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Sahimo Hydrogen Vehicle Gets Over 1,300 mpg
Mike writes "Students from Turkey's Sakarya University have unveiled a remarkable attempt at creating Europe's most fuel-efficient vehicle. Dubbed the Sahimo, their pint-sized hydrogen car is cable of eking out an incredible 568 km on 1 liter of fuel (about 1,336 miles per gallon). An aerodynamic carbon-fiber construction keeps the vehicle's weight down to less than 110 kg (243 lbs), and the designers hope to push the Sahimo's performance even further to a full 1,000 km per 1 liter of fuel before participating in the Global Green Challenge in October."
1,336 MPG
Still 1 short from being leet!
At 110 kilograms, how far will it fly when it gets T-boned by a Hummer?
Considering that high-school students in the U.S. have built viable vehicles that get over 1,000 miles per gallon of gasoline. They should be able to do better with hydrogen.
but I'd rather see a competition that takes regular cars and modifies them to get the most gas mileage. The problem with these uber gas-mileage vehicles is that they're street legal, have no safety equipment, and don't go very fast.
I second that.
Ranks right up there with the ShamWow.
...if it had smooth disc wheel covers and an attempt at wheel skirts.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Billy, we hardly knew ya
Le français vous intéresse?
Until you get rear ending by a semi truck. Or t-boned by a f-150, etc
In my opinion cars driven by electric motors are where we should be placing our bets.
Electric motors can go very quickly (at least the speed limit), have great acceleration, don't require a grid of hydrogen fuel stations to be built, don't require the massive amounts of energy used for electrolysis (the process of making useable hydrogen), have 0 risk of exploding (although admittedly hydrogen vehicles are pretty safe, but its more of a mental thing), and are ridiculously efficient. You know that about 3% of the energy used in internal combustion engines actually ends up moving the driver? With an electric motor, it is more like 50-80%, depending on the type of vehicle.
You could argue that we're just shifting the dependance (and the green house gases) to power plants- but this would open a door to a 100% maintainable system, it just requires an eventual (much more eventual than current state) shift over to clean power for plants. Our existing grid could easily handle 20 million plugin cars.
The only thing we're waiting on is efficient battery technology for the range of the things.
Billy Mays is going to bed. He crawls under the covers and says a little prayer...
"Lord, this week you saw fit to take Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson..."
and the Lord interrupts, "BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!!"
I'm sure you can find some nice radioactive thermal generators that have under a liter of fuel in them. That will get you a hundred thousand miles per liter easily.
I wish I had mod points to give you :(
The last 10 articles have been posted by kdawson.
You don't honestly think he's allowed to announce anything that earth-shattering do you? :)
Electric motors [snip] have 0 risk of exploding
Yeah because lithium-ion batteries are perfectly safe!
A lot safer than compressed hydrogen canisters- especially considering that the batteries in electric cars are separated to prevent any sort of massive failure. Worst case scenario one out of 6,300 cells pops, and you have to open it up and replace it.
Hydrogen is just a way to store the electricity.
What you have is hydrogen + fuel cell + electric motor.
1,336 MPG? Is that city or highway?
Seriously though... What is the practical fuel economy of this vehicle under normal driving conditions? With a strong tail wind and solid tires, everything I own is 'capable' of 100MPG. In practice, 40 MPG is about what I expect.
That's the general problem when you concentrate a lot of energy in little space. There are practical differences between fossil fuel, hydrogen, urane and batteries, but the concept of accidentally releasing (converting to pressure/temperature) much of this energy is pretty much the same.
This stuff doesn't work.
Why ahsn't this gone to mass production?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I'm surprised. Why does this 3rd place winner get this attention? If the numbers are anything to impress with, take a closer look at the winner, the Norwegian contribution, clocking in at 1246 km per 1 liter of fuel equivalents. Official Results: http://www.shell.com/home/content/eco-marathon-en/europe/2009/results/app_results_2009.html
Haiku as the sponsors laugh all the way to the bank after receiving any patents and royalties (assuming Toyota hasn't sponsored them and bought their designs and any universities along with them...
It is STILL a real "Rice Rocket": It's white, short-grained, oblongish. But, will it fit in sushi rolls. Anyone getting run over in that thing will look like baluga and salmon eggs rolled into one bite-sized pill. With blood and shit, it WILL be on bitter sushi pill to swallow.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Maybe the battery could be of a special type: It would split water into H2 and O2 as electricity enters, store the H2 in a compressed tank, and convert it back to electricity with a fuel cell on demand. To save weight, the water-splitting component could even be separated from the car and attached to the power outlet instead.
