Not only to laptop cells. UPS batteries (lead-acid) shrink in capacity (and increase internal resistance) quite fast, especially at higher temperatures.
And what major auto manufacturer is proposing to use UPS batteries to power an EV?
Yeah. So scratch that off the list.
Cellphone batteries (NiCd, NiMH, Li-Ion, Li-Pol) also shrink in capacity over time.
Modern cell phones are generally all powered by li-ion and variants (li-pol is just a li-ion variant). But great of you to bring up those other chemistries because, they too, by material, management, and charge/discharge profile curves, too can be made to have vastly different lifespans. Example: the NiMH pack in the Prius, which averages 10-15 years of life. They chose a target life and built to it.
NiFe are even heavier than lead-acid. But do you really want me to give you an example of a li-ion battery that's been running for over 100 years? There's a weeee bit of a problem with that notion....
Where I live, outside temperature can be anywhere from -35C (all time low -42.9) to +35C (all time high +37.5), the car with the battery will be outside and I might even want to drive it when it's -34C (and use the heater of course). Climate controlling the batteries will reduce the range of the car in the temperature extremes.
It is done, and not that much, actually. And, FYI, gasoline (and esp. diesel) cars don't exactly run so great in -34C either. Just as a random example, automotive-style li-ion batteries (your manganese spinels or phosphates) are much less cold sensitive than the PbA starter batteries your gasoline car relies on.
Unless your house was wired by Thomas Edison, I seriously doubt that. That's not enough to even run a modern 4-burner electric range -- range sockets are 50A. A dryer socket is 30A.
There is also a problem with the battery life
False. One always has a choice in battery life as a balancing factor versus other factors (price, energy density, etc). There are nickel-iron batteries out there that have been operational for over 100 years. You're referring *specifically* to non-climate-controlled laptop cells wired in series with no charge balancing. Nobody is ever going to use that in an EV. The closest out there is Tesla, but they climate control the cells and each "brick" is only one cell in series (many in parallel), and the bricks are all monitored and individually replaceable. All other manufacturers are simply using more stable cell chemistries.
The fastest electric car (and fastest vehicle, period) in 1899 was La Jamais Contente, which hit 62mph on a straightaway. And wasn't exactly a 4-seat crash-rated vehicle with modern accessories, to put it lightly;)
Rechargeable batteries have been doubling in energy density about once every 8 years, have maintained such a pattern since the 80s, and show no signs of slowing down. Don't think today's ranges are good enough? What about in a decade? Two decades? Three decades? If your car can go 800 miles per day (a whole day's drive), what need to you have for frequent fast-charge stations? You just need to be able to get your 800-miles of range charged while you settle in for the evening/eat/go to bed/wake up/get ready/eat/leave. 250Wh/mi and, say, 10 hours charge time requires 20kW (~83A). Modern houses are generally built with 200A panels nowadays (most of that being little utilized at night), and hotels far larger.
So at some point, all of those other issues just go by the wayside. 800 miles not good enough for you? Then wait for 1000. Or 1200. But at some point, you hit your mark. And low current distribution panels are increasingly a thing of the past.
The bigger question is cost. Battery cost per watt have generally declined, but not followed a very predictable path. A given tech (say, PbA, NiMH, Li-ion, etc) generally shows a predictable price decline over time, but at random intervals, a new tech comes along to continue the aforementioned energy density increase. Usually (but not always) it starts out pretty expensive, but then declines over time. In short, though, it's really hard to say how expensive those 800-mile packs of 20 years from now will be -- only that no matter what their initial price, it will drop over time.
As for history: "Fuel" powered engines have a much longer history than "electricity" powered engines. The early brushed DC motors and lead-acid batteries are the electric-car equivalent of the steam engine. The modern synchronous AC drivetrain and lithium-ion batteries are the electric car equivalent of early internal combustion engines. It's a game of catchup. There was one point where electric vehicles briefly took the lead, but only due to extreme deficiencies of the gasoline vehicles of their day (the lack of a starter, nonstandardized fuels, horrible reliability, etc). Speaking of "nonstandardized fuels" -- electric cars are just now having to get over a related problem (nonstandardized connectors).
It's simply an industry that needs time to mature.
