process is good it's easier to make that compromise. As you can just harvest K->H->ES, and you can take that engine penalty, still have more power and need less fuel to do it than everyone else.

[Tommy Cookers]

every make of engine has good combustion

in some makes combustion is good at higher AFR than is possible in other makes

combustion is the burning of fuel, not the ways some of its heat is turned into work

[godlameroso]

No doubt, the combustion is good, and some do it better at leaner AFR's, I reckon getting there is why they call it a combustion process.

[Craigy]

Imagine enough electrical energy to both remove the compressor as a load on the engine, with the MGU-K going at full tilt. There is no regulation as far as the capacity of the ERS, just how much you can harvest or deploy per lap. It's a no brainer to take the 5kg weight penalty and stuff as many exotic battery cells as you can in the ES casing. Particularly since power from the ES to the MGU-H Is unlimited.

I wonder what the maximum power the MGU-H is capable of in motor mode?

If it takes ~100kw for ~5 bar MAP. Does that mean the MGU-H needs to be that powerful? Or does it only need to be powerful enough to create a lag free environment? ie maintain a minimum and maximum turbine speed.

If so it allows you to size your turbo for extreme efficiency as the turbine doesn't have to be efficient over as wide a range of efficiency islands. Provided of course you have enough electrical energy.

Again if your combustion process is good it's easier to make that compromise. As you can just harvest K->H->ES, and you can take that engine penalty, still have more power and need less fuel to do it than everyone else.

Personally, I tend to think of this from the opposite direction - just another way to do it and both ways are equally valid. Let me explain how I see this.

The energy flow from MGU-H to ES is unlimited in both per-lap limit (amount) and in charge/discharge speed (rate), and given that the MGU-H can be used as a flywheel to allow some sort of alternative route from the K to the battery, then you'd have to work pretty hard on the sizing of both the MGU-H and MGU-K than if you ignored this route and optimised them against more traditional, simpler sizings. Both of those components are going to have higher limits than they would otherwise have, if you didn't see this route and optimise your PU around using it.

The first thing I'd say is that the 2MJ and 4MJ limits for K-direct-to-ES need to be maximised, so the ES is going to have to be able to store and discharge 4MJ per lap for the working life of the control electronics and energy store, purely from this workload alone.
All rechargeable batteries lose capacity with each charge-discharge-recharge cycle, so an ES battery at end-of-life ( which is what, 10 weekends next year?) needs a lot more than 4MJ full-to-empty at the start of its life in order to have that at the end of life. But it's not a 4MJ lap limit at all anyway. It's far more than that because of the flywheel route.

Consider the sizing of the MGU-H if you're using it as a flywheel a lot of the time during a lap.
If the flywheel is being used to charge the ES, then you're going to want it to be able to accept power from the MGU-K at maximum rate for the MGU-K (120kW) during the flywheel spin-up, and it's going to need to be able to dump that kinetic energy into the ES at some rate you decide.

You might guess/start off with at the same 120kW that was being used to generate electricity for the ES, so a 50/50 split of time spent charging and discharging.
I think that would be really ineffective, since there is an *unlimited* path from the MGU-H to the ES. You'd actually want that to discharge into the battery as quickly and for as short a time as possible - just for example, you might opt to have the MGU-H dumping power back into the ES at 240kW or 360kW, or more.
If weight and volume weren't factors, you'd want the rate to be as high as was possible with any known generator and battery technology, because the faster you can discharge energy from the flywheel to the ES, the more time you can spend receiving energy at the regulated 120kW limit from the MGU-K. That 50/50 time slicing of the charge/discharge of inertia from the flywheel is a bad assumption. You want it to be 99% charging, 1% discharging or better.

That leads to a sizing discussion about how fast the MGU-H could feasibly dump power into the CE and ES, how it would switch between charge/discharge and how much time the MGU-K would actually spend charging the ES using this route. It is unlimited in both rate and duration in the regulations. Why not a 240kW MGU-H, capable of time slicing 1/3d of the time putting its power into the ES and the other 2/3rds of the time charging up from the MGU-K?

This opens up possibilities. The whole system is also reversible, ES powering up MGU-H at some huge rate, then that power being used to discharge into the MGU-K at its limit. The time when the ES is spinning up the flywheel of the MGU-H, it would also be powering the MGU-K directly at 120kW.