Because there are massive vested interests that would lose money if it did?
Miles per gallon, or kilometers per liter, is only a useful measurement when we're comparing vehicles with the same fuel. Getting a 25% increase in miles per gallon of gasoline would be great. But is 568 kilometers on a liter of Hydrogen even GOOD? How expensive is that hydrogen? (How many kilos of coal were burned to generate the energy to generate the hydrogen?) How dangerous is a fast-moving vehicle with a liter of hydrogen?
This may be great, but the statistic is pretty meaningless. They could get a lot BETTER miles per gallon out of a gallon of plutonium, I'd wager, if we're making those sorts of comparisons. Don't even get me started on antimatter.
"Our existing grid could easily handle 20 million plugin cars"
I'm not sure it could. Take for example the 10 minute fill up of this car http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced-cars/electriccar-maker-touts-10minute-fillup
"To charge a 35-kWh battery in 10 minutes requires 250 kilowatts of powerâ"five times as much as the average office building consumes at its peak. That rules out rapid charging at home. Even rapid-charge âfilling stationsâ stretch the imagination, as youâ(TM)d need a megawatt power feedâ"generally available only at electrical substationsâ"to simultaneously operate four power pumps. "
i wish i could stop
In my opinion cars driven by electric motors are where we should be placing our bets.
Electric motors can go very quickly (at least the speed limit), have great acceleration, don't require a grid of hydrogen fuel stations to be built, don't require the massive amounts of energy used for electrolysis (the process of making useable hydrogen), have 0 risk of exploding (although admittedly hydrogen vehicles are pretty safe, but its more of a mental thing), and are ridiculously efficient. You know that about 3% of the energy used in internal combustion engines actually ends up moving the driver?
I think you mean 30%, if you are referring to petrol (gas in USA) and 45+% for diesel.
Incidentally, on UK roads, although an accident may be more survivable in an SUV, you are more likely to have an accident involving a collision with an oncoming vehicle, owing to our narrow roads and many obstructions. Also, journey times in SUVs are longer because you are likely to be held up so much more often. The recession and the oil price spike has brought a sudden halt to the SUV-ification of the UK, and most new cars are either company cars or small ones. The result is that driving on my mixed urban/rural commute is getting noticeably easier. This trend may accelerate.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I for one welcome our new fuel efficient, genocidal overlords.
One problem I see with that number is that, yes 1300 mpg is impressive, but it's 1300 mpg of hydrogen fuel. The only useful comparison that can be made to current cars is that it'll be ages between each fill-up.
Without doing any research, I have no idea whether 1300 mpg is impressive for hydrogen fuel or not.
I'm a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar...
-Lucy-
And even if I didn't, if the thing's big enough to hold two adults, they'll still outweigh it.
...which, of course, will always work just fine. Everyone knows that safety systems are all infallible, and all work exactly as intended.
Oh. And nothing ever catches fire.
Kid-proof tablet..
A driver of one of these would have significantly more safety on a motorcycle.
That thing, if t-boned by a motorcycle, would likely result in the driver dying. This thing has a curb weight of 243lb, which is 100lb less than a small non-highway motorcycle. Consider, also, that it's (likely steel- or aluminum- mesh substructure) carbon fiber: it's significantly less resistant to fracture than any metal (except maybe over-hardened iron).
Additionally, the driver's vantage point is low. Very low. Again, if hit by a motorcycle, the driver's head would be right at the bike's center of gravity. This is right at the "bumper" level of other 4-wheeled vehicles. The driver would be fucked.
Finally, this thing is unlikely to produce the noise that a motorcycle does (which adds to others' awareness of the biker), lacks the agility of a 2-wheel vehicle, and decreases the driver's visibility over what is available on a bike (due to the 'cockpit' as well as the low perspective). Driver competence aside, a motorcycle is safer.
Finally, there are a lot more drivers per capita in the US than in Europe. This might have something to do with the death rate (as well as the endemic nature of car ownership here). The bar is significantly lower for ownership, combined with the fact that the roads are likely much more full of cars as a result (and that people drive more often/regularly here) may lead to this statistical difference. If someone has a daily commute of 30+ miles each day - with tens of thousands of other people doing the same thing, rain or shine - the likelihood of an accident goes up.
As a parable, someone who gets certified to sky-dive and does it a handful of times isn't as likely to have a problem as someone who does it with regularity (say, someone in Airborne) due to the sheer number of times it's performed. Shit happens, and is more likely to happen with increased exposure.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
there are .62 km in a mile your calculations are way off!! its not 1300 miles pergallon its more like
568
x.62=352.16
silly people no offense
That's only 0.18 l/100km !