Hey, at least the Portuguese translation isn't full of *deliberate* jokes like the Icelandic translation. They've fixed a number of them (like translating "Sigur Rós" as "Foo Fighters", translating "Where is the bathroom?" as "Talarðu ensku?" (Do you speak English?), translating "My hovercraft is full of eels" as "Láttu mig í friði!" (Leave me alone!), etc), but there's still a *ton* in there. Someone had a lot of fun exploiting how it builds its translation database.:P I guess the fewer the speakers, the easier it is to rig. And even where it's not rigged with fake translations, it often likes to pretend that whole words or phrases -- very common ones, at that! -- aren't in the sentence and just leaves them out of the translation.
There are uses for Google Translate. Getting a *good* translation isn't one, but getting a rough idea quickly is. Given sufficient time (and a good dictionary for the words/phrases I don't know), I can translate pretty much anything from Icelandic -- but I don't always have the aforementioned "sufficient time". There's always time for Google.
Already been done. You expect them to do the same thing again?
No, they're not going to be digging for dinosaur bones, but they're not going to just repeat what Cassini-Huygens did for kicks, either. Some of the Titan probe proposals are really fascinating, to be honest.
What does thermodynamics have to do with anything, apart from a first-principles perspective?
Look at the sort of reactions silanols undergo, for an example of non-carbon-based complexity. The thing is, even if another form of life *could* form on Earth, it'd be immediately out-competed by established carbon-based life.
1) The simplest boring device is merely a boring (pardon the pun) RTG or nuclear reactor, melting its way in slowly over the course of years. 2) You don't have to bore to get to the subsurface; ice volcanism brings it up for you. Heck, an Enceladus probe doesn't even have to *land*, thanks to its geysers. BTW, Enceladus isn't the only Saturnian moon with ice geysers -- just the one with the biggest ice geysers. 3) Please propose an alternative Europa hypothesis to a subsurface ocean.
I noticed you didn't discus Titan. Titan should be an incredibly easy body to explore due to its combination of a thick atmosphere and low gravity -- hot air or helium balloons, powered blimps, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, variable-pitch wing aircraft, autogyros, etc. While the Delta-V requirements to get there are certainly high, they're tempered somewhat by the very easy aerocapture. It's an ongoing laboratory of organic chemistry due to the photocatalytic chemical reactions in its upper atmosphere (likely creating the tholins found all over the Saturnian system -- which we really know very little about, apart from that they're complex organic chemical compounds). It has seasonal and permanent organic lakes, ice volcanism dredging material up from the warmer subsurface, tectonic activity, and on and on. Honestly, of all the bodies in the solar system, I think Titan calls out the most for exploration.
Which is something for which we don't know much about the long-term health effects of. It might be no better than microgravity.
They have 10km deep canyons on Mars, can you believe this? Colorado River Canyons are dwarfed against that.
It's hardly the only massive canyon in the solar system, however. The Saturnian system has some impressive ones (like Ithaca Chasma), made all the more impressive in comparison to the size of the body they're on.
You have the desert. The beautiful sunsets, the amazing sun rises.
Sounds more like Earth than Mars.:P
With solar panels you can harvest sun
Between the greater distance and the electrostatic dust that clings to everything, not nearly as well as on Earth. At least with most other bodies in the solar system, you don't get dust clinging to all of your sensitive electronic equipment.
you can melt ice to get water
Water becomes more abundant the further out in the solar system you go.
you can create methane and O2 to ave rocket fuel.
Not readily. CO2 is such a sparse gas on Mars, and the process to convert it to methane is not trivial. On the other hand, say, on Titan, you've got an atmosphere already full of methane. LOX can be burned like jet fuel on Titan. Most of the solid bodies from Saturn on out, and to a lesser extent in the Jovian system, are covered with tholins -- all sorts of various complex organic carbon compounds, nearly all of which could be used for hybrid rocket fuel much easier than trying to produce methane on Mars. On any body with ice, you can produce LOX and LH anyway; fuel is not really the issue. At least there's lots of LH engines to choose from; there aren't many methane engines out there.
You can fly planes or ballons.
Only with *extreme* difficulty; Mars's atmosphere is so thin it's almost negligible. It's far much easier on Titan or Venus's habitable cloud layer (there's a layer of atmosphere in Venus with a temperature similar to a hot Phoenix day at a pressure similar to that of La Paz -- and even a normal Earth atmosphere is a lifting gas on Venus, so floating colonies are not out of the question. You could even walk outside in shirtsleeves, although you'd need a mask to provide oxygen and goggles to protect your eyes from long-term exposure to the trace carbon monoxide; the small amounts of sulfur dioxide may also be an irritant).
You can make a greenhouse and plant groceries.
