Slashdot Mirror
Can Your Car Get 1,700 MPG?
Xaroth writes "Given all the hubbub over EPA mileage ratings, I'm a little surprised that this one hasn't come up earlier. SAE apparently holds a contest each year to encourage students to design single-person, fuel-efficient vehicles. This year's winner achieved 1,747.4 MPG, with the press release that tipped me off pointing out that third got a 'measly' 1,194. There are more details on the competition over at SAE's site about the competition. Now, if only they could make these street-legal..." However, even the winner has nothing on top entries we mentioned in Shell's competition a few years back.
Holy Shit!
and that's how I likes it.
(you knew this one was coming)
What kind of gas mileage will they get when they are loaded up with 1000+ pounds of DOT required safety equipment?
1. When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.
2. Do not eat iPod shuffle.
Somehow I dont think a styrofoam hummer will take off..unless there is a gust of wind.
Fred Flinstone, with infinite miles to the gallon.
My rights don't need management.
My bicycle.
I win.
How about the most fuel efficient 4 door seating for 4 w/ trunk space, radio, air conditioning, that meets federal safety and crash tests?
Than watch those MPG numbers plummet. Add to that must have respectable performance numbers (ie it must not be so slow accelerating as to cause a hazard on public roads)
That's a real contest.
ANS: My own sense of self-satisfaction.
The formula:
1) Take a highly-efficient small engine.
2) Modify for even more efficiency.
3) Attach to 80 pounds of framework, gas tank, and wheels.
4) Drive 9.6 miles at 15 mph.
5) ???
6) Profit?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
When I was working on a solar powered car in college there was one of those SAE cars next to our bay. I don't think they're all that plausible because they are little more than go carts. I think we should work toward some of the technologies they use, like superatomizing and mixing the fuel, and trying to get engines above their pathetic 30% efficiency, but 1500 mpg is a bit out of reach. Of course, I guess I should never say never.
It turns out that "mileage" doesn't necessarily equate to "MPG" RBTFL!
When I can buy a car with that kind of effencieny I'll look into it, but until then, a walkin' I a' go.
><));>
if my car could get 17000 mpegs my porn
collection would almost be complete.
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
So, how much energy can you get from combusting a gallon of gas? If an engine was completely efficient, how far should it push 1ooo pounds?
Can you imagine getting "rear-ended" by someone's giant SUV or colliding at an intersection in one of these? You'd be crushed, flattened, splat. They look really cool, but as long as there are ppl driving what nearly equates to a tank next to/behind me, I think I'll opt for something that gives me a little sturdier cage, even if it gets less gas milage.
I'm sure most of those designs would be street legal. If not sidewalk legal.
:P
I think street legality is mostly related to things like bumpers and lights, as well as emissions.
Btw, didn't they have a 10,000MPG vehicle a while ago? I think driven by a tiny 12 year old girl
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
How hard would it have been to just put them in text format?
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
> Fred Flinstone, with infinite miles to the gallon.
Laugh if you will, but we'd all be a lot healthier if we followed Fred's example and ran to and from the office, instead of hit cruise control after rolling drive-thru.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Is to get more energy from the engines.
by
injecting hydrogen or
using a fuel cell
I'm not impressed. The Spanish in the 15th century in their voyages to the New World and back were getting thousands of miles per galleon.
Yes it can, but can yours do this.
http://siamesestew.no-ip.org/
on ethanol maybe??
40 miles each way, to and from work, 50 weeks a year (2 week vacation), with a 500ft altitude change and see what kind of milage/reliability results the bloody thing gets. My guess is that it wouldn't last a week before some major malfunction. Optimization in one area often degrades performance in others.
These cars typically achieve their best mileage using a 'coast and burn' strategy. They run the engine full throttle until they reach ~20mph, then cut the engine. This way the engine is always operating at peak efficiency (no throttling losses). This driving technique could be a little impractical in stop-and-go traffic...
This article makes me wonder: just how fuel-efficient can an aircraft be?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's important to note that MPG has a lot to do with driving style. While my car cannot get 1700 MPG, a bit of predictive driving (i.e. know when to start slowing down, when to build up momentum) will greatly increase the MPG.
TERRE HAUTE, Ind., June 15 (AScribe Newswire) -- Engineering students at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology designed a fuel efficient one-person vehicle that achieved 1,194 miles per gallon of gasoline in the Society of Automotive Engineers' Supermileage Competition, conducted last weekend near Detroit.
That performance placed third out of 24 teams in the collegiate division, a remarkable achievement for a first-year team in the competition, according to Tom Edelmayer, a technical specialist for Eaton Corporation's Engine Air Management Operations. Eaton hosted the annual engineering contest at the company's vehicle proving grounds in Marshall, Mich.
Rose-Hulman engineering students designed and constructed a one-person vehicle that is powered by a highly modified single cylinder 3.5 horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine. The vehicle is eight feet long, 26 inches wide and weighed approximately 80 pounds. It has two wheels that provide steering in the front and a single drive wheel in the middle of the back. The main structure of the vehicle is provided by a honeycomb carbon-fiber panel which rests approximately a half inch above the pavement.
The vehicle completed six laps around the proving grounds (9.6 miles) while maintaining a minimum average speed of 15 miles per hour. Edelmayer said that a typical 9.6-mile run burns an average of about 14 grams of fuel, which weighs about as much as 14 paper clips. Each team's fuel is measured before and after each run. The difference is calculated to determine the contest winner.
The University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) finished first in the collegiate class with 1,747.4 mpg. The California State University-Los Angeles placed second at 1,615.5 mpg. There were 24 teams in the division this year from the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico and Mexico. Other colleges on the list included the University of California-Berkley, University of Toronto and Virginia Military Institute.
"People certainly took notice of our performance this year. Achieving over 1,000 mpg is quite an accomplishment, especially for the first year," stated Rose-Hulman Supermileage Vehicle Team President Matt Neisen.
Nine of the team's 25 members traveled to the competition. Joining Neisen were vice president Rob Lally, driver Brittney Elkins and members Tim Berowski, John Frey, Elliot Goodman, Michael Haughney, Joshua Persels, and faculty advisor Richard Stamper.
Rose-Hulman's team is supported by Caterpillar, Rose-Hulman Ventures and Rose-Hulman's Student Government Association.
http://www.solectria.com/products/accomp.html#sunr ise
And that was in 1997 with old NiMH batteries. Current LiONs would double that to around 700 miles and next generation Li-Ss should pretty much double that again to around 1,300 miles.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Now, if only they could make these street-legal...
