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Steam-Powered Car Breaks Century-Old Speed Record
mcgrew writes "New Scientist reports that a steam-powered car has broken the 1906 record of 204 km/hr (127 mph) for the fastest steam-powered automobile, the Stanley Steamer. The Inspiration made a top speed of 225 kilometres per hour (140 miles per hour) on August 26. 'The car's engine burns liquid petroleum gas to heat water in 12 suitcase-sized boilers, creating steam heated to 400C. The steam then drives a two-stage turbine that spins at 13,000 revolutions per minute to power its wheels.The FIA requires two 1.6-km-long runs to be performed in opposite directions — to cancel out any effect from wind — within 60 minutes.'"
are from two runs of the same vehicle.
They don't ahve to be opposite directions.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Guess that settles. Humans cause global warming.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Valve goes out of business? :)
Next up...ridiculously large front-wheeled bicycle speed record.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
Over a century later - and all they can manage is 13mph more!? I was sort of expecting them to at least double the record...
"to cancel out any effect from wind" - and any slope, otherwise we'd have people dropping cars off cliffs claiming speed records like nobody's business =).
Steam Powered Cars:
1906: 204 km/h - 127 mph
2009: 225 km/h - 140 mph (mean of runs of 136 and 151 mph)
Not bad for what started as a student project in 1997.
Fastest electric car: White Lightning 245.5 mph in 1999.
And being based on petroleum gas, at least they should have provided with some sort of performance measurement, such as Miles or Km per gallon or liter?
Slow Down you damn Steam Punks! And stay the hell off my lawn.
engine burns liquid petroleum gas to heat water in 12 suitcase-sized boilers
Am I just ignorant or does all of that sound really, really pointless?
Stanley Steamer...you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. *shudder*
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
That seems like cheating. I guess the Stanley Steamer Rocket still retains the record for the fastest piston-powered steam car.
(Interestingly, this article also claims that the Rocket unofficially hit 150mph right before it crashed and was totaled in 1907.)
Bah, electric cars are just glorified golf carts, dontcha know.... ;)
One of my favorite lead-ins to an article about electric cars:
"The one-million-dollar Ferrari Enzo can do zero to 60 in about 3.5 seconds. So can Mike Willmon's 1978 Ford Pinto."
Dear Lord: I don't want to go back to college, so please help me be sexy. Amen.
What's it's 60mph to 180mph time? ;)
can it get David Letterman to work on time?
Seriously, isn't that how we're supposed to design vehicles?
fantasize about this in a mad max/ road warrior movie type setting?
talk about steampunk
although i'd be REALLY impressed if someone invents a steam powered aircraft/ helicopter
heliboiler? steamplane?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Someone tag this with Steampunk.
Considering the disappointing margin over the old record.... Cleavland Steamer anyone??
I have to agree with the underwhelming nature of only 13MPH faster.
We now have a much better handle on material science and metallurgy. We actually have the capability to model the predicted performance and make design tweaks. We have the ability to machine to tolerances only dreamed about back then. And we have composites and alloys that weren't available.
I realize that it's not a linear scale from a drag standpoint, but our victory could be due only to 1906 measurement error.
Sheldon
Cool, a hybrid! Where can I get the government coupon to purchase one?
NABT (not a boiler technician) but I'd like to know how much pressure the thing generates. I've been around 600 pound and 1200 pound boilers, and learned some of the problems with the high pressure system. (basically, it was shit) I'm curious how much pressure this thing is using, and why and how. 400 degrees really means next to nothing, I don't know why they even put that little detail in the story.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
but can it get my carpets clean any faster?
I was wondering. What does acceleration has to do with top speed?
I'm more a technology-based car fan than a muscle car fan.
Nowadays, It seems like since you are not expected to average more than 90mph, Cadillac, among other brands, has come up with ugly cars with aerodynamic coefficients probably higher than 1. That doesn't seem to be the case of the Enzo or the Carrera GT, which allows them to go faster than your pinto.
0 to 60mph seems to be, just one single metric that many people obsessively think about. But, speaking of acceleration, how does the Pinto do going from 60mph to 0?
When bringing comparisons, bring the whole bunch not just one. Because someone may just pick the color as their metric.
The fate of the steamers is a cautionary tale for backers of projects like the Tesla.
They were handcrafted for the extremely wealthy.
The total production run for the Stanley was 11,000 cars in 25 years. Stanley Steamer
No matter how you price such a car, you never generate enough cash to remain competitive in R&D - never enough to survive hard times.
Is it sitting on 22"? Because that's all I care about...
liquid petroleum gas
Is the fuel a liquid or a gas?
... But, speaking of acceleration, how does the Pinto do going from 60mph to 0?
Doesn't that depend on how solid the wall that it hits is?
So, the modest speed increase required either much better coefficient of drag, smaller frontal area, or much more power.