You can do that anywhere. But it's not nearly as simple of a process to do sustainably as you're imagining.
On Europe:... On Enceladus...
It's far too simplistic to declare Europa and Enceladus's surfaces as being *all* ice. And it's not like anyone would live on the *surface* of such a world when you could so readily go underground for radiation shielding. And those are but two bodies amount the vast many possibilities in the solar system. And who says that colonization needs to occur *on* a solid body anyway? It could just as well be done in space, with only mining done to solid objects (which might not even be planetoids/moons), so you don't have to have your people locked deep in a gravity well. And if you're going to choose a gravity well, why choose a deep one when it might not actually offer any health benefits?
Anyway, this is a whole red herring, because this was a discussion about exploration and the search for life. Colonization is so far off of a topic it shouldn't even warrant consideration at this point in time.
I know Mazda has been toying with the idea of using rotaries as range extenders in electric vehicles. Range extenders in a properly designed PHEV don't run often, so they don't need to handle a lot of miles or be as efficient. They need to be small, light, quiet, low maintenance, and cheap.
Unobtanium, a lazy sci-fi writers contribution to the element table that explains in one simple word how difficult it is to obtain the ore... except that they are able to obtain it.
"Pandora is blessed with a naturally occurring susbstance a million times more precious than gold. Its joke name of "unobtanium" has stuck, over the years."
The backstory to Avatar was actually a lot more fleshed out and interesting than used in the movie, and they stuck to real science more than almost any other modern sci-fi that I can think of. As for "unobtanium": it's a room-temperature superconductor (probably the most likely thing on Earth for scientists and engineers to jokingly refer to as "unobtanium"). There are hints to that in the movie, such as when one character sets a piece of it down over a magnet and it floats in place. The backstory is that astronomers' attention was drawn to this moon because of the tremendous magnetic fields it was generating. A lot of the "ORLLY?" moments in the world are actually quite plausible given the concept of large deposits of a room-temperature superconductor underground -- a planetwide communication network, floating mountains (superconductors strongly expel magnetic fields), highly intense and uneven localized levels of magnetic field strength and radiation (and thus communication disruption), and so forth.
They really went to a ton of detail with the latest in scientific paradigms on pretty much every aspect of the worldbuilding. The spacecraft, for example. It's dual propulsion. For earth departure, it uses a photon sail pumped by a laser array at Earth, to accelerate the craft without it having to carry extra propellant for said acceleration. For decelaration, however, there is no such laser array, so instead it needs to provide its own thrust. For this, they use antimatter-initiated microfusion. All parts of the spacecraft are sized in proportion to what they'd actually need to be sized as to actually complete the journey. The craft is laid out in a very un-sci-fi-like fashion using tensile structures rather than rigid structures. First the sail, then the propellant/engine system for deceleration, all lie *ahead* of the craft, with the craft hanging in tension behind them. This can dramatically reduce system mass. The first system I read about like that, although there may have been others proposed before then, was "Medusa", a more efficient alternative to the popular "Orion" nuclear pulse propulsion system. Behind the spacecraft lies a reflective shield that protects it from the lasers used during the initial boost phase. During interstellar travel, it is then rotated to act as a shield against grains of interstellar dust. For the return trip, the antimatter and hydrogen are topped back up from locally-produced sources and used to boost it back up to 0.7c. At Earth, the photon sail and laser array is then used for deceleration.
Similar level of detail went into creating the biomes and evolutionary history of the different species, and pretty much every aspect of the worldbuilding. Unfortunately, a lot of compromises were made in trying to wedge the plot in and make it appeal to the lowest common denominator:P. For example, the Navi were initially far less human-looking, in fitting with a realistic evolutionary development pattern. This was changed to help the audience bond with them better. One can only likewise expect similar compromises in the Na'vi speaking so much in English, the human being the "big damn hero", and other unrealistic audience-identification-with-characters aspects. I find it a shame that there's no way to get a "not dumbed down" version.
As a side note, I found it interesting to read that the visual similarities between the
I'm not sure what made you think that, but you wouldn't perchance have once owned a Honda Insight, would you? If so, you may be interested in knowing that I've got a grid charger purchased that should be here in about two weeks.;)
It works both ways, though. When the Big 3 buy a system from a Tier 1, it's essentially a black box to them. Whenever they want anything changed with it, they're beholden to just one company: the Tier 1. And their vehicle gets engineered and certified around it, so they can't just swap it out for a different system (well, for some parts easier than others, but for many, it's a *very* non-trivial task).