That would be great. Then we could all put around in our aluminum frame, 1" ground clearance, back breaking go carts. He's probably wincing and holding his right hand near his head because he just sliced off a few fingers in the wheel spokes. Oops.
-Adam
9.6 miles is a far cry short of 1,747. It seemed as though they didn't have very convincing numbers, in terms of scientific rigor. It is a very impressive feat to get that many theoretical miles to a gallon, but I seriously doubt that an actual 1,700 mile run would have even 1/50 the gas mileage. Those cars likely wouldnt even have time to heat up during 6 laps, especially expending so little fuel.
All theories aside, its promising.
You can get 125 miles per gallon all ready with one of these little mopeds, And they're cheap and street legal too.
"Can Your Car Get 1,700 MPG?"
Well no, but I'm sure it could get 1,300 AVI, at least!
Sig Nature
9.6 miles at 15 mph ideal, level track with a single cylinder 3.5 horsepower engine, and the whole thing weighs 80 pounds.
Wake me up when I can sustain 70 mph on a 6% grade with two or three tons of a laden vehicle over, say, three or four miles and keep that beautiful 1,700 mpg.
Not to shatter the dreams of budding engineers, but this isn't much to gawk over.
Your saying that your car can drive 4305564.16 Square Feet for every 52.5 gallons? First of all how do you calculate how many square feet a car drives? You would have to take the width of the car and multiply it by the length the car has driven. I will assume for the sake of easy math that your car is 10 feet wide; If you divide 10 4305564.16 by 10 you get 430556.416 feet, which converts to about 81.5 miles. That means that your car gets 1.55 miles to the gallon, which is pretty bad unless of coarse you are driving a canyonaro. :P
This sig was generated by a barrel of trained kittens for SeXy_Red (550409).
They were required to use a specified (inefficient) engine, but were allowed to make modifications. Imagine what they could do if they could choose (or build) their own engine!
It is nice to see that my old engineering school has placed so high. They even topped out 1st in 2001, and 2nd in 2002.
Makes me proud to be a Wildcat on many different levels.
I am billdar, and I approve this message.
I went all the way across the U.S. on a gallon of whiskey.
BTW, if you happen to be those frightened pedestrians I saw in Kentucky, that was an accident.
I ride a motorbike you insensitive clod! :-)
A phrase I heard years ago, though I don't remember where. It was something like... "Sure, we could hundreds of miles per gallon out of todays cars, just as long as you don't care how fast you accelerate or how fast you get there..." Personally, I could deal with a lot less acceleration...
~~ Please keep your arms, legs, and outright stupidity inside the ride at all times. Thank You ~~
My Dodge GTX V8 can do almost 5 to 10 MPG or so...
You burned calories doing all that walking, and most of the energy would have been in the form of hydrocarbons -- just like a car.
These vehicles would probably require less energy to get you there then walking.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I've seen people riding around here in Eagle River, AK on "pocket bikes" Link Another Link They look pretty funny because people knees stick way up in the air when they're riding on them. I imagine that these could be a viable alternative to cars in some instances. Does anyone own one or know someone that has one? What's your opinion of them? I can imagine that I could save a lot of gas driving to class, a friends house, etc.
There's one catch. Nitrogen is very stable. Almost any chemical reaction will take more energy than it releases. When it comes to engine efficiency, this is Not Good.
Ideally, what you'd want to do is separate the oxygen and nitrogen, so that the oxygen ratio in the engine is much higher. Since you're losing less energy through the nitrogen, you would (by implication) get more useful energy out.
Ok, so how to do this, without reducing the energy you're getting from the oxygen at the same time?
That's tough. However, it may be possible. Nitrogen, as mentioned, doesn't react easily. The electrons in the outer shell are tough to displace. With oxygen, the reverse is true. Oxygen reacts very easily, and electrons are displaced with considerably less effort.
You can certainly use this to separate oxygen and nitrogen. Just set up an electrically charged grid, such that the charge will convert O2 into O2+, but leave nitrogen (N2) electrically neutral. Set up a second grid, with the reverse charge. The oxygen will be attracted towards it, the nitrogen won't.
If you picture the first grid at the entrance to a y-shaped tube, and the second grid at the fork splitting off of the long section of tube, you can see how the nitrogen will travel straight on, whilst the oxygen will be diverted.
Now, here's the tricky bit. The oxygen is one electron short (it's charged), and you've got to put quite a bit of energy into a device like this to charge the grids up enough. Will you get a net gain in efficiency?
That part, I can't answer.
Would it be worth doing anyway? Maybe. Well, it'll cut out a major air pollutant. The oxides of nitrogen that you get off will react with water to produce nitric acid. Not really something I want to be breathing in, if I don't have to.
Are there better solutions? Not using a conventional piston engine. We're almost at the limits for those, given a standard air mix. A rotary engine might get you a better theoretical limit (you don't have to keep reversing mechanical devices), but they're costly to make (they develop far higher pressures) and you have to develop one that's large enough that the increased surface area to volume is no longer a factor.
For ultimate fuel efficiency, I suggest a small fusion reactor. Though you may need to wait a while for them to be approved for use in cars.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
" People certainly took notice of our performance this year. Achieving over 1,000 mpg is quite an accomplishment, especially for the first year,"
Um, no they didn't. Your toothpick and styrofoam "car" averaged 15mph and weighed a paltry 80lbs doing nothing but ovals. Maybe you're busting out cartwheels in academic la-la land, but out in the real world where people actually have to break, accelerate, turn, drive uphill, downhill in traffic with air conditioning, heating, other passengers and groceries, it means JACK SHIT. Their testing parameters are so far removed from reality that practical application isn't even a possibility, which makes this an even larger excercise in absurdity.
No, my car can't get 1,194 miles to the gallon, and there is a good reason why-- It's not limited to being eight feet long, 26 inches wide and weighed approximately 80 pounds running soley along a six laps proving ground (9.6 miles) while maintaining a minimum average speed of 15 miles per hour.
If this were a step foward, I'd be behind them all the way, but it's nothing but engineering masturbation-- Neato to accomplish but utterly fucking useless.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
one man's off topic is another man's +1 funny. I laughed at this one!
I worked on one of these in college. It's a small torpedo that barely fits a person, an engine, a steering mechanism, and some brakes. There's no safety equipment other than a crash helmet, no headlights, no trunkspace, and sadly no stereo. Calling it a 1700MPG car is very misleading.
