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A Solar Race Around the World
garzpacho writes "In Switzerland, two teams are vying to be the first to circle the globe in a solar powered vehicle--one team in a boat, the other in an airplane. The boat, a two person trimaran, is the brainchild of PlanetSolar, who hopes to circumnavigate the world In 80 days. Solar Impulse is fielding the single-pilot plane, which will be capable of taking off under its own power and flying all night. Both groups hope to bring greater attention to solar power, which they believe is more appropriate for alternative transportation than for automobiles."
To heat and power a house, sure. But to power a vehicle? I'm not sure. Wouldn't that require a lot of energy collecting to get to a decent speed or produce power? I understand that the sun is out for a while so It's an almost constant power sour ce.
Maybe for a tram system where the power can go to both the engine and the track?
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Solar powered airplanes make a lot of sense, since they fly above the cloud layer. During a day flight, they're exposed to a lot of sun. If plane could use this energy to fly, it could cut down on the amount of fuel required to fly. Obviously you'd carry a full fuel load because you don't want to be caught in a bind if the solar cells fail, but imagine the savings if you could reduce fuel consumption by something like 30% during day flights.
Literally.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the wind "solar powered"? So humankind has been circumnavigating the globe in "solar-powered" boats for many centuries!
Note: I know some wind currents are driven by the earth's rotation, but the earth rotates because it's orbiting the sun, right? Still solar-powered!
I was thinking about building an automated solar plane that could stay up for weeks, but apparently it's very hard to do with current tech. There was an article a while back about such a plane, but they cheated by using thermals(bubbles of hot rising air heated by the ground) for lift and only stayed up for a couple days. As the energy to weight ratio of batteries improves, it should become easier.
If you want the links in english instead of having to click on the little EN..
l
http://www.solar-impulse.com/scripts/page7655.htm
http://www.planetsolar.org/planetsolar.en.shtml
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
...who hopes to circumnavigate the world In 80 days...
Does anyone else feel pain when reading that?
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Everyone knows solar power is *WAY* more available during the day!
Wouldn't it be cheaper, faster, and more efficent to just use a sailboat instead of a solar-powered craft?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Solar Impulse is fielding the single-pilot plane, which will be capable of taking off under its own power and flying all night.
If you're flying around the world, couldn't you arrange it so it's always daytime?
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Ok I'm bored and am going to complain about a slashdot summary - yes I know...
"Both groups hope to bring greater attention to solar power, which they believe is more appropriate for alternative transportation than for automobiles."
What? That doesn't make any sense. How does a plane flying around the world or a boat floating around the world affect my commute? I don't know about you guys but solar vs gas isn't what stops me from driving a boat or plane to work. That would be cool, commutes would be fun instead of boring traffic, though I bet if everyone did it there would be crashes galore (especially the planes). Plus - why do we have to choose solar power or cars - what I want a solar powered car?
To be fair, one of the teams (boats), for some reason seems to make this comparison. I doubt there are many places where what they say is feasable. I don't care how effecient solar boats are - I can't drive one to work and I bet very very very few people in the whole freaking world can (of course, there are some - but then I bet alot of them do so to avoid traffic. It's no big deal to hit 60-70 in a boat and no traffic, not to mention the "fun" factor. I know I would do so in a heart beat).
As to what the parent article said - I don't see why this makes a difference in perception. I find the challenge pretty neat and plan to follow it (no problems there - great geeky/tech story), but making it happen doesn't really change my commute in any way. Jeese, a wind powered boat made a world wide traversal a few hundred years ago (continent to continent a few thousand years ago) - doesn't make wind powered cars any more useful or practical. A solar transversal isn't going to change much either. Again - not that I don't think this is useful or neat (anything that advances our understanding is worth it - I'm fully aware that solving thier problems may lead to some great advances and wish them great success - I want to see our dependancy on oil vanish for a variety of reasons), if thier goal is to raise perception of solar powered commute this isn't the way.
Back to geeking out - my bet is on the plane. Unless it's *really* slow I can't see it beating the boat. Especially given the plane can fly a fairly straight line (even with air space restrictions) compared to the boat. As to which will be made first - my bet is the boat. If the motor fails you still get to float, a plane loosing power is deadly.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Isn't that how Desmond got stuck on the Island? Maybe we should be tracking these guys...
that solar panels take more energy to produce than deliver through their life cycle.