Plus, when you look at the sort of stuff some of the Tier 1s pull (*cough* SEC *cough* ripping off some of my employees' previous employers), well, it's hard to pity them. I'm thinking of one in particular, and I imagine you can guess who.
I absolutely guarantee they won't give them the time of day
It's not that simple any more, mind you, with auto industry venture arms, arms-length subsidiaries, etc. But it's still an incredible longshot to go straight for the Big 3. The auto industry is all about confidence. You can have the best product in the world, but you need them to see that someone that they already trust has seen your product and will vouch for it.
Have you ever worked with Detroit? I own an auto industry startup who's dealt with top-level Detroit execs on a number of occasions. The auto industry is an extremely conservative industry with a very backwards business model and an exceedingly slow cycle time, hamstrung by regulations, supply agreements and partnerships that perpetuate the status quo. And they know all of this stuff, and it drives them crazy, because every exec has about a dozen big ideas for what they want to do but can't for some reason or another. At the same time, they have a formula that works, keeping them competing in an industry that tends to eat new know-it-all manufacturers for breakfast.
I wish the new startup well, and I wish I could say it's just a case of "may the best tech win". But it's not really. First off, Detroit is an "Old Boys Club", so a lot of their success will have to do with how well their team can infiltrate the culture, winning over power-brokers and former power-brokers who still have lots of buddies in the company, one rung of the ladder at the time. Secondly, you have to play by their rules. That means meeting over obscenely expensive dinners and drinks (and, from what I've been told, although I've thankfully been spared this for obvious reasons, strip clubs). And third, even when you do things right, it's slllllllllooooooooowwww. Assuming you do things right, have a good product, and properly cover your arse legally, and nobody scopes you to the field first, whether with independent development or ripping you off.
That said, startups *can* and *do* regularly make it in the industry, at least as suppliers. Although going from nothing to being a whole engine supplier is a pretty huge step, and they really should start out smaller. Honestly, given their situation, I'd strongly advise trying to work their way into some of the Tier 1 suppliers. It should be a lot easier than approaching the Big 3 directly (I really wouldn't expect them to give this startup the time of day).
Yes, Carnot's Law still applies to the sun. But on the upside, the theoretical maximum efficiency is very high, since the difference in temperature between the surface of the sun and the surface of the Earth is so great. In practice, there are a number of other limitations, however.
A Titan exploration craft wouldn't likely be a "rover" (although it could be). Anything more elaborate than the Huygens probe will, of course, be nuclear powered, but that's about all we can say for sure. Many different options have been explored, including, but not limited, to:
* Hydrogen-filled balloon (hydrogen doesn't burn on Titan, and all lifting gasses would work exceedingly well in the low gravity/dense atmosphere)
* Nuclear RTG hot air balloon (actually, the math suggests it'd work way better than you'd expect in the extreme cold of Titan; a fixed degree temperature differential is proportionally more lift, conductive losses fall off proportional to the temperature, and radiative losses (the main heat loss mechanism on Earth) proportional to the temperature to the fourth. Combine that with the much smaller surface area of the envelope (low gravity, dense atmosphere), and a mere RTG turns out to be sufficient)
* Either of the above two, as an electric fan-propelled blimp.
* Electric helicopter
* Electric fixed-wing aircraft
* Electric variable-pitch wing aircraft
Of the latter three, the helicopter has the advantage of easy landings but covers the least ground. The fixed wing aircraft covers the most ground but requires a large generator (and thus large, and thus expensive, vehicle) and cannot be trusted to safely land. The variable-pitch winged aircraft combines the advantages of both (landings, recharging between flights while studying the surface, and covering ground rapidly), but offers greater engineering complexity.
Either way, to be sure, a Titan probe would be like nothing we've ever launched before.:) And while Titan takes a lot of delta-V to get to, it's nice that you can aerocapture pretty easily. I find it a fascinating place because of all of the known organic photochemistry going on in its upper atmosphere, and the "tholins" in the Saturnian system in general. We have a tectonically-active Mercury-sized organic chemistry lab operating in our solar system, but we spend our efforts exploring a red rock which has a highly oxidizing regolith that stops organic chemistry in its tracks. Not that Mars isn't worthy of any exploration, but come on, spread the love around.:)
The real problem is this: You can't beat Carnot. If you could, you could produce infinite energy.