The SAE competition in the link requires a four cylinder engine. This kind of rules out other types of power such as steam, fuel cell, and stirling engine. Although, I suppose with enough modification, the provided Briggs and Stratton engine could be converted into a steam engine (not that this is necessarily more efficient). Let's see, new camshaft, a means to adjust the valve cutoff, maybe one of those cool looking fly-ball governors... Since a steam engine can apply power in each cylinder on every revolution, this makes it equivalent to a V-8. If you seal off the crankcase into a separate compartment for each cylinder, you can use both sides of the piston and make the equivalent of a V-16. Of course, details like, how to water from condensing in the oil will have to be addressed.
Also, since the peak horsepower of a car is rarely needed except in rapid acceleration, I would think that the key to reducing engine size, and thus, improving efficiency would be to use a small engine with some kind of storage system. Since batteries are bad for the environment, maybe two flywheels rotating in opposite directions (to cancel out precession) under the floor can be used, along with an electric motor/generator to transfer power to/from them. Extra power generated by the engines, as well as from braking, can be used to accelerate the flywheels. This would also improve handling because the gyroscopic effects would keep the car perfectly level on fast turns.
Also, I would think that the car would be cheaper to engineer and produce if you could eliminate most of the mechanical parts. How about a gasoline fired generator, a flywheel battery, and an electric motor on each axle?
Unknown host pong.
You know we could have magnetic induction cars? Why lug around our fuel, and an engine to explode it in? Unfortunately human nature being what it is. People would try to cheat the system, much as one cheats the meter behind the house.
Yes, yes it is.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Sounds like a rideing mower, what a coinsedince, they have the same top speed...
My car gets 4 rods to the hogs head and that's the way I like it!!!
It gets 12mpg and I am from Arkansas. I felt ya'll needed an actually person to criticize instead of using all those pesky stereotypes.
Is that a bike in your pocket...
I firmly believe that Gasoline(or more specifically oil) is and will be responsible for more destruction then any other homegrown (as opposed to cosmic phenomenon) force of idea ever. Comments? I would love to argue this point.
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
The Bush administration announced today that all US military personnel in Iraq would be either returning home or shoring up the neglected war on terror within the next month.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, "It turned out Iraq wasn't really ever a threat to our national security, so we couldn't really justify keeping so many troops over there, what with real threats like Al Qaeda out there needing attention." He added, "You may not know this, but it was actually Al Qaeda and not Saddam Hussein who's been attacking us all along! Even September 11th, we're starting to understand, had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein!"
Vice President Dick Cheney denied any link between this latest move and the recent availability of super-fuel-efficient vehicles: "Listen you pig #*$^@%ers, the war in Iraq was not about oil. So drop it if you want to stay out of Guantanimo, alright? I've got some explaining I need to do to Halliburton's shareholders, so I can't stay long."
Here is the number in km/L.
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
Can increase the efficiency over metal based ones. The temperatures they can withstand are far higher, raising the efficiency substantially over conventional ones.
They're also much lighter, the materials don't expand/contract and can be machined to closer tolerances and they wear out much slower than metal ones.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I always wondered why recriprocating engines theoretically required more energy to reverse the direction of the parts. I mean, once the piston passes mid stroke and starts slowing down, it is pulling/pushing on the crank, accelerating (imparting energy to) it. After it passes dead center, I would think that the added rotational energy of the crank would be transfered back to the piston. The kinetic energy thus is transfered back and forth between the engine's flywheel and the pistons. Aside from the usual friction in the rings and bearings, I'm not really sure where the loss is.
Unknown host pong.
...the competition is too see which of the vehicles can get back up the hill again.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
5.5 GPH at 120 knots: The brand new two-seater by Liberty Aircraft.p erformance. php
http://libertyaircraft.com/libertyxl2/
A knot being 1.15 mph, for the non-pilots here.
Some students do something cool in a contest and all most people are saying is "yeah, call me when it's really a car." Criminy. Articles on case mods get friendlier comments than this, and this is something that I would have thought geeks would have found interesting. Or nerds. Or whatever we are.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
A quick calculation yields 25 MPH (138 miles using 5.5 gallons)
Not bad.
.
Nice that Briggs & Stratton sponsors science fair projects like this.
Even nicer though if they could design their products to be repaired with ease.
I just replaced a fuel filter on an late model 8 horse B&S. Now you would think it would be an easy thing, but the line had to be replaced, because a) it had deteriorated at the connection end; and b) the old line was smaller than the nipple and any currently available filter.
I'm really not sure if there is anything I didn't have to take off the engine block to remove the old and useless fuel line. (the carb was in front of the starter, on top of the line.)
I'll take ergonomics and long-usable-life over fuel efficiency any day.
I hope they wernt intending for this to be the answer to the comming oil crisis?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
We're talking about gallons of uranium, right?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I'm not sure what the rules are for this particular one(RTFA), but in our competition in Minnesota we basically accelerated to 30MPH, then killed the engine and coasted down to 10MPH, then accelerated to 30MPH, etc.
The lack of any other features, like an alternator or a/c, also would provide a boost.
Am I the only one who read the subject and thought this was going to be a story about an in-car entertainment system that could store 1,700 MPEGs?
How about comparing modern day cars, trains, busses, and planes, on a per-passenger basis?
According to Top Gear a few nights ago, trains get worse mileage than the average car, per passenger(I'm trying to find any info about the study online to see if that's based on maximum capacity of each type of vehicle or real-world average passenger counts) and a high speed train gets worse mileage than a jumbo jet! Personally I'm kind of curious about a subway train as well. Both averages(ie based on typical # of people in them) and maximum figures would be interesting for all vehicles.
When they asked the UK "Green Party" for a statement, they said "the best choice is the journey not taken". Um...okay.
Oh, and ever watched a diesel locomotive idling or at speed, belching lots of blue/black smoke? How about a city bus? Here in Boston, they're downright filthy, and in neighborhoods near the bus depots and garages, asthma rates are much higher, and studies have repeatedly shown diesel soot causes both cancer and asthma.
Please help metamoderate.
...for fear I'd be caught dead in one.
Did you see how flimsy those things look? One altercation with a triple-trailer semi-tractor rig and it's goodbye bug, hello windshield.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
See subject line. I accept your rant, and raise you a hear-hear, in general.
However, you seemed to have invoked shades of a strawman - the grandparant did _not_ make any reference to a hydrogen fuel cell. It is, in principle possible to make a fuel cell that will convert fuels other than pure hydrogen into electricty (+ wastes).