I swear Officer, these are not WMD, just plain French cheese...
Now that I've started commuting, it's time to replace my old Chevy Van with a more efficient car. The Smart car looks pretty attractive at first (it's actually possible to park one in San Francisco, unlike the van :-), but the big drawback with it or the other small lightweight cars on the market is safety. Admittedly I've only had a collision every few decades, but the van's never been the smaller vehicle, while the small cars are smaller than most other things on the road, plus they're short enough that you don't have as much visibility.
On the other hand, a friend of mine totalled her Miata once and walked away with only some airbag burns - a truck ahead of her on the freeway lost a ladder, and there was no time to dodge it. She spun around a couple of times and banged into the median barriers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
nice post..
If you're an average American, your car probably outweighs you by a factor of 10-20 (unlike this lightweight vehicle, which you might outweigh :-). So no more than 5-10% of the energy is moving you as opposed to the vehicle, and *then* you can go multiply by 30-45% depending on fuel, etc.
Also, one of the most common methods of producing hydrogen today isn't electolyzing water, it's cracking methane or other hydrocarbons.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is how I'd start to approach making a modern street car more fuel efficient:
* start with a small sedan (Ford Focus, Honda Accord, etc.)
* rip out anything unnecessary from the inside. This includes all the comfort electronics. Weight requires more energy, so remove as much as possible.
* remove all unnecessary subsystems that leech from the alternator: air conditioning, power steering, ABS, etc.
* remove the "emission control" measures, which seem to invariably sap a good 25%+ fuel efficiency.
* add an HHO system and run the engine rich, either tricking the sensors or modifying the computer to ignore the high readings
* if you plan on heavy city driving, add in the break energy collector and a fuel cell of some sort.
Bet you could get close to 100MPG if you did something like this. Too bad performance and fuel efficiency seems to drop off quickly if you go below a 4 cyl engine.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
ICE are actually about 30-40% energy efficient in terms of the energy utilized to move the vehicle. I assume that was what you were referring to, unless you're under the presumption that a vehicle with an electric motor can weigh about 1.5x what the driver does.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
From the article: "The SAHMO is truly a lightweight carbon fiber vehicle, weighting less than 110 kilograms."
The entire car weighs less than an overweight American.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It takes more energy to make hydrogen than what you get back out of it. You can't make this at home. But you can make electric power at home, for free.
Hydrogen fuel necessitates a distribution network exactly the same as for petrol. This is why the oil crazies in the Bush regime pumped money into hydrogen and nothing into electric, even as electric cars worked and people loved them to death.
Plus, it's unbelievably explosive - in concentrations between 2% to 98% it's explosive. So you either must have none or very close to 100% hydrogen for it not to explode. Now, when gasoline turns into a vapour and creeps along the ground then explode if lit you can get a 30 foot or more radius is vapour with corresponding explosion as the vapour ignites. And gasoline is a fairly heavy dense molecule compared to hydrogen which is the lightest molecule known, and since it's really a gas, unlike gasoline which will sit there as a liquid for days, hydrogen turns from a liquid to a gas in much less than one second.
If you have a tank with 5 gallons of hydrogen and the tank is ruptured - and eventually this absolutely is going to happen one day - then the resultant break and explosion would very much on the order of what is definitely not conducive to human life. That is, you'll be ok unless that tank goes, then you're pretty much a goner, much more so than with gasoline.
Between the fact you have to buy it from the oil barons and can never make it your self for free and is the most explosive substance known, yeah, hydrogen is great. Not.
I think if we knew what we were doing we'd immediately stop anything to do with hydrogen cars and stick to electric. Keep in mind before the oil companies paid the car companies to stop making electrics, there were more electric cars than gas powered cars on the road in the early 1900s.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Oi! I resent the blanket generalization. I'm pretty sure I _could_ fit about half an ass cheek in that thing.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
At over 1300 mpg, there's really no need for a dense grid of Hydrogen stations to begin with, as you'll rarely need to fill up and having to drive out to a station wont take that much out of the vehicle's range with a filled tank.
Heck, maybe it will be possible to simply order Hydrogen in small quantities and have it delivered to the consumer to fill their tank.
You didn't say how fast the Hummer was going, or if it was an H1, H2, or H3 (or how overweight the guy driving it is for that matter).