It does mean that there is a >4MJ route from the ES to the MGU-K. In fact, it's essentially unlimited. You would want an ES capable of generating 120kW for the whole time the car needs to accelerate around the whole lap at the longest duration on the throttle (I suppose this will be somewhere like Spa, Monza or Baku). It would dump the 4kW permitted directly to the MGU-K only during the timeslices where the MGU-H wasn't able to provide the indirect route because it was being spun up itself by the ES. Total energy out from the ES through the K would be a hell of a lot more than 4kW by adding together the flywheel and direct routes. The ES would need to be capable of outputting 120kW as well as whatever limit the MGU-H was running at (eg. another 240kW), meaning its real limits would need to be potentially 360kW and upwards of 10MJ, for the sake of example.

Essentially, the 25KG limit for the ES becomes a hard limit. The sizing of the MGU-K would be such that it could run 120kW for a lot longer than the 33s the 4MJ direct ES to MGU-K would suggest - maybe double this. The sizing of the MGU-H would not be the amount of energy produced by the turbine and otherwise lost to the wastegate, it would instead be capable of large rates, in order to permit effective flywheel operations. The CE would need to be capable of switching 120kW from MGU-H to ES to MGU-K very quickly and smoothly for several races.

The ES thermals would be quite hard to control, with the amount of work it would be doing and the charge and discharge rates. The MGU-K is going to be physically bigger and will need more cooling as it's going to be active a lot of the time. The MGU-H is going to be doing a hell of a lot more work than it would have been doing if it was just a power takeoff for unwanted boost pressure. The ES and CE are both going to be throwing electricity around at much higher rates than the MGU-K basic 120kW, and the CE in particular is going to be switching quite a lot.

That's how I see things anyway. Forget 33s of deployment per lap, followed by whatever can be dripfed from the turbine in sustaining mode. What you're interested in is, how much power can you get out of the ES using the unlimited route. It's feasible that with an ES with enough capacity, the direct ES to MGU-K route would *only* be used to fill in the times when the MGU-H is being topped up with rotational inertia (at an unlimited rate!).

It'd be interesting to see what the capacity and discharge rates would look like for 25KG of lithium ion batteries, at a maximum, using modern cells. Also, it'd be interesting to know how many seconds per lap the hardest duty cycles are for tracks on the 2018 calendar, because it could provide a maximum required specification for quali mode.

Thoughts?

Edited to add: Just looked at the FIA's notes for the ES and the regs state a maximum of 4MJ SoC difference from top to bottom in a lap. This means that the route out of the ES and into the MGU-K is likely direct for most of the 4MJ, but the charging idea still stands as a way to bypass the 2MJ ERS-K to ES limit.

[Wazari]

Thanks for the info @ Wazari.

Is the peak Hp north or south of 900?
I guess it would be very difficult to guesstimate the Hp figures for McHonda as they cannot compare and correlate with data from other cars, unlike with competitor engines.
Overall the general trend seems to be an average of 50hp gain every year since 2015. Given the gap to the top engine is quite big, do you think Honda will catch up with the other two by next year?

Let's say a little south....

There was a report from a japanese source that Honda did make over 900hp at a certain instant. Was that true?

Something to the words of "we can make over 900hp now"

I have Honda at 895 hp in my calculations. This is running at self sustaining mode. Does the electric supercharger mode give a little more power in qualifying? ( that is if Honda has an electric supercharger mode)

I can't disagree with anything in your post.

[godlameroso]

Imagine enough electrical energy to both remove the compressor as a load on the engine, with the MGU-K going at full tilt. There is no regulation as far as the capacity of the ERS, just how much you can harvest or deploy per lap. It's a no brainer to take the 5kg weight penalty and stuff as many exotic battery cells as you can in the ES casing. Particularly since power from the ES to the MGU-H Is unlimited.

I wonder what the maximum power the MGU-H is capable of in motor mode?

If it takes ~100kw for ~5 bar MAP. Does that mean the MGU-H needs to be that powerful? Or does it only need to be powerful enough to create a lag free environment? ie maintain a minimum and maximum turbine speed.

If so it allows you to size your turbo for extreme efficiency as the turbine doesn't have to be efficient over as wide a range of efficiency islands. Provided of course you have enough electrical energy.

Again if your combustion process is good it's easier to make that compromise. As you can just harvest K->H->ES, and you can take that engine penalty, still have more power and need less fuel to do it than everyone else.

Personally, I tend to think of this from the opposite direction - just another way to do it and both ways are equally valid. Let me explain how I see this.

The energy flow from MGU-H to ES is unlimited in both per-lap limit (amount) and in charge/discharge speed (rate), and given that the MGU-H can be used as a flywheel to allow some sort of alternative route from the K to the battery, then you'd have to work pretty hard on the sizing of both the MGU-H and MGU-K than if you ignored this route and optimised them against more traditional, simpler sizings. Both of those components are going to have higher limits than they would otherwise have, if you didn't see this route and optimise your PU around using it.