That's not to say that they exist - most 'methonal' fuel cells are reformation style, where the carbon -> CO2 converstion is not used to produce power, but just to free up the hydrogen.
In principle, however, there is no theoretical barrier to a gasoline fuel cell, with high efficency (just a huge, _huge_, long list of practical ones). There _is_ a theoretical barrier to raising the efficency of an internal combustion engine.
My tank is 12 gallons from F to E.
If a car were toget this kind of milage, we'd be complaining about oil usage. We'd be able to traverse the contry 4 times on 1 tank of gas, but have to get oil changed at each cozst.
Not only that, but having such efficient vehicles would effect the world in ways that we'd ever guess. Shipping somethign would be incredibly cheap, almost free. We'd apprach a true globalization and not just on the net.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Mirror #1
Mirror #2"
Mirror #3
The submitter didn't catch this, and no one else seems to have pointed it out, but 1194.10 mpg (obtained by the Rose-Hulman team) was not the third highest mpg. Rose-Hulman was third amongst collegiate teams. If the high-school teams are included, Rose-Hulman drops to fifth place. Overall, Evansville Mater Dei (1352.58 mpg) was third, and Winamac (1235.33 mpg) was fourth. First and second remain Univ. of British Columbia, and Cal. State LA.
I can get a lot more than that, assuming a standard ten-gallon gas tank.
Step 1: Launch the car into low earth orbit.
Step 2: Drop it.
I'll leave the practical applications of this to the engineers.
The PDF on the web site says the engine in question is a Briggs & Stratton Corporation (Model 091202 Type1016E1A1001). The engine is air cooled, four cycle, with a 2.61 kw (3.5 horsepower) rating at 3600 rpm.
It's a tiny 1 cylinder engine.
-ted
Oh wait.... This is Slashdot... Never mind... :-)
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
My wife's 40 MPG Honda does better because engine tweaking leaned through "engineering masturbation". Hybrid vehicles do even better. Now, wash your mouth out with GoJo.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
is your command of the language.
Homer is looking for a car, and is in a small Eastern-European car
Foreign salesguy: You'll like this one, it gets 30 hectares on one liter of kerosene.
Homer: What country was this car made in?
Salesguy: It no longer exists. Why don't you take it on a test drive?
Homer tries to start it, and shifts it to a weird symbol
Salesguy pushes the car down the road while it's backfiring like crazy
Salesguy: Put it in H!
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
...your own sense of self-satisfaction?
(ObSimpsons)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Especially if it's raining. Or snowing. Or hailing. Or foggy. Or rather hot. Or particularly windy. Or some combination of the above.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
My imaginary car weighs nothing, but requires a driver. I (imagine that ;) I weigh 200lbs, and a gallon of gasoline has 1.32E8 joules. A joule is "consumed" in moving 1 Kg 1 meter, a pound is 0.45359237Kg, and 1 mile is 1 609.344 meters. So my imaginary car can get, at best, 1200MPG. A real car will be heavier, and get less than 100% energy efficiency from the gasoline. Even my imagination, powerful enough to reduce my weight to 150lbs, can't make 1200 >= 1700.
--
make install -not war
Look at the pictures--most people won't be caught dead in those contraptions.
1,000+ miles/gallon is nice...but for goodness sakes give us something PRACTICAL even if it "ONLY" gives us 100 miles/gallon without looking dorky.
...if they can do it at 55MPH. Getting insane milage at 15MPH, while cool, doesnt seem very useful as a route toward replacing the current gas guzzlers in use. What ever happend to tinkering with things like the California Commuter ???
I'd presume that the "area" the car drives is not the overall width of the car (10 feet) swept out over the path of travel, it is more likely the cumulative width of the tire's contact-patch on the ground (so like about a foot) because that contact-patch represents the area communication, that is the area of energy transfer from the drive system of the machine to its environment.
Were it not this way, if I were to put a cross-beam across the roof of the car that spread the car's width to 20 feet, it would not produce a deterministic halving of the actual millage.
So going from about ten feet to about a foot, your caluclation results in a applicable increase in milage from 1.55 to 15.5 miles to the gallon.
That is keeping with the observations I have made of *MY* Ford F-150. So 40 hectares to the hoggs head is spot on for my truck.
Clearly the anticeedent poster has bought a street truck or middling to large SUV...
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
If every car was getting 1,000+ MPG, I very much doubt that gas would be $1.75 per gallon.
oxygen with that system .
I was thinking more of a filter.
yes. it's been thought of before.
50 MPG from the Liberty's predecessor, the europa:
http://www.europa-aircraft.com/
Your approach sounds interesting; I have no idea if it's practical. A couple of years ago I tried to find out what methods of separation were practical for just this purpose. My first thought was centrifugal separation, and I couldn't find much information, likewise for fractional distillation and the Hilsch vortex. It looks like the best approach is a molecular filter. It's not cheap and it probably gets clogged with dirt quickly.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Here's how to get excellent milage using about any modern car: Just get up to speed and then coast for 1 mile (throttle fully closed). Most modern cars completely close off the fuel flow and therefore use no fuel at all!
1 mile / 0 gallons = infinite mpg
Average that with the rest of your trip and it's still a pretty darn great number!
Not far from my house there's a fairly long stretch of road where you can drive with just two "burns" of the engine (yes, I'm fantasizing about being in space when I drive it) and no brakes.
You have to allow the car to go 10-15 mph over the speed limit (downhill) for a stretch to get enough momentum to crest the first hill though.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Give me a Durango with a 7500 pound towing capacity to carry my ego around that gets 35 and I'm all over it.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
There's a University competition sponsored by Ford and the DOE to build environment-friendly, fuel-efficient vehicles called FutureTruck. The catch? They have to modify Ford Explorers, not create go-cart sized vehicles, maintain existing performance, and remain fairly manufacturable. (In other words, Ford is using college teams for their R&D.)
There've been amazing results: the winning team, from University of Wisconsin Madison, built a hybrid Explorer that got somewhere over 40 mpg. (Different sources disagree as to the exact number.) For reference, stock Explorers are rated at merely 15/19 mpg for city and freeway driving. They also scored well in emissions and made a vehicle which could probably be manufactured and sold for about the same price as a stock vehicle.
So it's not 1700 mpg. It's still pretty darn impressive for an SUV!
"Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself." -Richard Feynman
If it was something like "SAE contestents achieve 1,700 MPG" then I would think that these comments would be much less.
Who the heck was driving this thing? Mary-Kate?
