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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.
Somehow I dont think a styrofoam hummer will take off..unless there is a gust of wind.
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.
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'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.
we'd all be a lot healthier if we followed Fred's example
I suspect the cardio vascular benefits of using your legs to power your car would be dwarfed in comparison to the damaged caused by eating one of those ribs that toppled said car.
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).
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)
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.
Going at 15 mph, there's not much safety equipment required.
Fuel efficiency is a difficult thing to deal with - engines have the highest efficiency (power out/fuel in) basically at the minimum point in the power band. Yes: this means that a common engine is getting terrible gas mileage if you're moving along at ~15 mph normally. This is why a car's maximum fuel efficient speed is complicated (and is rarely 55 mph, regardless of what hundreds of websites with terrible math will tell you!) and depends very strongly on the car's gearing. Many cars with overdrive will actually have a "two hump" fuel efficiency curve - that is, they'll be most efficient at about 30 mph or so if you're in 3rd gear, but also have another efficiency peak at 65-70 mph that's lower than the first (but still higher than going 55 mph in the overdrive gear).
The way to get good fuel efficiency with a standard design engine is twofold - make the car light, make the engine underpowered, and go slow. If the engine is always struggling, it's always in the power band, and always efficient. Hence the reason that a Geo Metro gets great gas efficiency.
Note the details of these cars - slow speed (15 mph), massively underpowered engine (3-4 hp), and very light chassis.
Here is a very good explanation.
(As an aside, most websites are crap at explaning this. See here, where they state that going from 100 kph to 120 kph increases the fuel consumption by 20%. Since you're moving 20% faster, a 20% increased fuel consumption means exactly the same gas mileage.)
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
I'm a machinist, and I've dealt with automotive engine blocks before. I think the big problem is going to be manufacturing costs. When machining a ceramic, it tends to chip very easily, which could raise costs due to high waste, and special manufacturing procedures that hamper productivity. However, since it's non-ferrous, you can use diamond tooling instead of the traditional carbide tooling, which will save a fortune on tooling costs
Ceramics are also very abrasive, which might drive up maintenance costs due to the need to frequently replace piston rings. The engine block itself should wear much more slowly than a normal cast iron block, however.
Ceramics can be pretty resilient even when faced with temperature stresses, but I don't know how well a car that needs to be running one moment, and parked the next would fare. I doubt people would put up with the need for a 5 minute warm up period, especially if failure to do so would destroy their car.
Another issue is that a ceramic block would be impossible to repair, and would probably be a good deal larger than a regular cast iron engine to provide strength at every location on the block that feels stresses. But, if it's possible to build ceramic handguns, I'm sure it's possible to build a durable ceramic engine block.
I doubt there's very many manufacturing experts who read slashdot, but I would be very curious to see solid numbers on the costs of ceramics manufacturing compared to traditional cast iron. I haven't done much work with ceramics, so much of the above is just educated speculation. Treat it as such.