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The inefficiency of the many implementations of Water Electrolysis HHO and Joe Cells are what make it safe and a "fuel supplement" that thet DMV is willing to admit to their certifications. Absolete efficieny yields the effect of a hydrogen explosion.. You'll probably see a lot of implementations of Stainless 316L plated within 1mm spacing to work on the arc of 4 ampere in DC 12 volts, but the original implementation is nothing more than a monotonic sound generator that splits the water.
Anything that replaces Petrol at the pump gets shot-down because it is an economy stabilizer. Imagine the companies that could hire more people and speculate further, let alone the Fed and states will implode; what draconian leadership would rear its ugly head of State immediatly rather than slowly rise from the sea disguised in beauty of progress.
If you want to see another implementation of fuel, look to a heat exchanger technology called the G.E.E.T. (GEET carbeurator) derived from an early Studebaker's experimental carbeurator design that accidently rolled off the factory floor among thousands of "standard" models. Same company founded by Paul Phantone and Joe is what they're working on "down under." That technology can take any primable fluid and break it down to the atomic level with plasma precision to combust as fuel (only works with organic water-based though)
Another one you can look towards is the Pre-Ignition Catalytic Converter from Jeff Otto's company that does the same as GEET only it is allowed by the DMV because it was shown to supplement the use of Petrol from the Pump.
Don't you get it? None own their automobile, because the DMV takes the Manufacturer's original Certificate or Statement of Origin direct from their regulated "car dealer" to register it with The State, then they associate the controlling interest to a Certificate of Title to an associated corporation called STATE OF ********* to grant the induction of a legislature-derived "motor vehicle" under their regulation; whereby without any kind of muniment of title, the qualified driver may conditionaly move said property in commerce with only qualified fuels (that in-so-far may be biased to generate the most revenue).
It's too bad that States of the United States send their persons to create corporations in other countries to plague those economies with alleged Freedom and Liberty. Feigned ignorance rules the sunset.
Einstein, Newton, Hawking and Slashdot once competed to see who could produce the most brilliant physics paper. Slashdot's paper said only "imagine a beowulf cluster of portman's hot grits. first post". On the way back Hawking gave Slashdot a wedgie. Natalie Portman watched and laughed and then her and Hawking went home together. As she left Portman made a point of showing Slashdot a bag of grits.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
You know your efficiency figures are wrong and meaningless, right?
Where the hell did you get that 3% figure??? Last time I checked, it was more about 40% for combustion engines.
Plus, you'll have to multiply your 50-80% by the efficiency of a power plant, between 30 and 60%.
I don't see any mention of how many humans fit in this car. 1 child?
You'll be saying wow every time you use this Car! It's like a corvette! It's like a Prius! It's like a sponge for liquid hydrogen! A regular car doesn't work wet - this makes water all the time. This is for the executive, the environmentalist, the pitchman, the john with a bitten tongue fleeing a crazy hooker! This car burns twenty times less hydrogen than gasoline. Look at this! It just extracts all the work that was put into the hydrogen before! Why do you want fossils and dinosaurs to work so hard to push you to work and back? It drips, but it doesn't make a mess. You cruise the highways, fill it at the hydrogen filling station. It is made in Europe, you know the Americans never make good green stuff. Olympic divers, they pick up chicks in these. We're gonna do this in real time! Look at this! Put in a gallon of hydrogen, turn the ignition! [gets in the car] You follow me, camera guy? Look at this[cut] and we're 1300 miles away! [camera pans around] See what I'm telling ya? You'll be saying wow every time!
Please give us a car analogy...oh, wait.
But how much of that energy is used to move the driver, as opposed to hauling the vehicle itself around?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Utter Bullshit.
I had 4500 lbs of F-150 when I got tagged by a semi going 55-60 MPH on the ice. I was going 45 MPH when I made the sudden stop into the concrete wall. The concrete wall was unharmed. I was a bit sore from the shoulder belt. The front bumper was mangled, the rear bumper was scratched, the frame rails were bowed 2" (that's a lot) and the front crumple zone was crumpled. $200 for the frame straightening, $80 for another front bumper from the junk yard. $70 for a transmission tail cone. A bit of labor to put it back together. I've gotten another 100,000 miles on the truck since then. Fuck the Prius and the $1000 to fix the radio/AC display. I'm driving my truck until the wheels rust off.
Yes, it was a hit and run, and it was faster and cheaper (time = money) to fix my truck then to deal with the insurance company.
The only reason to compare fuel volume is one of convenience. How far can I travel in a vehicle that devotes a given amount of space for its fuel storage. However, we don't compare electric vehicles based on how much space their batteries take up to travel a given distance. Comparing gallons of hydrogen with gallons of gasoline and making it look like a fuel economy comparison is totally misleading.