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
A gallon of gasoline has 121MJ, while a gallon of diesel has about 138MJ.
--
make install -not war
Seems like transportation and its efficiency and costs directly impact lifestyle and societal structures. Now here is a lifestyle amish.net that is not impacted by high fuel costs. Grass for the horses, sweat and elbow grease for the humans. Basic input= food. Basic output= life. Suburbs and Exurbs, large urban areas, Freeways, etc. are all derived from the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act . We get what we pay for- tax dollars that created a system of life that made us dependent on a limited source of fuel. Thanks, Ike.
INSIGHTFUL? Yikes...
I didn't think so. Putting power on every stroke (as opposed to every other stroke: breathe in/compress/burn/breathe out) does not make an engine "equivalent to" one with twice the cylinders, in any fashion.
It does make the engine louder tho.
Steam engines generally have two compression chambers on either end of power piston (in a single cylinder). Thats a far cry from driving a gasoline ICE piston from both ends, when one end is a oil crankcase.
Sheesh.
That would result in oil/water problems that "have to be addressed" in the same sense that putting feathers on your car to enable flight would result in a gravity/lift problem that needed to be addressed.
Further, how would converting gasoline generator-produced electricity to kinetic energy in a flywheel, back to electrical energy to power a motor to create kinetic energy... "eliminate most mechanical parts"?
And is replacing a simple driveshaft with 4 energy exchanges (each losing effeciency) and far more complex motors, flywheels, wires and signaling (and OMG, far more "moving parts") a worthy goal?
No, I don't have a girlfriend, but damn it, it's the principle of the thing.
For a while I've been wondering about fuel economy & rpm's.
Particularly, the increase of fuel usage with more rpm's.
Obviously the higher the rpm the more fuel is being used.
What I'm curious about is the point at which the fuel usage (at a higher rpm) would be equal to driving at a lesser rpm simply because you reach your destination sooner (and therefore are burning fuel for a shorter amount of time).
Just something I've been wondering.
I thought they were talking about MPEGs...
is an admission of guilt and incompetence, rather than an excuse. You're supposed to see things on the road. That includes bikes, mopeds, kids, etc...
A joule is consumed in *applying 1 newton of force* to something over one meter of distance. There is no limit to how small an amount of energy it requires to move any arbitrary amount of mass any distance at all (disregarding other forces). A one millionth of a newton force applied over a millimeter will move the earth a light year, if you have long enough to wait and the earth doesn't encounter too many hydrogen atoms going the other direction in the meantime. This means that in a frictionless environment there is literally no limit to the milage you can get, regardless of the mass of your fantasy car.
Of course, there is friction and air resistance to worry about, but those can't be solved with the minimal information you've linked to.
It's interesting that your essentially arbitrary calculation ended up with something approximating the milage they're getting.
This, BTW, is also one of the many things going against public transportation. The image is wrong. Few people want to be confused with a bum or tofu-eater.
People want:
- hundreds of pounds of chrome
- engine noise from the exhaust pipe
- dangerously tinted windows
- aggressive stance (too high to be stable)
- loose spinning reflectors on the wheels!!!
- jacked-up suspension, with angled drive train
- V-Tec stickers
:-)
- violet underbody lighting
- wood trim
- audio system that everyone can hear
Nobody wants to admit that they're a "soccer mom" or that all they ever do is commute to work.I'm more interested in 50 mpg SUV's than 1700 mpg single person cars. If I'm going by myself I'd rather walk or take the bus.
Join Team Mozilla #38050 Folding@home
I thought braking gives you POWER! :)
several large diesel vehicles these days (busses, delivery vehicles) are coming equipped with air compressors and tanks. The compressor engages during braking and pumps up the tank. On acceleration, the air is released which helps torque the driveshaft during acceleration, taking the load off the engine.
Just one of many ways (and pretty environmentally friendly) to capture the energy normally lost to heat during braking.
-
Come on, this is lame. No, your car isn't going to get 1000+ mpg because it isn't 80 pounds and powered by a 3 hp motor.
Yeah, they made neat toys. Wahoo.
I remember a study they did quite a long time ago about the winter "brown cloud" that was always covering cities. Although, much of the pollutants were things like NxOy, ozone-like and CxOy compounds, more than 30% (by mass) was dust and particulates due to just wind and thing like cars moving around dirty roads and kicking up dust and dirt (especially tires grinding up sand that was put on the road to keep people slipping when it was icy, but later the ice melted) and heavy machinery moving. There were also lots of particulates due to coal (non-gasoline/oil) powered electrial plants.
Although you might argue attribute this to oil (if we didn't have oil, we wouldn't be moving as much), even in the Great plains states during the age of the buffalo herds had a great amount of air pollution due to just moving around during the huge buffalo herd migrations of the era.
Even now, look up "asian dust cloud" on the internet to see how bad just simple dust can be.
So unless you take the extreme position that all the things that are indirectly caused by having oil and gas (including large scale wars that used TNT and other explosives) are attributed to gasoline causing destruction, then maybe you have a point.
But I might take the point that the differential between if we found a completely non-poluting fuel, but did all the same destruction other than emitting CO2, my guess would be that there would be lots of natural phenomena like volcanos that would certainly be the same order of magnitude.
Care to argue your point against volcanos or earthquakes? Or maybe just simple human deforestation in the Asian continent causing dust storms? I think that people that attribute total evil to oil are a bit misguided, human deforestation is a pretty bad thing and has very little to do with oil (other than many folks that are buring forests don't have cooking oil and use charcoal and wood instead). Even simple civilization itself is pretty bad w/o oil.
I'm not saying that everyone should go out and drive SUVs because it doesn't matter, but to blame all the environmental and human destruction on oil isn't right. Civilization causes much destruction w/o the part directly attributed to oil, and if you replace oil with some other magic non-polluting slightly scarse energy resource, if you think that wars wouldn't be fought over that, you probably don't know humanity very well.
And, of course, nature (even the non-cosmic variety) has us poor insignificant humans beat by a long shot...
Okay, now your turn...
A team from the University of Saskatchewan got over 5000 mpg once.
http://www.engr.usask.ca/~sae/fsae/history.html
My computer can get 1700 MPGs.
My Blog
Why would that post get moderated upward? Thirty five years ago when I worked for GM we had already hit the limits on how hot we could run a gas engine. It's easy to get gas to preignite (spark knock) even with an engine made in the 50's. You up the compression ratio a little, and you start having trouble. I know because I have a '55 in my garage that I've had to retard the timing to stop it from spark knocking. The 50 year-old steel handles the temperatures just fine. A material that can handle higher temperatures doesn't help because you simply can't use higher temperatures with gas.