The first thing I'd say is that the 2MJ and 4MJ limits for K-direct-to-ES need to be maximised, so the ES is going to have to be able to store and discharge 4MJ per lap for the working life of the control electronics and energy store, purely from this workload alone.
All rechargeable batteries lose capacity with each charge-discharge-recharge cycle, so an ES battery at end-of-life ( which is what, 10 weekends next year?) needs a lot more than 4MJ full-to-empty at the start of its life in order to have that at the end of life. But it's not a 4MJ lap limit at all anyway. It's far more than that because of the flywheel route.

Consider the sizing of the MGU-H if you're using it as a flywheel a lot of the time during a lap.
If the flywheel is being used to charge the ES, then you're going to want it to be able to accept power from the MGU-K at maximum rate for the MGU-K (120kW) during the flywheel spin-up, and it's going to need to be able to dump that kinetic energy into the ES at some rate you decide.

You might guess/start off with at the same 120kW that was being used to generate electricity for the ES, so a 50/50 split of time spent charging and discharging.
I think that would be really ineffective, since there is an *unlimited* path from the MGU-H to the ES. You'd actually want that to discharge into the battery as quickly and for as short a time as possible - just for example, you might opt to have the MGU-H dumping power back into the ES at 240kW or 360kW, or more.
If weight and volume weren't factors, you'd want the rate to be as high as was possible with any known generator and battery technology, because the faster you can discharge energy from the flywheel to the ES, the more time you can spend receiving energy at the regulated 120kW limit from the MGU-K. That 50/50 time slicing of the charge/discharge of inertia from the flywheel is a bad assumption. You want it to be 99% charging, 1% discharging or better.

That leads to a sizing discussion about how fast the MGU-H could feasibly dump power into the CE and ES, how it would switch between charge/discharge and how much time the MGU-K would actually spend charging the ES using this route. It is unlimited in both rate and duration in the regulations. Why not a 240kW MGU-H, capable of time slicing 1/3d of the time putting its power into the ES and the other 2/3rds of the time charging up from the MGU-K?

This opens up possibilities. The whole system is also reversible, ES powering up MGU-H at some huge rate, then that power being used to discharge into the MGU-K at its limit. The time when the ES is spinning up the flywheel of the MGU-H, it would also be powering the MGU-K directly at 120kW.

It does mean that there is a >4MJ route from the ES to the MGU-K. In fact, it's essentially unlimited. You would want an ES capable of generating 120kW for the whole time the car needs to accelerate around the whole lap at the longest duration on the throttle (I suppose this will be somewhere like Spa, Monza or Baku). It would dump the 4kW permitted directly to the MGU-K only during the timeslices where the MGU-H wasn't able to provide the indirect route because it was being spun up itself by the ES. Total energy out from the ES through the K would be a hell of a lot more than 4kW by adding together the flywheel and direct routes. The ES would need to be capable of outputting 120kW as well as whatever limit the MGU-H was running at (eg. another 240kW), meaning its real limits would need to be potentially 360kW and upwards of 10MJ, for the sake of example.

Essentially, the 25KG limit for the ES becomes a hard limit. The sizing of the MGU-K would be such that it could run 120kW for a lot longer than the 33s the 4MJ direct ES to MGU-K would suggest - maybe double this. The sizing of the MGU-H would not be the amount of energy produced by the turbine and otherwise lost to the wastegate, it would instead be capable of large rates, in order to permit effective flywheel operations. The CE would need to be capable of switching 120kW from MGU-H to ES to MGU-K very quickly and smoothly for several races.

The ES thermals would be quite hard to control, with the amount of work it would be doing and the charge and discharge rates. The MGU-K is going to be physically bigger and will need more cooling as it's going to be active a lot of the time. The MGU-H is going to be doing a hell of a lot more work than it would have been doing if it was just a power takeoff for unwanted boost pressure. The ES and CE are both going to be throwing electricity around at much higher rates than the MGU-K basic 120kW, and the CE in particular is going to be switching quite a lot.

That's how I see things anyway. Forget 33s of deployment per lap, followed by whatever can be dripfed from the turbine in sustaining mode. What you're interested in is, how much power can you get out of the ES using the unlimited route. It's feasible that with an ES with enough capacity, the direct ES to MGU-K route would *only* be used to fill in the times when the MGU-H is being topped up with rotational inertia (at an unlimited rate!).

It'd be interesting to see what the capacity and discharge rates would look like for 25KG of lithium ion batteries, at a maximum, using modern cells. Also, it'd be interesting to know how many seconds per lap the hardest duty cycles are for tracks on the 2018 calendar, because it could provide a maximum required specification for quali mode.