Me? I think I'd rather explode in a quick hydrogen blast then burn to death in a gasoline fire.
No sig today...
Using volume to compare hydrogen to gasoline (or diesel) is silly.
With a "gallon" of reactor fuel, a usable street vehicle could travel tens of thousands of miles.
I think he means 3%. A driver is around 10% the weight of the car. Add inefficiencies. There you have it.
I wonder how many of Toyota's patents they have violated?
The cost of development for the SAHÄMO wasnâ(TM)t cheap â" amounting to $170,000.
Who the hell thinks that $170,000 to develop a prototype vehicle is expensive? That sounds incredibly cheap, to me.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Yeah, so true! Because lithium-ion is the only battery that exists. Oh, wait, it's not.. Check out LiFEPo4, A123 makes them, there was a video when they drilled straight through and no kabom, just some smoke if i remember.
They need to change the rules on these efficiency challenges. This vehicle and this vehicle are completely impractical.
The rules need to be:
1)Must carry more than one occupant in a seated position.
2)Must maintain an average speed of at least 30 mph.
GM will be releasing this thing in 2011 as the new flagship luxury car...
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
How about an interum solution:
www.dotyenergy.com.
It uses wind, H2, sequestered CO2, and runs in our current cars. Burning their "WindFuels" (which is actually just gasoline made using wind for the energy and RFTS processing) releases no NEW Co2 into the atmosphere and is 100% renewable. It;s also safe, clean, and proven by 50 years of science. (we were making diesel using this process WAY back in WWII).
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
It does not have to be perfectly safe.
It just has to be safer or as safe.
Well, LiIon, not so much, but LiPo are quite safe unless you actually SET one on fire or rupture the casing. Then again, that's also somewhat likely in a car accident, so instead we'd use LiTit batteryies, or better yet the up and coming LiSu. They don;t explode, don't burn, and can charge to 80% in under 10 minutes...
Of course, they're a ways off from enough mass production to actually support us all having cars with them, and we're 30-50 years from having enough electric power, and a completely rebuilt smartgrid that could actually handle the loads, so we need an interum solution:
Here it is: wwew.dotyenergy.com. If you have questions about their RFTS process, I'll be happy to enlighten you.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Am I the only one that got a good laugh out of the sponsorship logos on that thing?
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
You owe me a new keyboard.
A microsoft keyboard, at that.
Distance is not so relevant due to vastly differing population density and traffic type. You may drive 120 miles a day as commute, but if you are doing it on a freeway with relatively low number of exit/entries then you will be vastly safer than the same person doing 120 miles a day in a urban environment without freeway. To give you a proper example, to go to my parents from Paris I did use only departmentals (with lot of crossings of smaller or other departmentals). The risk of an accident is far higher than if I did indeed take only the freeway/motorway (autoroute) for the SAME distance. So your statistic would not be the slightiest better.
A far better statistic would be to compare distance travelled on similar road and population density and distance, then comapre countries. I dunno what the result would be, but after having seen the age of many of the stuff which was on road back when I was in Dallas Tx, I would make a wager that some part of the US would still be higher in accident incidence than most of the EU.
I would love to see more of these technologies coming out in the consumer sector, where it can be used right now instead of 20 years from now....really!
http://www-static.shell.com/static/usa/downloads/responsible_energy/ecomarathon/SEMA_2009_Final-Results.pdf
All they did was add a body kit to a Smart Car
Loading...
so...from the old days of Bob and Doug McKenzie figuring out the metric system (Canadians)
to get from our 65mph zone to the metric, you double it and add 30. so you would have to be going 160 metric miles per hour to be equivalent.
apparently if you only travel 120-130, we are about 32 metric miles faster.
Doug: "Like how many beers would that be, if you want like, a sixpack in metric?"
Bob: "Six, six is 12, 30 is 42 beers. 42 metric beers."
Doug: "That's good for me eh. Count me in on metric."
This article is rather un-newsworthy because the data is absolutely meaningless to the average human. For one, this vehicle is nothing like conventional automobiles, largely because one impact will kill you, even a relatively tame one. This is a $170'000 go-kart!
The second problem: 1336mpg on what ? A litre of hydrogen ? How does that compare to the cost of a litre of 85-octane gasoline ? Where will one refuel this fart-sipping coffin ?
As a kickass go-kart, it might be interesting (cabin ventilation?). As a general-purpose commuter vehicle, it's a non-starter.
Blasphemy. Shamwow was Vince the hooker-puncher.