... find out what the most efficiant speed is for my vehicle? I have a 2.7 L V6, so that sucks, but DOHC helps a little bit.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Making the most out of your miles per gallon has nothing to do with gearing, rpm or engine size, etc.
It is about making the most power (aka efficiently using) out of every combustion. I've been into computers since the early 90's and now I'm into drag racing cars. Imagine going zero to 152 mph in 8.9 seconds.
Everything has to do with the combustion chamber design on the head, the timing at which the combustion occurs, the weight of the rotating assembly, and most importantly, MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING ELSE, is the weight of the vehicle. The compression has a lot to do with it, the cam specs, and all that, but most importantly, it is all about maximizing the power amount per combustion. If every car did that gas prices would be FAR less.
Because its efficient and powerful?
All a Hemi is, is a hemispherical combustion chamber, with valves located across from eachother and the spark plug in the middle. This is one of the best ways to ignite and burn fuel (spark starts at the narrow top and expands downwards from there), as well as flow gasses (from one side of the chamber to the other). It can be good for both power and efficiency (typically mutually exclusive), though it was the "Hemi Power" that made the concept famous.
Oh, and for the record, Chrysler didn't invent "Hemi's", nor are they the only automaker to use them. They were just smart enough to coin it as a buzzword (and then patent it).
avi?
Errr, sorry, but your bit on the EGR is wrong.
EGR valves are there to recirculate exhaust gasses after you lift off the throttle. When your engine is going like mad during hard accelleration, you're dumping a lot of fuel into each cylinder to maintain a good air-fuel ratio (and make lots of power). However, when you suddenly lift off the throttle (to slow or shift), your engine will still be dumping tons of fuel into cylinders that suddenly aren't sucking in nearly as much air. Your car goes extremely "rich", and for a few revolutions you literally start spewing fuel into your tailpipe. This is where the EGR comes in: Rather than just coughing a nasty mix of fumes and unburnt fuel out the exhaust, some of it is recirculated back into the intake path of your car so that the unburnt fuel gets a chance to be used. This reduces emissions on throttle lift, which is pretty much your engine at its dirtiest.
The EGR is most certainly NOT there to reduce combustion temperatures though. Yes, some of the exhaust gas going back into the engine is relatively inert during combustion, but the temperature of that gas can be several hundred degrees. This will most certainly raise the combustion temperatures of your car, which reduces fuel efficiency. The emissions you save by recirculating exhaust gas heavilly outweigh those of the momentary temperature increase though, which is why they're now standard on all cars.
As a side note, a lot of guys I know who are into drag racing tend to buy or machine a simple EGR blockoff plate for use at the track (and sometimes, illegally, on the street). It really doesn't make much of a difference, because you're not under power when the EGR is open (during shifting), and the temperature increase is miniscule at best. But since a chunk of metal shaped like an EGR gasket only costs a couple of bucks, and every degree celcius cooler is a potential ~0.2% more horsepower, its a tempting mod.
-A guy also named Adam
Except that it is not possible to build functional ceramic pistol, despite what MSNBC and certain movies have told you.
The famous "Glock 17" contains no ceramic parts -- much of the frame is plastic, just like a few cars, but the chamber and barrel are good old fashioned steel... more than half a pound of metal in each 22 ounce (unloaded) pistol.
The technology is called "oxygen enrichment", and is used on some large diesel engines (trucks and railroad both). I can't remember the name of the company that makes it.
The purpose is as much to reduce emissions as it is to increase fuel efficiency.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Man, you had me right up to the point where you said "Go Nuculear" Ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics? The real solution to stop sucking that oily nipple is solar. Truly effecient solar water heaters have been available for years but those same wealthy, powerful decision makers don't want any of that! For the capital cost to design, build and implement a nuculear reactor you could buy and install more than enough solar water heaters to eliminate the need for the nuculear plant. This is assuming that there are no operational costs for the nuke plants 25 year life and there is no cost for waste disposal/containment. Do you know why no one has ever done a life cycle cost analysis for a nuculear plant? No one has ever figured out how to decomission one once all those stainless steel cooling pipes begin to crack from embrittlement due to neuton bobmbardment.
You would think that a team that can build a car that gets 1,000 miles to the gallon could build a website out of something other then frontpage. I submit for your review Cal State LA's website
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
In serious units, 1,747.4MPG is 0.13 l/100km.
I'm truly ashamed for people who think that hydrogen fuel cells will solve all of the world's fossil fuel problems. Sure, hydrogen fuel cells will make for extremely low exhaust cars, longer laptop battery life, etc, but they won't solve the fossil fuel crisis.
Good article in Scientific American either this month or last. Addresses the total energy costs of fuel cells and a "hydrogen economy" in general.
I guess it was May.
I have 5.5 Honda four-stroke engine on my lobster boat to power a hydraulic winch. Running about two-thirds throttle, it runs for 8 hours on maybe a tad over half a gallon of gasoline. Not gonna get into the math, as there would be too much speculation, but you can see that a 2-3 hp engine could go for a good long time on only a gallon. If you looked at the cars they made, there's certainly not going to be much in the way or resistance, either air or friction.
In conclusion, if you own a boat that still has a clunky two-stroke outboard, trade it and get a four-stroke!
To debunk the metaphysicist, one needs only to take him outside and throw a rock at his head. If he ducks, he's a liar.
There is a 14% grade leading right up to my house, here in the city of Oakland, California. Note, I do not live "in the hills".
-josh
Im lucky if I see 12 miles from a gallon in my series 2 landrover...
Merlin --- We're an autonomous collective... Help, Help, I'm being oppressed!!
This page claims the current record of the Shell Eco-Marathon is 10,240 miles per gallon. (This may well be UK gallons, not US)
_ 2003/exhibitor/team_crocodile.htm
http://www-outreach.phy.cam.ac.uk/physics_at_work
Note that the most dense city in the world is Venice, Italy. Note the concentration of mile high skyscrapers.
Density stems not from huge buildings but from sane city design.
-josh
I should be running my car at 3000-3500 RPM's instead of the 2000 RPM level, in order to get better mileage? Here I've been thinking I've been saving fuel and my engine.
I'm no engineer, mechanic, gear head, whatever, but that does sound counter-intuitive. I'll have to try it out.
Now if I can just get the car back from the shop. Damn dexcool stuff.