This is embarrassing. Look at the thing. It looks like a land speed record vehicle. It's turbine powered. They took it to the Bonneville Salt Flats, where reaching 200 MPH in a straight line is no big deal. And they went 140MPH. Most production sports cars can do that. Some dragsters now exceed 300MPH for a quarter mile. If you don't have to corner, going fast is easy.
The current land speed record for wheel-driven vehicles is 451 MPH. (The record for thrust-driven vehicles is over Mach 1, but those are really low-flying aircraft.) The record for electrics is 257 MPH. There was an unsuccessful British attempt to break 300 MPH with an electric car in 2005; the power train works but the vehicle was unstable in a crosswind. 357 MPH has been reached with a TGV train. (Maglevs do slightly better, with the record there being 361 MPH.)
So 140 MPH on the Bonneville Salt Flats just isn't very impressive.
Judging a Ferrari Enzo by only its zero to 60 time is shortchanging the car. Mike Willmon's Pinto is also almost as fast as a fresh off the showroom floor $9,000 motorcycle. The Pinto is also faster than a ten-million-dollar Fabergé Egg thrown by Randy Johnson.
Always undersell and overdeliver. Starting a conversation about electric cars by comparing one to a supercar can only backfire.
Has been for more then 40 years.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Just my guess regarding your 136mph rabbit.
That or you pushed it off a cliff.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You pretty quickly dismiss the suspension as not being a factor. That lake bed isn't exactly as smooth as a billiards table. If you want to keep control of the car and keep going in a straight line, a decent suspension is a good thing to have when your going over 100mph.
Okay, when someone wins an Olympic medal for the 100 yard dash, do you chime in about how they're not very impressive because you could cover a hundred yards much faster in a Ferrari?
What impresses me about this accomplishment is that it must have been achieved among a small group of enthusiasts.
With the internal combustion engine, an amateur can draw on a huge pool of professional resources and documented knowledge to build up a high performance vehicle. In fact, very few people, if any are a master of every component on a modern race car - usually your race team will have access to suspension specialists, tire specialists, engine builders, aerodynamic and chassis design guys...
There really can't be that many experts on the automotive uses of steam engines, and a huge amount of new development must have gone into this car - that's something fantastic.
Materials have come a long way... But how much of of an advantage does that give you against the massive loss of experience we must have had over the last 100 years?
I'm a motorcycle racing enthusiast, and even at my amateur level it's amazing how much knowledge is only available through experienced teachers. There are literally more in-depth books about programing in ruby than books about motorcycle chassis engineering and physics.
Acceleration off-the-line is predominantly determined by power-to-weight (given traction). This is how the low-powered Caterhams and Lotus Elises can hang with the "big boys" using that metric.
Top speed, OTOH is dominated by outright power and drag. Mass features little, hence top speed is typically dominated by heavier cars with massive amounts of power.
Incidentally 60-0, and also cornering, should be dominated by mass & traction, but traction itself is influenced strongly by mass, making traction alone the dominant factor (ignoring aero which is increasingly significant at speed) - which is why almost any car with four good tires can pretty much pull the same braking and cornering (skid-pan) figures of around 1G. if you can find published 60mph-0 distances, you'll find they are usually around the 40 metre mark, almost regardless of the car model.
The Powell steam engine and it's associated motor vehicle was far more advanced than the Stanley systems and also more powerful and reliable than the Packards, Duesenbergs, Auburns, etc. of it's day. Powell was devastated by the collapse of the economy in the late 20's and his patents and inventions remain locked away somewhere to this day.
Cars and Parts magazine ran a month's long series on this revolutionary inventor and his motor car in the early 70's.
It was, as I recall, a horizontally opposed, 4 cylinder engine, ran completely silent and exhaust-free, with none of the dire explosion risks the Stanley Bro's systems had.
Worth a read if you can locate the article series.
you need to stop flapping your jaw before you get someone killed. you could take the tires off of a ferrari, slap them on a front-heavy american sedan, and still not corner or brake like a ferrari because the suspension rolls too much or is cheaply built (live axles, macpherson struts, etc.), the frame bends too much, the center of mass is too high, etc. There is much more to a sports car than big engine + grippy tires
In 1905, the British Admiralty announced all new ships of the line would be turbine driven.
Babcock & Wilcox built coal fired boilers through the 50's - most of these driving turbines.
By the time of the Stanley record, piston steam was on it's way out for capital ships
Now, some WWII naval ships used piston steam driven pumps for damage control, but it sounds like you're talking about main propulsion.
It was called the "Penny-Farthing" because of the ridiculous small wheel and the ridiculous large wheel. The big wheel had no gearing AFAIK, so you had to REALLY lay on the leg-muscles. Now.. lesseee.. I'm not a Brit so which was the "Penny"? I seem to remember UK pennies as bieng quite large and HEAVY! I remember being in London during the 1960s, and the only place that would take my damn pocketful of pennies (my pants were about to fall down) was a slot-machine arcade. Now, presumably all road bicycles are known as Euro-Euros.