A vehicle such as this would be a great addition to any manned venture to another planet or even the moon. I think you all can work out the details of why... eh, this is /. I'll spell it out in a traditional format:
1) Build a light weight, fuel efficient vehicle powered by the most abundant resource in the universe
2) Launch it into space
3) ???
4) Profit!!!
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Wow that car is light... I'm 20 lbs shy of weighing the same as it....
shift over to clean power for plants
What? I always thoughts plants used the cleanest power available... lied to again, when will the deception end... first Santa Claus... now this...
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
It gets 26,208,000RPH (that's 655,200 furlongs per hogshead).
In any case, that's OVER 9000!!!!
http://weblogic.noroot.org/2006/02/24/rods-to-the-hogshead/
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I saw a hydrogen-storage technology at my uni in the 1980s which stored hydrogen in LOW-PRESSURE bottles (40 PSI). The way they got a good volume of hydrogen packed into smallish, low-pressure bottles was that the bottles contained a foam composed of some metal(s), though I don't recall now what it was.
The hydrogen molecules combined with the foam; they would detach (convert back to free gas) such that there was a steady 40 PSI inside the bottle. This obviously limits your burn rate, but they got enough to run their demonstrator vehicle (2-seater with enough storage area for two lunch-sized Eskimo boxes).
Point being, it radically increased the safety factor - no shrapnel-generating explosions if there was a traffic accident which ruptured the bottles.
If we are achieving over 1,000 MPG for cars without air conditioning, and ~15-60 MPG for cars with air conditioning, it seems to me that we need a "green air conditioning" competition. Rolling down the windows wouldn't count for the contest of course (and besides, that would drastically alter the drag coefficient).
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
They built one of those small kid versions of real cars that runs on hydrogen! Much better than those battery operated SUVs.
Unfortunately, they didn't have any pictures of the actual car. Maybe I didn't go far enough into the article....
To be honest the amount of money they spent on developing and building this thing they could at least make it a bit more practical with a possibility of actual released to the public. Iâ(TM)m all for going green and getting away from fossil fuel but these competitions and the cars that people have developed for them are so impractical itâ(TM)s not even funny. Who the hell would want a car that could not carry anything or could barely carry a single person and move slower than a person on a bicycle.
Billy didn't sell the shamwow. He sold Zorbees.
How does 500ish KM= 1000ish miles?
1 Mile= 5280 feet
1 KM= 3280.84 feet...
so really its more like 300ish miles on a tank. Still good but not ridiculously amazing...
So wait. It gets 568 km to the liter. What does a liter mean? Are they using gaseous H2? Liquid H2? Solid-adsorbed H2? Is it a liter at STP? Is it a liter at 100 atm? At 2 K?
The article doesn't answer these questions. To say "a liter of hydrogen" is not meaningful in the same way as saying "a liter of gasoline." There could be a _huge_ amount of fuel in a liter of hydrogen, or virtually none, depending on pressure and temperature.
The ideal gas law is not hard. People are supposed to learn it in high school. Is there a reason journalists can't pick up on these things?
...that is one butt-ugly car!
That's a very interesting link (although, it would have been nice if you'd made it clickable). I've been wondering for awhile if anyone had ever developed any techniques to synthesize gasoline using input energy, water, and CO2 from the air. The only things I'd been able to find for 'synthesize fuel' were processes that turned coal into liquid gasoline. I'm gonna seriously look into this dotyenergy company, when I get a chance.
If it's not snake oil, that might be a brilliant idea. I mean, we could have 'carbon-neutral' fuel, without changing our cars at all (I mean, increased fuel efficiency isn't bad, but it would be good to be able to still use gasoline, if possible).
He drank too much OxiClean at once.
Turkey is NOT a European country, they are trying hard to force their way in to the EU but they are not culturally, historically, religiously or ethnically European. So stop calling Turkey European you dimwitted Americans!
The only thing we're waiting on is efficient battery technology for the range of the things.
You mean like hydrogen fuel cells?
In my opinion cars driven by electric motors are where we should be placing our bets.
I agree. Except i'm confused by your stance on hydrogen.
Electric motors can go very quickly (at least the speed limit), have great acceleration, don't require a grid of hydrogen fuel stations to be built, don't require the massive amounts of energy used for electrolysis (the process of making useable hydrogen), have 0 risk of exploding (although admittedly hydrogen vehicles are pretty safe, but its more of a mental thing), and are ridiculously efficient. You know that about 3% of the energy used in internal combustion engines actually ends up moving the driver? With an electric motor, it is more like 50-80%, depending on the type of vehicle.