I know its not a space race, but I'm sure Issac Azimov still is getting a boner in his grave.
It's only a matter of time before ALL his predictions come true.
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
To even participate in a solar race. Simple physics just don't allow it.
Should the sun speed past the facet of light, it would implode, causing mass destructoin, collaping the universena d ya.
Didja take a look at that website about the solarplane? All kinds of mumbo about "pushing the envelope", and by the language, it's pretty clear that anything resembling construction is a *long* way off.
But, any dolt could take a nice, efficient catamaran, replace the sales with a solar rigging and a trolling motor, load the boat down with some MREs, and start sailing.
Not saying it'd be pleasant, but I'd rather sit on a Hobicat than try to get through the night in an ultralight plane knowing that battery life would just *barely* make it through the night, with almost no margin for error. (and yes, I'm a pilot)
The kind of aspect ratio they're talking about would be mighty difficult to fly, since it would be very prone to flutter, and the difference between the cruising speed and the stall speed would be almost negligable!
Not to mention having to be both very lightweight and also very strong...
Scary!
Better to fuel up a general aviation craft on butanol call it "green" and be done with it! Really, when you read up on it, butanol is some seriously cool stuff.
1) It mixes freely with gasoline
2) It burns like gasoline, in cars unmodified,
3) It can be made from corn, wheat, cheese whey, just about any agricultural product or byproduct.
4) It handles moisture much better than ethanol.
5) It's possible to extract more energy (in BTU) as butanol from corn then as ethanol.
Seriously, the fuel of the future for the United States is here, and it's butanol. (Bio-Diesel is probably more appropriate for Europe, where they have many more diesel cars than the US which is almost all gasoline-powered)
Just as green, and much easier on the pilot!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
However, your feeble attempt at humor was pretty painful.
Sorry, but I can't get up the slightest bit of excitement for a "solar" boat... First of all because they've been wind-powered for quite a lot longer than they've been diesel-powered. Secondly, because the ocean doesn't have any minimum speed-limit, so ANY ammount of energy will eventually get them where they are going (like a solar-powered blimp). And last but not least, because boats need a tremendous ammount of maintenance (unlike cars), which is where the bulk of the operating expense is... not the fuel (unlike cars).
The solar powered airplane sounds like a great idea, until you read that it has to FALL all night long to maintain its airspeed... That strikes me as being quite impractical for anything but an exhibition. So... interesting, but not showing how practical solar-powered planes can be.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
FTA: The same level of the quality is given to pretty much all the "information" on the site.
When I read that title, the first thing I thought of was Arthur C. Clarke's story "The Wind from the Sun," which details a race between space ships driven by solar wind.
ANYWAY. Haven't first thought of that, I then read the article, and somehow what they're proposing just pales in comparison.
If one airplane is above the other one does that mean they might go faster because the light that bounces off the bottom one will hit their plane faster than regular light?
Lots of sentiment here about the solar plane not being practical...
However, the whole purpose behind this is not based on how "practical" a solar powered round-the-world flight may be, but rather the required technological gains that must be made to enable a global solar powered flight possible - namely improviements in battery weight and solar cell output, as well as gains in light weight composites.
Advancements in these areas have huge implications for your practical everyday mundane tasks
I've seen what happens when you enter a solar race...
you get stuck on some island in the middle of the pacific and have to push some stupid button every 108 minutes...
The best way for alternative fuel sources to become popular is for them to become economically viable. By buying a hybrid engine (a hybrid car, for example), you are providing downward pressure on fossil fuel demand, and normal supply-and-demand economics tells us that this will provide downward pressure on fuel prices.
Hybrids are a "half step" toward alternate energy sources. We need full steps. Want to help save the planet? Buy an SUV. Crank up those gas prices. This will help the case for alternate energy sources, by making them more economically attractive.
Same goes for Hybrid airplanes.
What do you think, can I win this argument?