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
Is that statute miles per Imperial gallon, or statute miles per US Gallon. The difference between the two can be astonishing. For further tweaking, you could quote miles per gallon in nautical miles per gallon, but that wouldn't make it look as good. At least with litres per 100km, you know what units are being used.
That's why I love Google Calculator!
My alma mater won many such contests in the 80s with one car at nearly 6000 mpg. A wind tunnel helped in body development. The driving technique is to iteratively accelerate to the optimum speed and coast.
On the winning day, there was a helpful wind. Since the shape of the car had a large vertical panel on each side one might wonder what the wind-free fuel economy is. I remember a similar designs coming in over 3000 mpg in a subsequent contest.
The cars go around an oval to negate the effect of wind but it would seem the car was still very advantageous in wind.
Consider a glider or sailboat though - no need for an engine.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Hmm. 1700 miles per gallon that's about 723km per liter which corresponds to 1.38ml per km which is about 0.00000000138 cubic meter per meter which is 1380 square microns. This means the fuel consumption of this car is about the size of a 32-Bit SRAM. That's small.
What you are describing is more accurately termed a "diesel-electric" locomotive, for obvious reasons. There have been/are plain diesel locos.
Interestingly, here in Ireland, our newest diesel-electrics are required to supply three-phase 220v a/c to the carriages from the head-end power (HEP) unit. Being US locos (GM-EMD), it seems they were merely retrofitted for this. We now have ten-year old locos that are more unreliable than 40 year old ones (also GM-EMD)! In addition, due to the engine overload, three locos have burst into flames while pulling passengers.
Being Ireland, there's not much being done but rotating the locos to ensure even wear. (Only the cross-border Dublin-Belfast service, requiring 3 out of 34 locos, uses the HEP).
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
... and yes, there isn't a lot of clearance. There is a stretch of main road, part of the A97, that is the main route north-west from Inverness. It is a single *lane*, not carriageway, barely 10 feet wide in places, but is used by hundreds of trucks and buses, and thousands of cars every week. Any groceries you buy up north will have been delivered by trucks driving along this road. It's scheduled to be upgraded in 2070. Hooray for privatisation.
We have a 1965 model Piper Comanche. There's no direct comparison; but as a simple math exercise, it burns 15 GPH at cruise (less as you go higher) and flies about 185 MPH if there's no wind (yeah right).
That gives us a little over 12 MPG. Certainly not on par with today's mid-sized passenger cars; but it's about identical to the '78 Trans-Am I owned after high school. And the airplane carries 120 gallons of fuel (factory aux. tanks, plus wingtip fuel tanks) so I can go a lot farther than the old TA.
It has a 540 cubic inch air-cooled 6 cylinder engine with fuel injection that produces 260 horse-power.
Some of the things that help our fuel economy in the airplane:
Rectractable landing gear (weight penalty; but less drag)
Constant speed propellor (adjust for power during takeoff, efficiency during cruise)
Speed mods (essentially a wash after we put the tip tanks on)
You can also get better fuel efficiency if you load the airplane to the rear of its center of gravity envelope. Doing so means the elevator (back wing) doesn't have to pull down as much to keep the airplane level. Less downward lift from the elevator means less drag, means more efficient. However, I've never consciously applied this theory as it's just too hard in real conditions to quantify a difference that small, and there are drawbacks to getting too close to the rear cg limit.
Modern piston aircraft are getting more efficient, with composite construction, etc. They're also doing a lot of testing with diesel engines for aircraft, though I think that technology may get trumped by the arrival of sub-$1million very-light-jets. As it is, a new airplane that is equipped comparably to our Comanche, and with comparable performance is about $500K new. That's for 200 MPH and 4 people. So a jet that costs $800K, flies at 350 MPH, has 2 engines and carries 6 people is going to make a lot more sense.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Having spend 10 years as an energy anaylst for several international investment banks, I agree 100% with your post fishybell.
So if we have any magic energy source that powers cars, this wouldn't cause more than a million people a year to die? Like I said in my original post, just moving is a big part of the problem.
If there was no oil, but there was a magic energy source that had 1/2 the energy storage/transport properties of oil don't you think it's likely that the richest man alive would likely have some part of his fortune responsible for it?
Wouldn't countries shape their foriegn policy and possible go to war to get their share or more of this magic energy source?
Isn't it really just civilzation and the fact that there are so many homosapiens and their propensity to want more (resources, technology, speed, power, influence, etc) that causes all these problems?
Flip back the clock a few thousand years and replace oil with food. Hmm...
Ane then flip forward a few thousand years and when the world's cheap/clean drinking water supplies start depleting, and then replace oil for water. This isn't as wacky as it first might seem. Examine the current political situations in Singapore vs Malaysia and water (search it on google)...
And on the natural disaster thing. Think about the US hurricane season when they occasionally evacuate large portions of the south eastern part of the USA. If the oil wasn't in the cars they use for evacuations, how many more people do you think would die? How bout that oil in an ambulance or firetruck or in the trucks that moves food into famine areas to distribute grain? Ahh, those positives don't quite fit your anti-oil agenda so those don't count...
And don't get me started on plastics...
As with any inanimate object, it isn't good or bad. People are most definitly the root of all scummy behavior.
Okay, your turn...
P.S. And on the foreign aid thing, I think the USA gives more aid to Russia and Isreal, neither of which gives the USA very much oil, and one might argue that the countries that have much of the oil don't really like one of those countries very much...
If we presume the traditional three score and ten for an average lifespan, that means there are 613,620 hours to a human life. Be extra generous and assume an even million (a whopping 114 years). Now estimate how many "lives" are lost in the extra commute-time. For example, assume 50 million people take an extra hour each way, to commute - that's 2*50 million = 100 million = 100 "lives" per day. There certainly comes a point of diminishing returns for society as a whole...
Peugeot do a 2.0 litre petrol turbo engine, as fitted to the Citroen XM 2.0CT - stands for "constant torque". It only uses a very, very small amount of boost most of the time but holds the torque pretty much level from 1,200rpm to 5,500rpm.
My '88 Civic LX with a 1.5L engine will do 105mph just fine.
the EGR adds inert gases (burned fuel) back into the intake stream. It does this at cruise and during deceleration to a.)decrease the cylinder temperature and b.)increase the "effective" compression ratio. This allows the use of a leaner mixture.
I used to own a 1985 Honda CRX that got somewhere in the high 40 mpg range on the freeway. And this was a carbureted vehicle, not fuel injected where the engine is helped by computer control of the fuel-air mixture. What people here would have you believe is that my 1985 car was not possible to manufacture. It's almost 20 years later and the average efficiency of gas powered cars has not improved but declined. This is absolutely absurd, and it goes to one point and one point only: The automotive industry is not ruled by technology but by economics.