Here's an example of why. Are you familiar with the term "COP" from the heating/cooling world? "Coefficient Of Performance". It's the ratio of how much energy you move against a thermal gradient versus how much energy you put in. Counterintuitively, perhaps, the numbers are often well greater than 1. Home AC systems, for example, are usually COP=2.5 to 4.0, and you may see commercial systems in the ~5.0 ballpark (that is, they move five times more heat energy from the cold reservoir to the hot reservoir than they take in). The closer together the temperature of the hot and cold well, the higher the maximum theoretical COP -- just like the closer together the temperature of the hot and cold well in a generator, the *lower* the maximum theoretical generation efficiency of a generator, due to Carnot's law. Guess what? Those come out to the *same boundary condition*; that is, a 100% efficient engine would harness precisely the amount of work needed to power a 100% efficient heat pump to restore the heat gradient used in generating said work. If you could ever produce more work from a given heat differential than the Carnot limit at that temperature, then you could run a heat pump to more than restore the heat differential used to produce that work, and you now have an over-unity perpetual motion machine. And, of course, in the real world, nothing is 100% efficient.
It doesn't matter whether someone's "clever idea" for recovering ever-more energy from waste heat has to do with infrared electricity production, graphene magic, or pixie dust. It's never going to work beyond the Carnot limit. If someone thinks they've found a way to make it work, they're missing something. "Waste heat" can, of course, always have *some* energy recovered from it, as long as there's any temperature differential at all, but as Carnot's Law will tell us, you rapidly hit diminishing returns. We call it waste when it's at the point that we can no longer justify spending the money to stick even the cheapest of generators there to recover more because the recovery rate is just so low.
In a car, the whole point generally shouldn't be "how can we try to recover these tiny amounts of energy from waste heat". The goal should be, "how can we stop spending the energy in the first place." This means efficient energy storage and reuse, keeping any engines/motors as close to their optimal powerbands as possible, and an efficient primary propulsion cycle (in the case of an ICE, a high compression ratio). You'll generally get way more energy with way less investment (and less mass -- and remember, extra vehicle mass is an energy *consumer*). Any waste heat energy recovery should be as simple as possible, such as using exhaust to run a fuel preheating stage.
Because people like you never notice how much things actually *are* changing here in the real world.
Batteries are my favorite example. I'm constantly hearing people complain about reporting on battery breakthroughs in the lab, sarcastically saying, "Yeah, but when are we actually going to see these in the real world?" -- forgetting how much radically smaller and/or longer lived rechargeable batteries have gotten for increasingly high-power-consumption consumer electronics. Secondary cells have 5x'ed in energy density since the late 80s, and the trend shows no signs of slowing down. Even li-ion seems to have good life left in it (in particular, the anode; silicon (derided on Slashdot as a "sure, when will we finally see THAT?" tech) is now starting to replace carbon for part of the anode materials in commercially available cells, and it has a maximum theoretical anode energy density 10x that of carbon). Li-ion cathodes probably have a good 50% improvement left in them, possibly more; we'll probably see a migration to a Li-S chemistry after that, since that seems to be maturing the fastest (barring unexpected breakthroughs in Li-air, other chemistries, or electrostatic storage).
One nice thing about Li-S is that it's lower cell voltage with a much higher cell capacity, meaning that it's easier to get a specific desired voltage. Electrostatics would obviously be best (durability, temperature sensitivity, voltage discharge curve, etc), but they've also got the longest way to go. Li-air is oft hyped, but it too has an awfully long way to go. Then there's all sorts of other longer-shot contenders out there -- nickel-lithium, sodium-ion, aluminum secondary cells, etc. And then the question of whether flow batteries of any given chemistry will ever compete outside of a very narrow range of applications (such as grid storage).
A steam engine is not an internal combustion engine
Nor is a variable-frequency AC electric motor the same type of device as the brushed DC motors that powered the early EVs. Did you not read my post? I already went into all of this.
The first successful "fuel-fueled vehicle" was built in 1769. The first successful "electric-fueled vehicle" was built in 1891. The first-successful "internal combustion engine gasoline vehicle" was built in 1885. The first successful "variable frequency AC electric motor vehicle" was built in the mid 1990s. You're trying to compare a second-generation "fuel" drivetrain (the internal combustion engine) with a first-generation "electric" drivetrain (brushed DC motors). You're doing the same thing with batteries, comparing first-gen batteries (lead-acid) with second-gen fuels (refined petroleum products).