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- aqk
F U
"I was wondering. What does acceleration has to do with top speed?"
It's how you get there.
Hey, if you want to talk motorcycles, the Killacycle does 0-60 in under a second, and there are faster ones than that out there. We're not talking motorcycles; we're talking cars. It doesn't matter how you cut it; 0-60 in 3.5 seconds is *fast* for a car. And for a Pinto? An amateur conversion Pinto? I mean, come on! Pintos aren't exactly optimized for racing. And this conversion used heavy lead-acid batteries to boot, rather than lightweight, higher-power li-ions.
Dear Lord: I don't want to go back to college, so please help me be sexy. Amen.
The steam age never ended because it didn't exist. There was the wood age, the coal age, the current oil age and i'm guessing the next age will either be nuclear, or wood again, depending on how the coming resource wars go.
Deleted
Is there really anything scientific or technological that we cant do vastly better now that 1906?
My guess is yes, but I can't come up with a good example at the moment.
Here's an unbroken 1960's land speed record set by one guy with very little money working in his garage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burt_Munro
Very fun flick too, if you like hackers.
I watched that movie - "The World's Fastest Indian" - for the first time a couple of nights ago. It's great.
... support of the porn industry
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
I think it also has to do with the minimum amount of remaining car that you time to get that 0-60 speed. For example, if you rear-ended a 1978 Pinto and only the car from the front seats forward accelerated away, does that count toward the record?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Drag only increases by the square.
FRA: STFU GTFO
http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/british_steam_car_plans_for_170_mph_at_bonneville.php
>'The car's engine burns liquid petroleum gas to heat water
Ummm....i thought the whole concept of steam powered vehicles, was to get away from using oil or gas to power the sob?
I would have thought because the engine gets super hot from the friction that it could have been used to recylce the heat through to
change water into steam, but I am uncertain how much oil is used to convert water to steam....especially if it is just at the start, where you need to start the cycle, however, I am not really looking far, I have not RTA.
ps - If the amount of fuel used to steam to water is almost = to what we use in cars today, I guess we have made no progress then...!
Papa Schimmelhorn's Stanley Steamer could.
I agree that the skid-pad 1G mark is reserved for particularly sporty vehicles, whether you're discussing a Ferrari, BMW M-series model, Chevrolet Corvette, or Dodge Viper.
But I think you're singling out American sedans for poor handling unfairly. A Toyota Camry handles like a boat, too, and Toyota doesn't invest the money in a better suspension because 400,000 Americans each year clearly don't mind its wallowy driving characteristics very much. Volkswagens sold in America tend to drive better than equivalent domestic or Asian vehicles, but you pay at least a $3,000 premium for the improvement and very clearly most of us don't care enough or can't afford to spend the extra money.
A Pinto is relatively small and light, just about 2400 pounds, with plenty of room under the hood, and rear wheel drive. Its styling is the polar opposite of the Enzo's "sex on wheels", but even ignoring electric conversions many tuners would swap the stock engine with a big V8 and deliver tremendous straight line acceleration.
A Pinto is relatively small and light, just about 2400 pounds,
And the Enzo is 3,000 pounds, but with a massive 500lb engine and a bunch of other heavy performance-designed components. And the Pinto that they're talking about is *lead-acid* based. PbA cells have ~1/4th the energy density of automotive-style li-ions, and a small fraction the power density as well; they're used because they're dirt cheap. The fact is, is this is a cheapo conversion and it can accelerate as fast as a million dollar supercar. Try to get that kind of performance out of a Pinto using gasoline on that kind of budget.
Dear Lord: I don't want to go back to college, so please help me be sexy. Amen.
2400lb is not light.
1200lb is light.
Hell, my 5-door car capable of fitting 4 adults and all their sporting equipment for a National competition only weighs 2400lb.
Mike Willmon's budget was about $30K to convert his Pinto into an electric dragster. You could easily add a twin turbo kit, a bit of nitrous, and a bunch of driveline parts to a vintage Camaro or Chevelle and stay way under that number, and run 10s or 11s in the quarter mile. Mike expects 12s out of his Pinto.
... 26 grand and any vintage Chevy can do 9 seconds in the 1/4 mile. If you want to save a significant chunk of the budget and simply find a gas package with slightly better perfomance than Mike ... http://nelsonracingengines.com/pricesheets/chevy/dailydriver/na/dds_454bbc_na.pdf ... 12 grand for 625HP, plenty to beat the Pinto.
Here's a drop in package I found in two minutes of googling... http://nelsonracingengines.com/pricesheets/chevy/dailydriver/tt/dds_355_tt.pdf
My original point was that accellerating as fast as a million dollar supercar isn't a big deal. Straight line acceleration isn't what you are buying for $1,000,000.00. Anybody with $30K can embarass a Ferrari stoplight to stoplight. I'll bet the Pinto also has better windsheild wipers than a 60 foot Yacht and is oranger than a 2 billion dollar stealth bomber.