It is cheaper for companies to produce cars with low mileage efficiency, and people buy them because gas is cheap. Yes, compared to inflation, gas is cheap. Let it rise to US $5 per gallon or US $10 per gallon, and let's see how fuel efficient cars can become.
Think about how much more we know than we knew in 1985, and think how absurd is this conversation. I am certain that -- outside of hybrids and using conventional fuels -- automotive manufactures could market and mass produce a safe, consumer grade vehicle that gets about 100 miles per gallon. They could do this with advances over the last 20 years in computer control technologies, advances in fuel injection valving, advances in materials, improvements in lubricants, etc.
Since 1985, the average fuel efficiency for cars has plummeted. It is now higher than just a few years ago, not counting SUVs. (Check the EPA site for more info.) There are many reasons for this, few of which I think can be blamed on safety equipment. One reason, I am sure is that the car companies do not make as much money per vehicle with fuel efficient cars. Further, there are other ways to influence the mileage debate, including convincing regular people that it is not possible to get the mileage that my car got in 1985.
Note that venice is not even considered a major city by North American standards (a city in the US requires a population of over 1 million to be considered a metropolis -- while cities of the size of Venice are common, few to none are popularly known oustside of their respective states). Further note that disqualifies it as useful in your argument. Also note, that while I live in a town tiny enough few people know about it outside of my province (not to mention that few know of it INSIDE my province), it has a larger population than venice.
For your reference.
Population of venice, italy: 275,368
Population of NY, NY: 8,084,316
Notice the difference. See what I'm getting at? If not, perhaps you should ask the residents of Italy, why, if Venice is such a panacea, that the vast majority of them live in Rome instead?
But hey, try and troll me again, I feel like arguing tonight.
I continue to present your idea of making cities like venice as unworkable until it is proven to work with a population of 1 million+, which would be a sizeable city in North America, and not just an extremely tiny suburb, such as Venice would be here.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Slashdot is breaking under the stress again!
>There certainly comes a point of diminishing returns for society as a whole...
Absolutely. By refusing to spend 4 hours walking to work, and instead driving just 25 minutes, I help reduce the number of lives lost to commuting. Also, by living in an area allowing me to practice hobbies I enjoy, I help reduce the my number of visits (to zero) to a psychiatrist.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Actually reducing vehicle mass is something we need to take a look at.
We can try shifting the the energy source as many times as we want but eventually we also need to look at reducing energy consumption if we want a maintainable lifestyle.
Also a question for any bio engineers (or arm-chair bio engineers) out there: what are the implications of a large number of fuel cell vehicles releasing steam into the local atmosphere? Will it affect weather? Bacteria? Mold?
So I've always been interested in cars with great fuel economy and great power or great torque.
Being too lazy to crunch out the figures, I was wondering if anyone else had?
Other possible derived figures of merit come to mind, too, such as:
- Decibels@65mph*PurchaseCost,
- ShoulderRoom/Cost,
- TopSpeed/YearlyInsuranceCost,
etc. that people might find useful in planning a new car purchase.Definitely, a web site with plots showing the different car models on an xy graph of X=MPG, Y=HP would be most interesting.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Speaking of fuel efficiency, this thing keeps driving me crazy. Every now and then I run across this reference and I must say it seems valid to me, but I know that I happilly believe things that I want to believe, you know... Pease feel free to call me a moron and a gullible retard.
n gine/ind ex2.html#BMW%20LETTER
Here's a link to the supposed UK patent that could lead to the "oh-wouldn't-it-be-swell" water engine kind of thing.
http://members.tripod.com/~anon99/water_e
And a quick summary of the way it's supposed to work.
One of the most ingenious methods of obtaining a supply of hydrogen to power transport was patented by Francois P Cornish (UK!) in 1982. Aluminium from a coil of 1.6mm welding wire was fed into a pressurised water tank and pressed onto a revolving aluminium drum. A 16000 volt 1 amp current from a capacitor was passed between the two, causing heating at the interface and liberating free hydrogen which was then fed into the intake manifold of a car engine - BMW tested the system and found it to work, using 1.8 metres of wire per minute to power a 2 litre engine with the one litre of hydrogen it produced.
Chemically, the equation is 2Al + 3 H2O = Al2O3 + 3H2
Aluminium, of course, is very energy intensive to produce from the bauxite ore, but most of this comes from hydro-electric plants so is sustainable. The aluminium oxide sludge produced proved to be an operating nuisance, but could be recycled (with more energy input) to recover both the Al and the pure oxygen. (That is, provided carbon-lined boxes are not used in the refining process, which produces CO2 - one of the very gases we are trying to avoid creating!)
The Microjoule team achieved 10,705 MPG in the 2003 SHELL competition. See here
for more info. They only managed a mere 9737 in the 2004 competition.
Actually many of these alternatives vehicles are street legal. They have the properly designed braking and steering systems, signals and other requirements.
Maybe, you'd still have to pay for the vehicle and driver.
Ther might also be more recreational travelling, bringing other business opportunities.
I hate sounding like a troll...
I didn't mind this article until I tried to find out who finished first. Second and Third were US teams, first was Canadian. Was it that hard to mention that a Canadian team won this event instead of just linking to the US team's press release? Give credit where credit is due please.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
Right now, I am getting 44 miles per gallon in a 7 year old car with 167k miles on it.
Diesel passenger cars are the immediate answer so that the next generation of technology can be developed.
Diesel fuel has a slight advantage in energy capacity but the real advantage comes in the large compression ratio compared to gassers.
They can be run on alternative fuels with no modification (Rudolph Diesel invented the engine to be run on peanut oil in order that farmers could be more self-sufficient) and many people are doing just that, some are even creating the fuel in their garages from waste vegetable oil.
Currently, Diesel has emissions challenges to overcome. The problem is that there is way too much sulfur in the fuel in the US. Sulfur poisions catylitic converters that treat for NOx. When the switch to Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel comes around in 2006, exhaust after-treatment can become a reality, something that happened with gassers many years ago.
Modern Diesels are clean and powerful and can be run on an alternative energy source. The biggest challenge is the American mindset that thinks otherwise.
I can tell you, however, that it is a great feeling to drive down the road knowing that you are not burning any petroleum, not introducing any new carbons into the cycle, and that your money is going to farmers and not saudi arabia.