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155 MPH Biofuel Truck Breaks Speed Record
An anonymous reader writes "A team of students from Boise University recently shattered the world land speed record for biofuel vehicles by traveling 155 mph in a vegetable oil-powered pick-up truck dubbed the Greenspeed. To achieve the speed record the vehicle was upgraded with a compound-turbocharged 5.9 liter Cummins straight-six diesel engine that produces 700 horsepower, and it ran on an oil mix consisting of cottonseed and sunflower oil."
Wait. No I don't. It's 2011, people, where's my hover conversion!?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
The fertiliser used to grow the plants was created using the Haber-Bosch process which uses lots of natural gas.
The ploughing etc is all highly energy (oil) intensive.
The processing an transport use existing oil reserves.
Finally, the energy consumption of the vehicle increases with the square of the speed.
Deleted
For the win!
Help stamp out iliturcy.
...compared to an electric vehicle. I'd be more much interested if it could travel 155 Miles on a gallon of biofuel.
They may have broken the record for biodiesel, but they are a far cry from the record for biofuels in general. One example is the Bentley Continental, which is a production car and has a top speed of 198MPH. It's a flex fuel vehicle.
So someone put a huge, guzzling turbo diesel into a truck to get it to go 155mph using vegetable oil which has the same carbon chain length as diesel except three of them are bonded as a triglyceride. Vegetable oil being a niche fuel and will never be able to scale up as a serious fossil fuel replacement. What a useless demonstration.
... there are people starving in Africa.
Food is meant for eating, not for driving cars!
http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20facts%202002.htm
But this does give good visibility to the concept of alternative fuels. It's not just some hippie in his diesel VW bus anymore, it's a truck with a higher top speed than a Dodge Ram SRT-10.
MPH is fine but MPG?
Long time /. reader here.
This is cool news... just because!
I own a 1995 Dodge Ram 2500 with one of those 5.9 Cummins engines (CTD = Cummins Turbo Diesel).
Mine has the legendary Bosch "P-Pump".
These engines last over a million miles with proper maintenance.
The only electrical thing in those engines are:::
Starter
Fuel Solenoid (cuts off electricity = cuts off fuel = engine dies)
I freaking love my truck.
I constantly get around 19-20 mpg.
Love the sound, love the turbo whine.
Oh, and did I mention that I run it on vegetable oil?
Just go to any restaurant, offer to pick it up... get the best looking one... and drop it in the bed.
Then go home, I filter it via a centrifuge (awesome USA product: WVO Designs' RawPower centrifuges!)... then drop it in the tank.
The exhaust smells like BBQ (not so much "french fries", as it is commonly believed).
Differences between dyno-juice and veggie-oil?
Absolutely none that I can feel.
Same power... same milage... same everything.
In fact, engine runs quieter and smoother with the veggie oil.
This truck is cool!
Final geek cred: Who went to pick-up the new POWER6 as/400 full-rack, with new tape drive, one disk array, and the HMC, to the dock, when the delivery company dropped the ball?
A '95 Dodge Ram with the CTD.
Shout out to the cool people over at CumminsForum.com!
Bio-fuel monster truck car crushers!
Those bastards!
Food cannot stop starvation in a growing population, only family planning can do that. Family planning comes with education.
Trying to stop starvation with food is like trying to put out a fire with fuel.
FRA: STFU GTFO
I wonder what kind of fertilizers, insecticides and defoliants were used to grow the cotton and sunflowers......
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
... there are people starving in Africa. Food is meant for eating, not for driving cars! http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20facts%202002.htm
Horse crap. Biomass from post consumption is now being turned into Bio Fuel. Do some research first.
hard way and longest way (probably more than 1 year) #day 1: buy a pickup #day 2 to day 300: take one year or more to make it go at these speeds, dealing with aerodynamics, mechanical parts, supercharging the motor etc. easy way and fast way (3 days) #day 1:buy a aerodynamic eficient disel car with a lot of power like a bmw 635d, remove the electronic speed limit (it's limited to 155mph), buy some B100 biodisel #day 2: drive to the desert #day 3: beat the speed limit
The BWM 335d is capable of running on BioDiesel (although you risk oil contamination) and with regular diesel will reach 175+ MPH.
The EROEI of biodiesel fuels is around 3-3.5.
fannn tastic, So.. about 1/3 of the population/ national GDP will be involved in production, sounds fabulous.
Also, the Haber-Bosch process does not consume natural gas, it consumes hydrogen
And the hydrogen on most plants comes from?????? .......