Thoughts?

Edited to add: Just looked at the FIA's notes for the ES and the regs state a maximum of 4MJ SoC difference from top to bottom in a lap. This means that the route out of the ES and into the MGU-K is likely direct for most of the 4MJ, but the charging idea still stands as a way to bypass the 2MJ ERS-K to ES limit.

I like how you think, and it's precisely the kind of thinking that gets ahead in this formula, at least in my opinion. There are less landmarks to follow for guidance, but the unlimited aspect of this formula is ripe for the picking, there are huge gains in exploiting the electrical side. Honestly I think we're just starting to scratch the surface of what's possible with these power units and ditching them I feel, would be premature. As you said the CE are being taxed to huge levels, even if they're capable of operating at 3gHz, the main limits are working voltages, and the energy density and charging rates/lifecycle of the cells. Any advance there would give proportional gains in overall system performance, in other words, use the energy you're harvesting to better use.

Ultimately of course you're back to square one because crank and turbine power and electrical power come from the prime mover, bang bang baby. I suppose like one of our enlightened posters posted up above, using the newly found routes, if all systems check out, one in theory could operate a 580hp ICE that's harvesting the better part of 400hp, or anywhere in between a 980hp total ideal system output. I suppose this means the ideal engine in this formula is making 760hp max from the ICE and 160hp from the turbine and 160hp from the K, where the H is operating strictly as potential energy that the engine and battery can tap into.

[PlatinumZealot]

Remember, MGUK energy and power discharge (from the energy store only right? ) are clearly limited! There is no way to go around that.
Only mguh is unlimited in charging the battery. I a not sure it is also unlimited in spining the mguk.

I have no idea if the same flywheel mode
loop hole can be applied in reverse to give unrestricted energy from ES to the MGUH then to the MGUK. Is this legal?

[Tommy Cookers]

and
a max 4 MJ/lap real state-of-charge-difference rule could mean far more than 4 MJ/lap is available (in instalments)
doesn't the rule actually count the lap total extraction and limit this to 4 MJ ?
there is no such thing as SoC measurement accounting - charge state is calculated from a running tally of current and voltage

the rules have always apparently been written to limit the extent of the compounding
if what now appears as 'the loophole' does exist .....
it was presumably (like spark plug pre-chamber rule) contributed by Mercedes(Renault) Co who didn't explain it to Renault

it was always known that a greater extent of compounding was possible with appropriate rules

[Craigy]

Remember, MGUK energy and power discharge (from the energy store only right? ) are clearly limited! There is no way to go around that.
Only mguh is unlimited in charging the battery. I a not sure it is also unlimited in spining the mguk.

I have no idea if the same flywheel mode
loop hole can be applied in reverse to give unrestricted energy from ES to the MGUH then to the MGUK. Is this legal?

As I understand the rules, from the K to the H and back, energy transfer amount per lap is unlimited.
The K itself is rate limited to 120kW.
Transfers between the H and ES aren't limited in transfer rate or capacity at all.
The limited route is from the K direct to the ES (2MJ towards ES in a single lap, and 4MJ towards the K in a single lap).
There's a note on the diagram that says the ES State of Charge isn't allowed to deviate by more than 4MJ between maximum and minimum per lap.

[wuzak]

Why not a 240kW MGU-H, capable of time slicing 1/3d of the time putting its power into the ES and the other 2/3rds of the time charging up from the MGU-K?

A 240kW MGUH is obviously going to be bigger and heavier than a 100kW MGUH. Then you also required bigger and heavier cables, higher capacity and heavier control electronics, etc.

And how much time will the MGUH be free from being used to either spool the turbo or recover energy from the turbo? The theory of using the MGUH requires it being decoupled from the turbo in order to be spooled up.

And given that there aren't many circuits that give 2MJ recovery from braking, the system would need the MGUK to be dragging on the engine at other times - either through lift and coast or by loading up the engine.

Essentially, the 25KG limit for the ES becomes a hard limit. The sizing of the MGU-K would be such that it could run 120kW for a lot longer than the 33s the 4MJ direct ES to MGU-K would suggest - maybe double this. The sizing of the MGU-H would not be the amount of energy produced by the turbine and otherwise lost to the wastegate, it would instead be capable of large rates, in order to permit effective flywheel operations. The CE would need to be capable of switching 120kW from MGU-H to ES to MGU-K very quickly and smoothly for several races.

33s has not been a real limit for some time.

At the beginning of last season, Ferrari stated 50s/lap deployment of their ERS. That's a total of 6MJ.

Mercedes is more.