I understand that a hydraulic pump and hydraulic motor coupled with two lines would be modestly simple, but the repairman going out to fix the system will probably have the same hourly/salaried rate as the repairman going out to fix the generator. Windmills have been modestly simple for hundreds of years, though. Today, the power chain looks like this:
I'd have a hard time imagining that the maintenance costs would be less with more points of failure, at least from a mechanical standpoint, not to mention the costs of cleanup due to a leak.
Actually, if they used more ideas from your car's alternator, they might get farther yet. But that's just my humble opinion.
According to TFA, this new generator uses permanent magnets on a shaft passing by coils of wire, so the magnets are always spinning, even in the slightest breeze. This isn't anything new, it's just that they're probably using IGBTs to turn the individual stator coils on or off, changing the load on the shaft.
An automotive alternator uses an electromagnet on a shaft (rotor) passing by coils of wire(stator). The amount of voltage fed to the rotor comes as a form of feedback from the regulator, which samples the battery's voltage and the alternator's output and adjusts the rotor voltage as needed. This design assumes more or less unlimited rotating force to the rotor from the engine, and that's not necessarily the case with wind generators.
I'm going to guess that the other thing that's happening here is that when this new generator is in "weak" mode, the DC power output will appear pulsed, like a square wave, so I'm sure there's going to be some more regulation electronics on the back end to get it to spit out straight DC.
Have you ever been in an American commercial building that was constructed during the Cold War? It appears to be way overbuilt, until you think about what that building might have to endure in the event of a nuclear war. In structural engineering, you try to anticipate any loads that might come into play, and build in a safety factor to account for those unforeseen loads (extremely heavy snowfall in Virginia, for example. Very rare, but not impossible).
NASA built a "safety factor" into the rovers to account for unforeseen circumstances that, if encountered, may have been the breaking point of the entire rover.
I think it already is, to some degree. Currently, a large portion of our energy sells at $60something a barrel.
Food would be valued based on it's caloric content and energy to produce,
Are you referring to the modern-day requirements of energy to produce, such as the cost of purchasing and operating a large combine to harvest wheat? That is directly dependent on the cost of the diesel to fuel the combine. Going "backwards" to a labor-intensive harvesting of wheat by sickle, shocking and separating by hand, and transporting the wheat on pack animals removes the diesel requirement, but increases the labor requirement.
Gold is a halfways-decent conductor. Silver is best, and Copper is slightly behind Silver, but the trick is that both of those materials oxidize in air, and their resistance goes up. Gold does not oxidize in air.
The reason it was so highly regarded in past eons is due to it's ease of workability and long-lasting sheen, along with it's perceived lack of availability. You can work gold effectively with hardwoods and bronze tools, tools that have been around for thousands of years.
Not arguing, but what data? If the tag doesn't contain personal information, exactly how much data does it need to store, and for what? How about 2D Aztek or DataMatrix bar codes that need to have the passport in hand, and opened, to scan?
I seem to recall that the actual turnout of 110 million United States voters in 2004 was 56% of the 215 million eligible to vote. 56% is still pretty pathetic, though.
Personally, I disagree. You seemed rushed in reply, but I don't think I would qualify those devices as "tools." A tool is a single-purpose object designed to solve or repair a problem, and can be checked for operating performance against a known standard. By that definition, that's all a voting machine should be, although I'm not sure I'd ever refer to a voting machine as a "tool." Then again, perhaps some election workers would argue that it solves the problem of hand-counting all those votes.
a government is a purely human construct. its all about social structure and where you fit into it. its all about trusting or not trusting the other people around you.