It's even worse than that. By putting the panel on the roof, you've now also got a piece of glass up there that's much heavier than the roof around it. And whatever ripple effects that extra weight (and wiring harness) adds. Losses relative to weight (accel/decel and rolling) are the primary energy loss mechanisms in city driving, and are still a significant fraction during highway driving.
Slashdot Mirror
And what major auto manufacturer is proposing to use UPS batteries to power an EV?
Yeah. So scratch that off the list.
Modern cell phones are generally all powered by li-ion and variants (li-pol is just a li-ion variant). But great of you to bring up those other chemistries because, they too, by material, management, and charge/discharge profile curves, too can be made to have vastly different lifespans. Example: the NiMH pack in the Prius, which averages 10-15 years of life. They chose a target life and built to it.
NiFe are even heavier than lead-acid. But do you really want me to give you an example of a li-ion battery that's been running for over 100 years? There's a weeee bit of a problem with that notion....
It is done, and not that much, actually. And, FYI, gasoline (and esp. diesel) cars don't exactly run so great in -34C either. Just as a random example, automotive-style li-ion batteries (your manganese spinels or phosphates) are much less cold sensitive than the PbA starter batteries your gasoline car relies on.
The main circuit breaker for my house is ~32A
Unless your house was wired by Thomas Edison, I seriously doubt that. That's not enough to even run a modern 4-burner electric range -- range sockets are 50A. A dryer socket is 30A.
There is also a problem with the battery life
False. One always has a choice in battery life as a balancing factor versus other factors (price, energy density, etc). There are nickel-iron batteries out there that have been operational for over 100 years. You're referring *specifically* to non-climate-controlled laptop cells wired in series with no charge balancing. Nobody is ever going to use that in an EV. The closest out there is Tesla, but they climate control the cells and each "brick" is only one cell in series (many in parallel), and the bricks are all monitored and individually replaceable. All other manufacturers are simply using more stable cell chemistries.
The fastest electric car (and fastest vehicle, period) in 1899 was La Jamais Contente, which hit 62mph on a straightaway. And wasn't exactly a 4-seat crash-rated vehicle with modern accessories, to put it lightly ;)
Rechargeable batteries have been doubling in energy density about once every 8 years, have maintained such a pattern since the 80s, and show no signs of slowing down. Don't think today's ranges are good enough? What about in a decade? Two decades? Three decades? If your car can go 800 miles per day (a whole day's drive), what need to you have for frequent fast-charge stations? You just need to be able to get your 800-miles of range charged while you settle in for the evening/eat/go to bed/wake up/get ready/eat/leave. 250Wh/mi and, say, 10 hours charge time requires 20kW (~83A). Modern houses are generally built with 200A panels nowadays (most of that being little utilized at night), and hotels far larger.
So at some point, all of those other issues just go by the wayside. 800 miles not good enough for you? Then wait for 1000. Or 1200. But at some point, you hit your mark. And low current distribution panels are increasingly a thing of the past.
The bigger question is cost. Battery cost per watt have generally declined, but not followed a very predictable path. A given tech (say, PbA, NiMH, Li-ion, etc) generally shows a predictable price decline over time, but at random intervals, a new tech comes along to continue the aforementioned energy density increase. Usually (but not always) it starts out pretty expensive, but then declines over time. In short, though, it's really hard to say how expensive those 800-mile packs of 20 years from now will be -- only that no matter what their initial price, it will drop over time.
As for history: "Fuel" powered engines have a much longer history than "electricity" powered engines. The early brushed DC motors and lead-acid batteries are the electric-car equivalent of the steam engine. The modern synchronous AC drivetrain and lithium-ion batteries are the electric car equivalent of early internal combustion engines. It's a game of catchup. There was one point where electric vehicles briefly took the lead, but only due to extreme deficiencies of the gasoline vehicles of their day (the lack of a starter, nonstandardized fuels, horrible reliability, etc). Speaking of "nonstandardized fuels" -- electric cars are just now having to get over a related problem (nonstandardized connectors).
It's simply an industry that needs time to mature.
Hey, at least the Portuguese translation isn't full of *deliberate* jokes like the Icelandic translation. They've fixed a number of them (like translating "Sigur Rós" as "Foo Fighters", translating "Where is the bathroom?" as "Talarðu ensku?" (Do you speak English?), translating "My hovercraft is full of eels" as "Láttu mig í friði!" (Leave me alone!), etc), but there's still a *ton* in there. Someone had a lot of fun exploiting how it builds its translation database. :P I guess the fewer the speakers, the easier it is to rig. And even where it's not rigged with fake translations, it often likes to pretend that whole words or phrases -- very common ones, at that! -- aren't in the sentence and just leaves them out of the translation.