Moon buggy. :)
FRA: STFU GTFO
All I can think of of Peter Griffin flying past the kitchen window in a plane, laughing.
What I'd like to see is an "open source" methodology.
If you want to make something happen in say, Linux, you can look at what someone else has already done, then tweak it to make it do what you need it to do. With our advances in bio-tech, surely there must be a future in bio-engineering some specific plant life to produce high amounts of usable energy. I know that there are bacteria that produce h2 etc. but the scale is insufficient.
What I imagine is, a plant that converts prodigious amounts of energy (ie bamboo can grow 6 feet in a day) and subverting that energy so that instead of producing growth, it produces a chemical that can be used to directly power an engine of some variety. An engine is defined as something that converts energy into work done.
In the end, we need a symbiosis to fulfill our transportation requirements. Back in the days, man used a horse or a cow, to pull a cart. The animal got its food from grazing grass which got its energy directly (but not completely) from the sun.
So why can't we follow that approach ? Utilise a very efficient system that nature has "designed" and subvert it to our own ends. After all, fossil fuels are only stored solar power.
Taking nanotech into account, it may be possible to create a muscle structure that when it is working generates an amount of electrical current. The muscle would get its "nutrition" from the chemical produced by the bio-engineered plant. The plant would get its energy from the sun. We could foster the initial growth of the plant in the ocean or tanks (for safety) much like an algae bloom, so we would only have to fill our "tanks" with a green goop once a month for example. The extra compounds the plant needs to survive (minerals etc) would be provided by the dead goop we have already used (think ginger beer plant). We still have to utilise the electrical energy more efficiently of course, but our motors are getting pretty good.
I realise this is all probably very naive, and I'm not a scientist in any way, at all ! But it seems to me that all our thinking has been towards shortcuts, ie. sun -> solar panel -> power instead of taking the natural route of sun -> plant -> food -> animal -> power.
We need to aim at creating a living system.
Maybe I'm talking out of my ninth planet, but the saying "haste makes waste" seems to apply as solar panels aren't very efficient.
Of course, you could say that my ideal involves many more stages and so is less efficient, but each stage would be as close to maximum efficiency as nature has got to already.
I'll get my coat.
Next time you tank remember, it is all natural.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Hindenburg :s
Because you can - or because you should?
Clorophyl the stuff you see in the leaves of most plants use sunlight to generate energy. In fact, the plants have mastered the art of converting sunlight to energy which helps them grow. Why not use the same thing to power our machines ?
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Since the crafts both use batteries at night, they are using stored solar energy for the trip.
Stored solar energy. Which is what fossil fuels are.
Therefore, the trip is not 100% direct solar.
Maybe they should call it partially direct solar powered, or trip only uses solar energy thatfell on the vehicle for duration of trip.
Of course, fuel will still be burned I am sure. A boat consuming fossil fuels will probably be keeping an eye on the solar boat, and the same for the plane.
Kernel Krunch - Part of a Complete OS
I doubt the planet will stop using petroleum based fuels anytime soon. There are several trillion barrels in oilshale (and oilsands) being worked on right now, because the prices got high enough to make it both economically feasible and the tech has gotten good enough to make energy transfer cost feasible (energy in to useful energy out).
The main problem right now is, the vast bulk of the expensively developed transportation industry (the fuel production vertically and the vehicles themselves) is about completely dependent on liquid fuels needing nothing more sophisticated than a non leaky fuel-tank to function. That's it, we bucket stuff around now, needs not a lot of high tech to accomplish.
Going to hydrogen for example is an entirely radical move that is orders of magnitude more expensive than just paying a bit more for traditional liquid fuels, every single step needs to be rebuilt, top to bottom. This is the buhzillion dollar option.