A hydrogen fuel cell produces electricity which means a hydrogen fuel cell car is really an electric car. Granted you would fill with hydrogen instead of plugging it in.
The HUGE benefit of hydrogen fuel cell over a plug-in electric is refuel time. Once the stations are in place and such, refueling a fuel cell probably won't take much more time over a gas engine. You can't recharge batteries that fast, and if you do there are all sorts of other problems it introduces such as shortening it's life cycle.
The only thing we're waiting on is efficient battery technology for the range of the things.
I think we're waiting on a good way to store tons of electricity, whether that's a hydrogen fuel cell, rechargeable batteries or a gasoline generator.
works if you're in Japan since the vehicles aren't monsters there. in the states, it'd be blown off the road....and i won't start on the safety issues. It's nice to know that someone built something that capable, but i'll look again when they build one road worthy.
The EU as whole also tends to have much harsher penalties for speeding than America, leading to people actually obeying them. If you're doing the speed limit in the US you better be in the right lane or you'll end up with a BMW up your exhaust pipe. I've had cars pass me while I was doing 105.
Just sayin'.
"I defy the second law of thermodynamics."
"The hell you do. Get back in the box."
I was expecting to see something that looked like a bicycle with a shell over it.
It's not snake oil, I promise. They've been working on this 20 years, and it's already a technology used in WWII to make deisel fuels.
All their ideas focus on improved heat exchangers, a new electrolysis chamber, making parts of the process symbiotic, new catylist systems, systems for flow and containment of the process; it's very much logistical systems improvements, with a few pretty impressive new invetions thrown in (actually their heat exchanger design has a lot more applications than this), and all materialized into a single system.
It can all be done today, using seperate systems for each phase in the fuel making process, but at about $1500 a barrel if you wanted to do it on your own, not $80 as they predict.
Their initial investment will make a facility about 2-3 times the size of a typical mall store, and a few stories high. They'll be able to tweak and prove out the larger scale process using that "lab scale" facility. They'll make only a few gallons a day at that scale, and use a couple of MW doing it. Phase 3 is a 75MW facility that will make hundreds of gallons a day (size sclaes very well up to a point for this process). The real things are 250MW, completely modular, and premanufatured for efficiency. We'll need a few thousand of them in the USA to replace 100% of our fuel use. They'll cost somewhere north of about 100M each to build. The cost is a fraction of what it would take to deploy an H2 infrastructure. They'll be profitable at about 2X what oil-based gasoline is.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
"An aerodynamic carbon-fiber construction keeps the vehicle's weight down to less than 110 kg"
I find this endlessly satisfying. There were a BUNCH of people on slashdot when I mentioned taking wind turbines, and moving from aluminum construction to carbon fiber for lighter weight, and everyone told me "CARBON FIBER IS HEAVIER"
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Miles Per Gallon is useful if you need to know how far you can get with the fuel that you have. While that's important, I think the real reason we're interested in this car is because of the fuel efficiency, which is conveyed much better if it's put in Gallons Per Mile. Knowing how much fuel you use per mile is what we're really interested in anyway, and MPG is misleading when representing that.
I was replying to a couple of absolute statements:
It seems plain, to me at least, that the "worst case" might very well involve a "massive failure" which cannot be "prevented" by putting the cells in their own little compartments.
Just because it's safe enough (and I think modern lithium battery tech probably is), doesn't mean that it's absolutely safe against catastrophic failure.
I don't believe I'm being overly pedantic by calling bluff on these statements, however sarcastic my reply might've been.
Kid-proof tablet..
i.e. not downwind
It's a harmonic effect, my friend. A water molecule is only so until the bond is discharged. In my experiments, the Stainless Steel was only to prolong the utility of the effect. You could use the same with any iron ore, only 316L is used to prevent the ferrite from tainting the water more than it needs to be. If not for the harmonic imbalance of the effect to reduce water into oxy and hydro then the same effect could be seen in varying efficiencies with other metals. I've produced helium and oxygen myself by using aluminum alloys instead of iron.