Also, energy consumption doesn't matter in the end, only emissions.
Yeah....... Tell that to the 2 billion starving to death as biofuels 3:1 EROEI ratio drives food inflation to the point they can't afford to eat. I foresee a touch of political instability.
Deleted
/Grumpy face. (I don't like to complain but... )
How many countries use mp/h and how many km/h? Would it kill them to write the conversion in the article/summary? Just for inclusion sake?
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
Might I suggest you start a new web sight.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
140mio tons of maize are being turned into ethanol in the USA alone. That's a quarter of the world maize production. Last year the world was supposedly in shock when Russia had the worst drought in 100 years or so and wheat production fell short by 10mio tons. (Yes, maize is not wheat, but the shortfall of the drought is still negligible in comparison to the amount of food burned.)
It's a truck, it has the aerodynamics of a fridge, and probably a power/torque curve suited for a truck (that is, for hauling rather than going fast).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
So? How much faster or slower it would be with ordinary Diesel?
Pfff.... looks like an retarded article or even an retarded attempt for a "record".
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I doubt it gets there "easily"
At present there is no shortage of food, there's excesses in some areas and shortages in others. If the distribution system was better there would be no starvation.
However, if we start burning food for fuel that could very well change. And quickly.
No one on Slashdot could possibly care, but that would be Boise State University, the one with the blue astro turf and a top 10 foot ball rating----just saying...
That and getting the idiots at the Vatican to saying that condoms/the pill are OK for population control.
Canada isn't in Europe, but uses kph
England is in Europe, but still uses mph.
That's halfway insightful. The instinct to breed is way stronger than anything you can accomplish with education though. If not for abortion and birth control, we'd have out of control population growth.
You say that like the Distiller's Dried Grain left over from making the EtOH isn't an outrageously good cattle feed, or for that matter the press-cake left over from oil extraction is still useful as feed as well. The other thing your forgetting is the majority of corn grown is for animal consumption not human.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Why is the speed so low with so much power available? Is it poor aerodynamics or is there something else that explains it?
Actually, I live in an American country but, judging by the quality of your comment, you wont understand what that means.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
You don't have to waste potential food, or lands on which such can be grown, for bio-fuel - if done right. The problem today is that it's done cheap rather than right, and, of course, it's easier to just use existing agricultural land and existing food stocks and processes to deal with them - if the resulting fuel is worth more than food would have been, fuel is what'll be made. The wonders of free market capitalism.
web sight
For all the talk of "euro trash", you could at least have paid attention to your English. I bet most "euro trash" in the comments know it better than you do.
Oh, and the proper name for a European Slashdot would be Dashcomma.
It's already been done. We know it works, it's just pointless. Why not team with a company like Solazyme and get biofuel that's actually being produced from algae (no plowing fields, I'm not going into how many ways it's green, but it is) and provide some real world numbers. Like this:
The Cummins 12-valve was available as the diesel engine option in the Dodge Ram for a lot of years, with newer versions being used after 98, and even newer versions in use since 2008. One advantage to diesel engines is they have longer service life than gas engines. My BIL has a 92 ram with the 12 valve in it, and he makes his own bio diesel from waste oil, which he doesn't steal, he gets legally. For a rough comparison, he gets about 23 MPG on dino-diesel, and 21 on Bio-diesel. While pulling a horse trailer. For further information, check out the DOE's energy density numbers, which will prove the bio diesel is much more worth while than, say, ethanal.
Additionally, bio diesel exhaust fumes are nearly entirely non-toxic, the amount of material harmful to humans or the environment is ..well, probably less per mile than per toy imported from China.
As far as modifications to this engine to run vegi oil, I know guys with 12 valves that run soy bean oil for fuel, and they just have larger fuel filters they change more often. I can't imagine it took much to get to where those kids are. They need some serious direction.
The relationship between horsepower and top speed is far from linear, especially when you have the crappy aerodynamics of a heavy duty Dodge Ram.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Any successor to Slashdot should think of "The Colon" as the first option, as it is what you get after you slash the dot in two :)
Wow little did I know I was withing spitting distance of the World record on the Autobahn with a Passat TDI using biodiesel from a standard gas station. This is a weak record. The taureg v10 can do 230kph stock with bio diesel. And the Baja racing v12 with !!6X!! as much Horse power and half the weight of the standard edition (and 200% the horsepower of this 'record winner') would crush this record.
----- 70% of all statistics are completely made up.
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