KERS is one of a kind modern technology which is right now, as we speak, is still in its development process but we can see that it is going to be a huge innovation and will go on and change the trend of motoring specielly when it comes to find the alternative fuel.
What exactelly is KERS? let me give you some idea. Imagine you are travelling at 90kph, there is a corner ahead, you have to brake from 90 to 30, during the braking process, an awefull lot of energy is released as a result of the calipers holds on to brake, the engine kept running while that time and evergy is going wasted. imagine all that Huge chunk of energy, instead of going waste, is available for you to make your car propell again after the corner as you hit the throatle. in technical terms, A regenerative brake is a mechanism that reduces vehicle speed by converting some of its kinetic energy into another useful form of energy. This captured energy is then stored for future use or fed back into a power system for use by other vehicles.
For example, electrical regenerative brakes in electric railway vehicles feed the generated electricity back into the supply system. In battery electric and hybrid electric vehicles, the energy is stored in a battery or bank of capacitors for later use. Other forms of energy storage which may be used include compressed air and flywheels.
Regenerative braking should not be confused with dynamic braking, which dissipates the electrical energy as heat and thus is less energy efficient.
Regenerative braking utilizes the fact that an electric motor can also act as a generator. The vehicle's electric traction motor is operated as a generator during braking and its output is supplied to an electrical load. It is the transfer of energy to the load which provides the braking effect.
An early example of this system was the Energy Regeneration Brake, developed in 1967 for the Amitron. This was a completely battery powered urban concept car whose batteries were recharged by regenerative braking, thus increasing the range of the automobile
Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS) are currently under development both for F1 motor sport and road vehicles. The concept of transferring the vehicle’s kinetic energy using Flywheel energy storage was postulated by physicist Richard Feynman in the 1950s and is exemplified in complex high end systems such as the Zytek, Flybrid, Torotrak, and Xtrac used in F1 and simple, easily manufactured and integrated differential based systems such as the Cambridge Passenger/Commercial Vehicle Kinetic Energy Recovery System