Maybe I could remind you the root question to this reaction, and that is: what is the resonant frequency of water, and how little sound engergy can be used to discharge the bonds. After HHO combusts to a carbon flame, it rebounds into water the moment it comes in contact with earth's atmosphere and pressure. The illusion of free energy is simply the unstability of water to this closed process, then re-introducing the result after detonation to earth's atmosphere and pressure, then the bonds recovering the atomic hydrogen and oxygen immediatly, and recycling it back into the cell. I've witnessed 8 states of hydrogen, while others would admit there could be as many as 21. There is just too much happening in a reaction with the simplest molecule itself. I do know this, and that the illusion of free energy leaches the water out of the air, but then it returns it the same. I would say the reaction is the least common denominator in thermodynamics, yet everything up until now has always been uncertain and bypassing theory. I would look more into the heat exchanger technology from G.E.E.T. They have a yahoo mailing list you might want to see http://groups.yahoo.com/phrase/geet-fuel. Most only experiment with small single-cylinder engines as to not risk anything non-combustible passing the reaction without change.
How many joules of energy are used to break the water bonds?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
since obviously that means the sober people are responsible for 51% or of the fatal accidents
Recently a car crashed into a meridian near where I used to go to school.
A hero rushed in and pulled the driver from the car. About 20-30 seconds later, it exploded in a giant fireball, similar to those explosions you see in the movies.
I don't care if electric is perfectly safe... nothing is.
... or how much coal burnt in power-plants, did it take to "MAKE" that hydrogen?
Or did the ingenious students fly off to the planet Jupiter to scoop up some free hydrogen?
Huh! Maybe they just drilled a well and got hydrogen that way!
OK, let's leave the above to conjecture.
Now- how much energy was expended in condensing, chilling or otherwise storing this magical "hydrogen"? Golly! It's a REAL BREAKTHROUGH, huh?
When are some people gonna wake up to this hydrogen scam?
.
- aqk
F U
There is more hydrogen in one gallon of gasoline, than in one gallon of hydrogen.
At STP or otherwise.
Go figure.
.
- aqk
F U
One "conspiracy theory", if you want to put it that way, was that the Bush administration pushed Hydrogen as an alternative fuel, because they knew we were a decade or two away from practical applications, and in the meantime we would still be dependent on good old petroleum, owned by all his friends.
In my opinion cars driven by electric motors are where we should be placing our bets.
Electric motors can go very quickly (at least the speed limit), have great acceleration, don't require a grid of hydrogen fuel stations to be built, don't require the massive amounts of energy used for electrolysis (the process of making useable hydrogen), have 0 risk of exploding (although admittedly hydrogen vehicles are pretty safe, but its more of a mental thing), and are ridiculously efficient. You know that about 3% of the energy used in internal combustion engines actually ends up moving the driver? With an electric motor, it is more like 50-80%, depending on the type of vehicle.
You could argue that we're just shifting the dependance (and the green house gases) to power plants- but this would open a door to a 100% maintainable system, it just requires an eventual (much more eventual than current state) shift over to clean power for plants.
Our existing grid could easily handle 20 million plugin cars.
The only thing we're waiting on is efficient battery technology for the range of the things.
The energy efficency of a 4 stroke diesel engine it's about 38% and not 3% like you say.
since the electricity is mainly produced from fossil fuel the overall efficency of an electric car (including the energy production and transmission) will be lower for an electric car.
What DUMBass would mark this as flamebait. Why the fuck can't humourless wretches just keep to their own, instead of pissing on someone's chance to make others laugh. Just because it isn't marked funny doesn't mean someone out their didn't wryly enjoy it. You bastard. Keep away! Go watch a comedy, or smoke a blunt or whack off instead of undercutting the little off-beat humor this site manages to get.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I know your an honest fellow. With absolute efficiency in Water Electrlysis detonation (emphasis on tonneage) is expected and tht is unwanted. Consider that the original Joe Cell was using negatively charged water under a vacuum of the engine-intake and there wasn't enough matter derived from that secondary electrolysis process. Alex Schiffer did more experimentation on that aspect; in special conditions, Water as a conductor. I, as others fruitlessly are pursuing Water Electrolysis that Stan Mayer already achieed. Can't say anymore than is elemenary ;-). Welcome.
Still trolling others under other logon names here for your sock puppets to do so, RyuuzakiTetsuya, when you start losing debates here?
I have patents in place that I don't want to disclose because then you would know the natural law and with such a f*cked-up copyright law I don't want you or anyone trying to monopolize it away from the public domain.
Did you know that a knife, when correctly sharpened, can cut all by itself? Would you think of registering a patent on the blade curve, the sharpening method, the ferrite ore, the knife, or it's use? Again, I can't tell you much outside of efficiency-infinity. Reverse psychology like you just used will not work to disclose, only an explanation of why you Will Not understand.
Enjoy your Lexus/Toyota's 30MPG Petrol rating. My urine Electrolysis Chamber in my homebrew vessel outperforms the imports and domestics.