Yes, the United States government is by the people, for the people; in many ways it is a hierarchy, but specifically for representation, security, and the enabling of rights as outlined in our charter documents. I don't believe it is meant to be a nanny-state, wherein we place all our trust in the government. The Forefathers recognized our need to prevent the nanny-state from occurring, and wrote the 2nd Amendment. I will never give the government, nor anyone around me, either 100% or 0% of my trust. Everyone involved in my life, including Joe Schmoe on the street whom I've never met, receives a certain percentage of my trust. If they befriend me or I determine their goals and past performances are worthy of my support, their trust level goes up. If they stab me in the back or are otherwise dishonorable, their trust level goes down. Very few people can ever receive 100% of my trust. I judge machines and contraptions the same way - based on previous performance. The government, just like the public in general, can never earn 100% of my trust, because it's impossible to personally know all of those people. At the same time, they can never earn 0% of my trust, because I realize that there are people who are in it specifically for the good of the general public, whether I know them or not.
I think trust is one of those fallible human emotions, like love. They are similar in many ways, but I don't think they're synonymous. I once had an ex who told me that 100% love means 100% trust, and that each was a requirement of the other. I couldn't really explain it then, and I can't really explain it now, but even though I loved her with all my heart, I never could fully trust her.
For the majority of people, damn near everything in their lives is a "black box." Very few people understand how simple devices actually work. To most people:
The automobile is a black box: put gas in, motion comes out.
The computer is a black box: put electricity in, naked women come out.
Television is a black box: put electricity in, naked women come out.
People have put their trust in black boxes for a long time. I'm neither for nor against electronic voting, but I do think there ought to be a paper trail and open source software running it, so it can be verified by a hastily-assembled group of people who don't want to be there.
Besides, any system is fallible: humans take part in it. Even if we kept with paper ballots, who's to say the officials in a district couldn't be paid off to swap the real ballot box with a fake one filled with a known number of ballots for Candidate X? And if the crime was admitted to, and the voters in that district were asked to vote again, would they all re-vote the exact same as they had before? Highly doubtful: they're human.
Actually, only 56.7% were satisfied with choosing any candidate.
The table in your provided Wikipedia link shows 122,267,553 votes for a host of candidates. Admittedly the majority of those were for two candidates. However, in 2004 there were an estimated 215.6 million registered voters in the US. See the table halfway down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election
Probably not in the immediate vicinity of the coathangers, but yeah, I've heard of that trick too. The worms think it's lightning, and come out of the ground just as they would in a storm.
Notice how these two stories have contradicting points.
Every American flight I've ever been on requests that you keep your seat belt fastened when you're in your seat, and I've been on plenty. They say that specifically to prevent these kinds of accidents. I've also been in some severe turbulence where you'd want to be buckled up because of the way it tosses around hundreds of tons of perfectly functioning airplane. The question for me isn't whether there was electrical interference from consumer products (highly unlikely), but why did so many people have their seatbelt off mid-flight.
But Guenneau cautions that large structures like islands and coastlines are unlikely to become invisible anytime soon, because building the many small islands needed to protect one is such a big job.
"It's crazy - maybe only people in Dubai could do this," he adds, referring to the spectacular artificial islands built there.
Smaller structures such as offshore oil platforms would be easier to protect, he says.
I personally like the little model. It must've taken awhile to CNC machine that.
How are the tourist ships and supply ships supposed to get to the island at the center?
What? I didn't follow the first part of your comment at all. Diesels don't have throttle plates, they vary the amount of fuel that comes into the injector. Since they don't have throttle plates, there's no restriction in the intake, and therefore there's no source of vacuum.
I think you're confusing efficiency with power. Peak power comes from burning all the fuel possible in an engine, whether it be a gasoline or a diesel. The situations you describe give peak power. Peak efficiency comes at making just enough power to meet a load, and doing it with the least amount of fuel. This is why you can get better mileage by slowing down, because the wind resistance is less, so the load is less, and your fuel consumption can go down. More efficient engines can use more of the heat produced to in the combustion chamber to drive the piston down, so there's less heat being lost to cooling and the exhaust. (100% fuel goes in, the engine uses around 30% of those BTUs to drive the piston, and the other 60% goes out the radiator and the exhaust pipe.) This equates to less fuel used to make more power.
Also, you're partly right: due to high compression ratios (up to 21:1 in some Detroit Diesel 2-cycle motors), you need to beef up the engine, but the high compression ratio is the result of increasing the stroke, not the other way around. Guys who run popular aftermarket "stroker" kits in their 302s and 350s need to use a shorter rod and a piston with a different pin height, otherwise the piston would contact the head and then some. This has been done since hot rodding was invented, but most will offset grind the crankshaft and go with a connecting rod that has a smaller rod journal end.