There are uses for Google Translate. Getting a *good* translation isn't one, but getting a rough idea quickly is. Given sufficient time (and a good dictionary for the words/phrases I don't know), I can translate pretty much anything from Icelandic -- but I don't always have the aforementioned "sufficient time". There's always time for Google.
Already been done. You expect them to do the same thing again?
No, they're not going to be digging for dinosaur bones, but they're not going to just repeat what Cassini-Huygens did for kicks, either. Some of the Titan probe proposals are really fascinating, to be honest.
What does thermodynamics have to do with anything, apart from a first-principles perspective?
Look at the sort of reactions silanols undergo, for an example of non-carbon-based complexity. The thing is, even if another form of life *could* form on Earth, it'd be immediately out-competed by established carbon-based life.
Find on a *map*? Of the solar system? Is that a joke?
You really think a lay person can't understand "a moon of Saturn" or "a moon of Jupiter"?
1) The simplest boring device is merely a boring (pardon the pun) RTG or nuclear reactor, melting its way in slowly over the course of years.
2) You don't have to bore to get to the subsurface; ice volcanism brings it up for you. Heck, an Enceladus probe doesn't even have to *land*, thanks to its geysers. BTW, Enceladus isn't the only Saturnian moon with ice geysers -- just the one with the biggest ice geysers.
3) Please propose an alternative Europa hypothesis to a subsurface ocean.
I noticed you didn't discus Titan. Titan should be an incredibly easy body to explore due to its combination of a thick atmosphere and low gravity -- hot air or helium balloons, powered blimps, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, variable-pitch wing aircraft, autogyros, etc. While the Delta-V requirements to get there are certainly high, they're tempered somewhat by the very easy aerocapture. It's an ongoing laboratory of organic chemistry due to the photocatalytic chemical reactions in its upper atmosphere (likely creating the tholins found all over the Saturnian system -- which we really know very little about, apart from that they're complex organic chemical compounds). It has seasonal and permanent organic lakes, ice volcanism dredging material up from the warmer subsurface, tectonic activity, and on and on. Honestly, of all the bodies in the solar system, I think Titan calls out the most for exploration.
Which is something for which we don't know much about the long-term health effects of. It might be no better than microgravity.
It's hardly the only massive canyon in the solar system, however. The Saturnian system has some impressive ones (like Ithaca Chasma), made all the more impressive in comparison to the size of the body they're on.
Sounds more like Earth than Mars. :P
Between the greater distance and the electrostatic dust that clings to everything, not nearly as well as on Earth. At least with most other bodies in the solar system, you don't get dust clinging to all of your sensitive electronic equipment.
Water becomes more abundant the further out in the solar system you go.
Not readily. CO2 is such a sparse gas on Mars, and the process to convert it to methane is not trivial. On the other hand, say, on Titan, you've got an atmosphere already full of methane. LOX can be burned like jet fuel on Titan. Most of the solid bodies from Saturn on out, and to a lesser extent in the Jovian system, are covered with tholins -- all sorts of various complex organic carbon compounds, nearly all of which could be used for hybrid rocket fuel much easier than trying to produce methane on Mars. On any body with ice, you can produce LOX and LH anyway; fuel is not really the issue. At least there's lots of LH engines to choose from; there aren't many methane engines out there.
Only with *extreme* difficulty; Mars's atmosphere is so thin it's almost negligible. It's far much easier on Titan or Venus's habitable cloud layer (there's a layer of atmosphere in Venus with a temperature similar to a hot Phoenix day at a pressure similar to that of La Paz -- and even a normal Earth atmosphere is a lifting gas on Venus, so floating colonies are not out of the question. You could even walk outside in shirtsleeves, although you'd need a mask to provide oxygen and goggles to protect your eyes from long-term exposure to the trace carbon monoxide; the small amounts of sulfur dioxide may also be an irritant).
You can do that anywhere. But it's not nearly as simple of a process to do sustainably as you're imagining.
It's far too simplistic to declare Europa and Enceladus's surfaces as being *all* ice. And it's not like anyone would live on the *surface* of such a world when you could so readily go underground for radiation shielding. And those are but two bodies amount the vast many possibilities in the solar system. And who says that colonization needs to occur *on* a solid body anyway? It could just as well be done in space, with only mining done to solid objects (which might not even be planetoids/moons), so you don't have to have your people locked deep in a gravity well. And if you're going to choose a gravity well, why choose a deep one when it might not actually offer any health benefits?
