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Coffee-Powered Car Breaks World Record
MrSeb writes "A bunch of tea-drinking northern Brits have set a new land speed record for a gasification-powered vehicle, fueled only by coffee beans. The car is called The Coffee Car, and it was created by the Teesdale Conservation Volunteers of Durham, England. The previous gasification-powered speed record — held by some Americans called 'Beaver Energy' — was a mere 47mph, fueled by wood pellets. The Coffee Car averaged no less than 66.5mph and was granted a Guinness World Record in return. Gasification is a process in which any organic fuel is turned into 'syngas,' a mixture of carbon dioxide/monoxide, hydrogen, and methane which can be used in conventional internal combustion engines. The Coffee Car was created with the sole intention of proving that renewable/green energy sources can power cars — and it looks like it succeeded!"
Just for those who don't know. This was very popular during and after WW-II in Germany as gas supplies were next to non-existent. In these gasification systems, you could burn pretty much anything combustible. Wood was popular a popular choice. It's a very old technology.
Not 100% related, but the original Diesel engine, ran on peanut oil. Fossil fuels only got used later in Diesel technology.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Mr. Fusion!
They don't mention how they reach the temperature required for gasification of the beans. That requires some energy input, and they didn't say where that energy came from.
Not that gasoline as we know and use it today comes with no cost, but if efficiency and cleanliness is what they are after, a little more disclosure would be useful.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If it's sensible, this could be useful in some areas, for some vehicles. Looks like the whole gassification assembly is not exactly a work of precision engineering and could be built in somewhat sub-standard conditions. I'd expect that many third-world plantations of easily gassified produce have lots of leftovers and not all of those have sensible uses to date - some might be just dumped somewhere to rot.
On a different note, if I were the CEO of Starbucks, I'd get such a car as a publicity and marketing stunt, and power it with dried left-overs from brewing.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
The Coffee Car was created with the sole intention of proving that renewable/green energy sources can power cars ...
Because everyone knows that wood pellets - you know, the fuel source used by the previous record holder? - aren't a renewable resource. I mean, it's not like they freaking grow on trees or anything, amirite?
I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
It is a waste product normally thrown away.
Everybody knows you dont use Java for speed.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Diesel designed his engine around coal dust.
Someone else ran it on peanut oil for exhibition in Paris.
Even if you cut down a forest, plant-based fuels are still carbon neutral, since a more or less fixed amount of carbon is available at the surface/in the atmosphere within this geological period. Fossil fuels add carbon to the entire system by releasing carbon formerly trapped deep in rock formations.
The BBC article is not clear on the fuel at all, the site coffeecar.org, states the car uses spent coffee grounds for fuel. So, this isn't as asinine as it originally sounds, just turning waste into syngas, not a useable (valuable, tasty) commodity for syngas.
--alop
I have been around on some of the green energy vehicle forums (trying to figure out how to properly convert an engine to run on alcohol) and I have seen similar setups in the back of a pickups. There they had a wood fired gassification chamber that was filled with wood. I have built a similar setup that uses the syngas as fuel to make charcoal. Granted this is a very simple setup, one metal bucket with some legs on the bottom and a smaller bucket (needs to fit in the larger one) with a metal tube coming out and under to fire the larger one. Stoke a fire under it and about 30 - 45 minutes you have a self sustaining reaction. When the fire finally burns out you have a fair amount of natural charcoal. This is how I dispose of my brush and also keep in charcoal so I can barbeque every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday when the weather is good enough (less than a foot of snow on the ground and not 90+F with oppressive Minnesota humidity)
Time to offend someone
"Even if you cut down a forest, ..." ... oops ...
Or it will simply become a desert
You don't want to cut down a whole forest.
If I had to guess as to why use coffee beans as fuel, I understand that when roasted, they are actually subjected to a process called torrefaction. In this way, moisture and other undesirable compounds in the raw biomass are boiled off. What remains has a Btu content just under that of coal, burns more consistently, and is resistant to moisture. Even if the coffee was first used to make the tasty beverage, I'm sure the used grounds would still have plenty of use as a gasification fuel.
The costs of processing the 'fuel' is actually paid for by the first use of coffee: drinking. To get a ready-to-use gasification fuel as a by-product sounds like a great way to extend its uses.
p.s., sorry, I think I duped this reply
I'd like to see a practical version of this that runs on junk mail. Unfortunately, burning the inks in glossy coupon flyers probably doesn't smell so good. It might be toxic too.
And yes, it wouldn't really be green. It's just that as long as the postman keeps delivering free fuel to me, I'd like a way to use it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
No what is really needed is to have the process be taken all the way to liquid fuels. This is a solved problem as the Germans did it in WWII using the Fischer-Tropsch process. With the same inputs we could probably get massively more useable energy from the resources we are currently diverting to corn ethanol, that and it wouldn't even be dependent on corn we could use input like switch grass, animal crap, animal processing waste, road kill, bamboo, yard waste, garbage, lumbar waste, or any other carbon based item we wish to dispose of.
Time to offend someone
Um, I think there is, although you might be making some obscure point I don't understand because I don't spend all day on anti AGW sites:
Climate during the Carboniferous Period
from the fine article:
If you're talking about something else I'd sincerely be interested in reading about it.
Except that they're using coffee grounds. To compare it to ethanol, you'd have to somehow be able to eat the corn first, and then make the ethanol from the husks/leaves that remain.
All that aside, coffee grounds were just a whim, not a necessity. The rig they built should work just as well with any other plant-based left-overs (sawdust, leaves, lawn-clippings). Just compress them to have similar density and away you go...
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
An earth full of tired tree cutters?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
So do you realize they are using spent coffee grounds?
What is next commentators that have no fucking idea what they are talking about? How about a commentator that then makes a bunch of stupid comparisons based on his total lack of knowledge about the situation.
You really think their attitude is more "See, we can run the world on coffee grounds" than it is "See, you can do all sorts of wacky things, like running a car on coffee grounds"?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
What's with the AOL etc. license plate?
UK number plates have the area the car was registered in, a serial number, and the year of registration.
So, AOL 183T means it was registered in Oxfordshire some time in late 1978 - "OL" was Oxfordshire, "A" and "183" is fairly early in the sequence, and "T" means August 1978 to July 1979.
The back can be fitted with a bulldozer blade with spikes attached. The vehicle will be partially propelled by the force of idiots on cellphones colliding with it. If you drop the remains off at the recycler, driving the car might yield a net profit.
It also works with cellulose (the parts of the plant you don't eat). No strip mining, no tailings, no net CO2 (assuming you keep growing the plant, you are just cycling the CO2).
Why would one want to use dirty old coal?
they run really fast for a few hours and then crash!