I agree that anything you do to lighten a diesel can be used to effectively lighten a gas motor (magnesium intake manifolds, more aluminum parts in non-critical locations like the valve covers, etc.), and I also agree that the extra weight that's required in a diesel means it needs to make more power to be competitive in the power vs. weight comparison with a gas engine, but the effective power to the wheels really depends on the gearing of the drivetrain. As discussed elsewhere, diesels have a very flat torque curve compared to gas engines, and torque can be used at a much lower RPM. This is precisely the reason why OTR tractor-trailers have 10, 13, 15 speeds and more: those large Cummins, Caterpillar, Detroit Diesel, Volvo, and Mack motors are all basically governed to run between 600 and 2100 RPM for longevity reasons, leaving a useable RPM range of 1500. A Continuously Variable Transmission as such put out by Mazda (and I think Ford too) would be impressive behind a diesel: the diesel could just run at it's low-speed max power output, and the CVT could change gear ratios between 30:1 and 0.40:1 (anything smaller 1:1 is overdrive).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to see some source on this.
I understand that a hydraulic pump and hydraulic motor coupled with two lines would be modestly simple, but the repairman going out to fix the system will probably have the same hourly/salaried rate as the repairman going out to fix the generator. Windmills have been modestly simple for hundreds of years, though. Today, the power chain looks like this:
Wind --> Blades --> Shaft --> Gearing --> Generator --> Grid
With this new system, they're hoping to get it to look like this:
Wind --> Blades --> Shaft --> Generator--> Grid
With a hydraulic system using a central generator, it would look like this:
Wind --> Blades --> Shaft --> Hydraulic Pump --> 360 Swivel --> Lines --\
Wind --> Blades --> Shaft --> Hydraulic Pump --> 360 Swivel --> Lines --> Big F'in Hydraulic Motor --> Shaft --> Generator --> Grid
Wind --> Blades --> Shaft --> Hydraulic Pump --> 360 Swivel --> Lines --/
I'd have a hard time imagining that the maintenance costs would be less with more points of failure, at least from a mechanical standpoint, not to mention the costs of cleanup due to a leak.
Actually, if they used more ideas from your car's alternator, they might get farther yet. But that's just my humble opinion.
According to TFA, this new generator uses permanent magnets on a shaft passing by coils of wire, so the magnets are always spinning, even in the slightest breeze. This isn't anything new, it's just that they're probably using IGBTs to turn the individual stator coils on or off, changing the load on the shaft.
An automotive alternator uses an electromagnet on a shaft (rotor) passing by coils of wire(stator). The amount of voltage fed to the rotor comes as a form of feedback from the regulator, which samples the battery's voltage and the alternator's output and adjusts the rotor voltage as needed. This design assumes more or less unlimited rotating force to the rotor from the engine, and that's not necessarily the case with wind generators.
I'm going to guess that the other thing that's happening here is that when this new generator is in "weak" mode, the DC power output will appear pulsed, like a square wave, so I'm sure there's going to be some more regulation electronics on the back end to get it to spit out straight DC.
It's because of the unknowns.
Have you ever been in an American commercial building that was constructed during the Cold War? It appears to be way overbuilt, until you think about what that building might have to endure in the event of a nuclear war. In structural engineering, you try to anticipate any loads that might come into play, and build in a safety factor to account for those unforeseen loads (extremely heavy snowfall in Virginia, for example. Very rare, but not impossible).
NASA built a "safety factor" into the rovers to account for unforeseen circumstances that, if encountered, may have been the breaking point of the entire rover.
I paid a significant amount of money for my CDs of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.
I serve them when I have WinMX running.
Nobody downloads them. Logical fail.