Most likely we will see a gradual shift to blends with biofuels as the main component of a transition economy away from strictly petroleum based to the buhzillion dollar hydrogen option. That's my best guess anyway. The only other reasonable option at this time, that is doable now with tech we have now, would be "plug in" hybrids, and have some of the fuel load thereby offset to renewable electricty sources such as wind or solar. For example, joe commuter, suburbia, has a sunny roof to exploit. If the plug in hybrid owner had a home solar array they could recharge their vehicles battery bank overnight from the battery bank at home, and that battery bank is kept charged from the solar. Even if only 25 miles of driving could be provided by the plug in hybrids batteries, that could lessen the demand for liquid fuels considerably in the commuting aspect of transportation, where it would fit the best. Millions of cars (potentially if the car companies would just *sell* plug in hybrids at a reasonable cost, which I think could be done with economies of scale) x 25 miles (call 25 a reasonable ball park there) rather non polluting and eventually quite cheap miles would add up quickly to considerable savings.
To make it better, somehow mandate or encourage that the stored battery potential would be used the closer you got the heavily urban area,not used right off the bat from the suburban area. The reason for that is the electric drive component is better suited for the stop and start of inner city urban driving, and it reduces pollution *there* where today it increase it with all those fuel burning engines running-and idling wastefully in stop and start traffic.
If they had a "switch to electric drive here" zone areas, perhaps that would help. I have no idea what amount of fuel is more or less wasted in downtown areas with massive stop and go driving, but it has to be simply a *huge* number. Having the electric option there-where the demand miles driven are lessened but the torque to get up and go is increased (where electrics shine), would certainly result in a lot of fuel savings. Most likely having the feature being speed based (like it is now with the hybrids) would help, but a dedicated "electric only" switch would also be needed.
And plug in hybrids using off the shelf stuff we have now would certainly be cheaper than trying to get to hydrogen and fuel cells for the next decade or two to come.
The formation of oil is still in dispute. There is a pretty credible theory called the abiotic origin of oil that has many adherents today. It is not the industry main view, but it is starting to garner more interest.
Okay, I hate to be a party pooper but sailboats won this races a few hundred years back. Winds are generated by the sun warming up the air, sailboats use this power to generate forward momentum. IE. Solar powered. A solar cell vehicle has to transform the suns energy twice before it is turned into forward momentium (Sun's radiation > Electrical > mechanical) so the systems aren't all that different or more complex. Sailboats just use the free energy that is already avalible.
I think this goes under "Pointless displays of useless technology"
Equatorial circumference of Earth ~ 25,000 mi
Duration of day = 24 hrs
Duration of "light" ~ 12 hrs
To get peak Sun ("noon") the whole flight time, the plane would have to clip along at:
25,000 mi / 24 hr ~ 1040 mph
Dawn to dusk:
25,000 mi / 36 hr ~ 700 mph
Note: C = 25,000 mi is actually at ~83,000 ft.
nt, u biatch
Given that fossil fuels are just biologically condensed solar power, I'm not sure there's room for a "first" here.
For that matter, wind is driven by differential heating of the Earth's atmosphere by the Sun, so Magellan might have a claim on being first with the boat variant.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
The Ama seem to be of a very low displacement.
The Bridge is a long way above the water (probably 20-30 feet!!!), as is that solar panel, so the centre of gravity is very high. I imagine they did this to reduce the salt on the panels...
Some nice waves coming abeam will enable the wind to get underneath that huge wind of theirs and over it goes.
Compare that to a sailing boat what has a C of G around the waterline, and the healing force reduces the further it's healed, and you'll see there's a bit of a difference.
So on one hand we have centuries of knowledge and experience. On the other we have a big unknown.
Which do you think will be the most reliable?
Batteries: Very efficient way of storing energy. Low energy density. Not that practical for long journeys.
Hydrogen: 'fuel of the future'. Not all that practical due to low energy density as a gas or refridgeration as a liquid. Not that practical at all.
Solar: 'free energy from the sun'. But you have to refine a fuck load of silicon, which uses huge amount of energy. The panels need to be kept clean, etc. And it's got low energy density...Not that practical.
Compared to these, planting and burning trees / making biodiesel may be less efficient, but it's a damn sight more practical. It's something you can actually use...
It was spinning when it formed so it'sa gonna keep spinnin 'till something big enough comes along to stop it.
That "something big enough" is already here. It's called tides. The difference in the force of gravity on the near and far side of the moon have locked it into a 1:1 rotation:orbit configuration with the earth. The same will eventually happen with the earth and the sun. Of course, it will take a much longer time, but barring external influences, it will happen.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams