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Hydrogen-based Rotary Engine?
Seabird99 writes: "I came across this article at one of my car related forums and thought that I'd pass it on here. I have always been intrigued by "alternative" technologies where they relate to artificial locomotion." For some reason Slashdot gets a lot of submissions of wacko energy concepts - power from nothing, power from sand, power from a black box, engines that get 500 miles to the gallon... Perhaps this is more of the same, but at least it's an interesting write-up.
This would be a boon to consumers, since fewer moving parts (no transmission are driveshaft) would likely mean fewer repairs.
Would automakers be for it? Most likely not. They make a substantial amount of money from repairs and maintenance. And to think of the outrage from auto-repair shops, cutting their business as well.
It's an excellent idea - less weight, much better fuel, fewer moving parts, etc. But there's a lot of opposition ahead.
this guy seems to have made a lot more money patenting strange and unique ways to work with a lot of different materials. (At least, it's a lot more than the people who waste their time posting to SlashDot make)..
Revolutions in design have rarely come out of corporations... considering this site is supposed to be Linux based, I thought I would see more support for anyone trying to solve the energy crisis outside of the regular channels, since it's highly unlikely it will come from the gas companies anytime soon.
ChuckyG
Yeah, that's the problem with hydrogen: You can't just dig a hydrogen well, you've got to make it.
You can't just dig a gasoline well either, what's your point? Even natural gas requires refining to remove impurities and other trace gases. With very few exceptions, you're going to have to do some work to get the energy in a form that's usable to you.
It seems that everyone is completely missing the point of this new (and unproven as of yet) engine. The thing that makes it unique is NOT that the guy can theoretically run it on hydrogen and oxygen produced by electrolysing water. What makes it unique is the sheer simplicity of the engine.
As geeks and programmers, we all love to see someone come up with a truly elegant solution to a programming problem. When someone takes years of kludges and condenses them down into a few lines of clear, concise code, it is not only a thing of beauty and mastery, it is something to be desired.
What should strike people about this engine is that this somewhat eccentric but proven inventor has come up with a replacement module for that hideously kludgey block of code called the internal combustion engine. If pistons and rods and camshafts and all can be replaced with such a simple construct, isn't that a good idea? Now, of course, I'll stay in the "show me the code" mode until I actually see a working prototype, but if these guys think they can hash it out, I say more power to them.
Using methanol sounds great to me, generate it from biomass, even from side products of crops - the inedible bits from corn for example. It can be made to burn _relatively_ cleanly already - although I'm sure this can be approved over time.
However, a lot of articles have been popping up in New Scientist essentially calling Methanol a demon fuel. It takes more energy to produce than it generates. By the time you use fertilizers, transport the stuff to the processing plant, run the plant, transport it to the pumps you've used more of the stuff than you can produce!
This sounds like Oil industry propoganda, but its getting a lot of column inches! anyone know anything?????
Except that this guy has all the money he needs, and is too old to care much about getting more, and has a great dislike for the combustion engine.
I find it helps to "get it" if you look at the shaft rotating, and only watch the plate from the corner of your eye. This helps make it clear that the plate isn't really "wobbling", it's simply mounted onto the sphere in such a way that when you have rotation along the shaft, the plate appears to wobble. If you took a quarter, punched a hole through it, and glued it onto a pencil at a 30 degree angle or so, rotating the pencil would give the same effect.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001