Food would be valued based on it's caloric content and energy to produce,
Are you referring to the modern-day requirements of energy to produce, such as the cost of purchasing and operating a large combine to harvest wheat? That is directly dependent on the cost of the diesel to fuel the combine. Going "backwards" to a labor-intensive harvesting of wheat by sickle, shocking and separating by hand, and transporting the wheat on pack animals removes the diesel requirement, but increases the labor requirement.
It's Egyptians all the way down...
And then dunk them in nitric acid to "get the lead out."
Gold is a halfways-decent conductor. Silver is best, and Copper is slightly behind Silver, but the trick is that both of those materials oxidize in air, and their resistance goes up. Gold does not oxidize in air.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity
The reason it was so highly regarded in past eons is due to it's ease of workability and long-lasting sheen, along with it's perceived lack of availability. You can work gold effectively with hardwoods and bronze tools, tools that have been around for thousands of years.
Not arguing, but what data? If the tag doesn't contain personal information, exactly how much data does it need to store, and for what? How about 2D Aztek or DataMatrix bar codes that need to have the passport in hand, and opened, to scan?
Pictures, or it didn't happen.
Jag-bombs are huge, dunno where you've been. Bar supply stores make little plastic cups specifically for that drink.
http://barsupplies.com/bomb-shotz-jager-bomb-shots-p-761.html
I seem to recall that the actual turnout of 110 million United States voters in 2004 was 56% of the 215 million eligible to vote. 56% is still pretty pathetic, though.
a government is a purely human construct. its all about social structure and where you fit into it. its all about trusting or not trusting the other people around you.
Yes, the United States government is by the people, for the people; in many ways it is a hierarchy, but specifically for representation, security, and the enabling of rights as outlined in our charter documents. I don't believe it is meant to be a nanny-state, wherein we place all our trust in the government. The Forefathers recognized our need to prevent the nanny-state from occurring, and wrote the 2nd Amendment. I will never give the government, nor anyone around me, either 100% or 0% of my trust. Everyone involved in my life, including Joe Schmoe on the street whom I've never met, receives a certain percentage of my trust. If they befriend me or I determine their goals and past performances are worthy of my support, their trust level goes up. If they stab me in the back or are otherwise dishonorable, their trust level goes down. Very few people can ever receive 100% of my trust. I judge machines and contraptions the same way - based on previous performance. The government, just like the public in general, can never earn 100% of my trust, because it's impossible to personally know all of those people. At the same time, they can never earn 0% of my trust, because I realize that there are people who are in it specifically for the good of the general public, whether I know them or not.
I think trust is one of those fallible human emotions, like love. They are similar in many ways, but I don't think they're synonymous. I once had an ex who told me that 100% love means 100% trust, and that each was a requirement of the other. I couldn't really explain it then, and I can't really explain it now, but even though I loved her with all my heart, I never could fully trust her.
People have put their trust in black boxes for a long time. I'm neither for nor against electronic voting, but I do think there ought to be a paper trail and open source software running it, so it can be verified by a hastily-assembled group of people who don't want to be there.
Besides, any system is fallible: humans take part in it. Even if we kept with paper ballots, who's to say the officials in a district couldn't be paid off to swap the real ballot box with a fake one filled with a known number of ballots for Candidate X? And if the crime was admitted to, and the voters in that district were asked to vote again, would they all re-vote the exact same as they had before? Highly doubtful: they're human.
Actually, only 56.7% were satisfied with choosing any candidate.
The table in your provided Wikipedia link shows 122,267,553 votes for a host of candidates. Admittedly the majority of those were for two candidates. However, in 2004 there were an estimated 215.6 million registered voters in the US. See the table halfway down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election
Probably not in the immediate vicinity of the coathangers, but yeah, I've heard of that trick too. The worms think it's lightning, and come out of the ground just as they would in a storm.
I don't know if you realize it or not, but you're a part of that very "upper class tax bracket" as described by, well, everyone.
When anyone talks about "the rich getting tax breaks," they're specifically referring to you.
You do realize that the majority of us only make 40-60K a year, right?
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24463183-661,00.html
http://www.aviation.com/travel/ap-081008-quantas-altitude-drop.html
Notice how these two stories have contradicting points.
Every American flight I've ever been on requests that you keep your seat belt fastened when you're in your seat, and I've been on plenty. They say that specifically to prevent these kinds of accidents. I've also been in some severe turbulence where you'd want to be buckled up because of the way it tosses around hundreds of tons of perfectly functioning airplane. The question for me isn't whether there was electrical interference from consumer products (highly unlikely), but why did so many people have their seatbelt off mid-flight.
You spelled "sir" without a "u," and your grammar and punctuation is mostly correct. FAIL!
Then again, I bet lots of disingenuous spam writers would love to have you help them...
No, I don't remember that. Do you want me to get off your lawn now?
ISS Vision Testing Procedure:
"Can you see me now? Good!"
If a post ever deserved a +1 Insightful, I'd give it to you if I had it.
But Guenneau cautions that large structures like islands and coastlines are unlikely to become invisible anytime soon, because building the many small islands needed to protect one is such a big job.
"It's crazy - maybe only people in Dubai could do this," he adds, referring to the spectacular artificial islands built there.
Smaller structures such as offshore oil platforms would be easier to protect, he says.
I personally like the little model. It must've taken awhile to CNC machine that.
How are the tourist ships and supply ships supposed to get to the island at the center?
Not sure why you got the flamebait mod... it brings a good point to that discussion. JMO.
What? I didn't follow the first part of your comment at all. Diesels don't have throttle plates, they vary the amount of fuel that comes into the injector. Since they don't have throttle plates, there's no restriction in the intake, and therefore there's no source of vacuum.
I think you're confusing efficiency with power. Peak power comes from burning all the fuel possible in an engine, whether it be a gasoline or a diesel. The situations you describe give peak power. Peak efficiency comes at making just enough power to meet a load, and doing it with the least amount of fuel. This is why you can get better mileage by slowing down, because the wind resistance is less, so the load is less, and your fuel consumption can go down. More efficient engines can use more of the heat produced to in the combustion chamber to drive the piston down, so there's less heat being lost to cooling and the exhaust. (100% fuel goes in, the engine uses around 30% of those BTUs to drive the piston, and the other 60% goes out the radiator and the exhaust pipe.) This equates to less fuel used to make more power.
Also, you're partly right: due to high compression ratios (up to 21:1 in some Detroit Diesel 2-cycle motors), you need to beef up the engine, but the high compression ratio is the result of increasing the stroke, not the other way around. Guys who run popular aftermarket "stroker" kits in their 302s and 350s need to use a shorter rod and a piston with a different pin height, otherwise the piston would contact the head and then some. This has been done since hot rodding was invented, but most will offset grind the crankshaft and go with a connecting rod that has a smaller rod journal end.
I agree that anything you do to lighten a diesel can be used to effectively lighten a gas motor (magnesium intake manifolds, more aluminum parts in non-critical locations like the valve covers, etc.), and I also agree that the extra weight that's required in a diesel means it needs to make more power to be competitive in the power vs. weight comparison with a gas engine, but the effective power to the wheels really depends on the gearing of the drivetrain. As discussed elsewhere, diesels have a very flat torque curve compared to gas engines, and torque can be used at a much lower RPM. This is precisely the reason why OTR tractor-trailers have 10, 13, 15 speeds and more: those large Cummins, Caterpillar, Detroit Diesel, Volvo, and Mack motors are all basically governed to run between 600 and 2100 RPM for longevity reasons, leaving a useable RPM range of 1500. A Continuously Variable Transmission as such put out by Mazda (and I think Ford too) would be impressive behind a diesel: the diesel could just run at it's low-speed max power output, and the CVT could change gear ratios between 30:1 and 0.40:1 (anything smaller 1:1 is overdrive).
That must've been one hell of a stripped-down Impala. My '67 Ford LTD with a 289 cost $3750 from the dealer.
But what was minimum wage in 1968, only two years after your dad bought that Impala? $1.60 an hour, but with inflation figured in, it was worth $9.12 in 2005 dollars.
So perhaps if minimum wage was $9 an hour, we wouldn't have much to complain about.