Anyway, this is a whole red herring, because this was a discussion about exploration and the search for life. Colonization is so far off of a topic it shouldn't even warrant consideration at this point in time.
I know Mazda has been toying with the idea of using rotaries as range extenders in electric vehicles. Range extenders in a properly designed PHEV don't run often, so they don't need to handle a lot of miles or be as efficient. They need to be small, light, quiet, low maintenance, and cheap.
To quote from the official scriptment:
The backstory to Avatar was actually a lot more fleshed out and interesting than used in the movie, and they stuck to real science more than almost any other modern sci-fi that I can think of. As for "unobtanium": it's a room-temperature superconductor (probably the most likely thing on Earth for scientists and engineers to jokingly refer to as "unobtanium"). There are hints to that in the movie, such as when one character sets a piece of it down over a magnet and it floats in place. The backstory is that astronomers' attention was drawn to this moon because of the tremendous magnetic fields it was generating. A lot of the "ORLLY?" moments in the world are actually quite plausible given the concept of large deposits of a room-temperature superconductor underground -- a planetwide communication network, floating mountains (superconductors strongly expel magnetic fields), highly intense and uneven localized levels of magnetic field strength and radiation (and thus communication disruption), and so forth.
They really went to a ton of detail with the latest in scientific paradigms on pretty much every aspect of the worldbuilding. The spacecraft, for example. It's dual propulsion. For earth departure, it uses a photon sail pumped by a laser array at Earth, to accelerate the craft without it having to carry extra propellant for said acceleration. For decelaration, however, there is no such laser array, so instead it needs to provide its own thrust. For this, they use antimatter-initiated microfusion. All parts of the spacecraft are sized in proportion to what they'd actually need to be sized as to actually complete the journey. The craft is laid out in a very un-sci-fi-like fashion using tensile structures rather than rigid structures. First the sail, then the propellant/engine system for deceleration, all lie *ahead* of the craft, with the craft hanging in tension behind them. This can dramatically reduce system mass. The first system I read about like that, although there may have been others proposed before then, was "Medusa", a more efficient alternative to the popular "Orion" nuclear pulse propulsion system. Behind the spacecraft lies a reflective shield that protects it from the lasers used during the initial boost phase. During interstellar travel, it is then rotated to act as a shield against grains of interstellar dust. For the return trip, the antimatter and hydrogen are topped back up from locally-produced sources and used to boost it back up to 0.7c. At Earth, the photon sail and laser array is then used for deceleration.
Similar level of detail went into creating the biomes and evolutionary history of the different species, and pretty much every aspect of the worldbuilding. Unfortunately, a lot of compromises were made in trying to wedge the plot in and make it appeal to the lowest common denominator :P. For example, the Navi were initially far less human-looking, in fitting with a realistic evolutionary development pattern. This was changed to help the audience bond with them better. One can only likewise expect similar compromises in the Na'vi speaking so much in English, the human being the "big damn hero", and other unrealistic audience-identification-with-characters aspects. I find it a shame that there's no way to get a "not dumbed down" version.
As a side note, I found it interesting to read that the visual similarities between the
No, the Asian autos, at least the Japanese, are seriously into in-house development. It both helps and undercuts them.
I'm not sure what made you think that, but you wouldn't perchance have once owned a Honda Insight, would you? If so, you may be interested in knowing that I've got a grid charger purchased that should be here in about two weeks. ;)
You win a cookie. ;)
It works both ways, though. When the Big 3 buy a system from a Tier 1, it's essentially a black box to them. Whenever they want anything changed with it, they're beholden to just one company: the Tier 1. And their vehicle gets engineered and certified around it, so they can't just swap it out for a different system (well, for some parts easier than others, but for many, it's a *very* non-trivial task).
Plus, when you look at the sort of stuff some of the Tier 1s pull (*cough* SEC *cough* ripping off some of my employees' previous employers), well, it's hard to pity them. I'm thinking of one in particular, and I imagine you can guess who.
It's not that simple any more, mind you, with auto industry venture arms, arms-length subsidiaries, etc. But it's still an incredible longshot to go straight for the Big 3. The auto industry is all about confidence. You can have the best product in the world, but you need them to see that someone that they already trust has seen your product and will vouch for it.
Have you ever worked with Detroit? I own an auto industry startup who's dealt with top-level Detroit execs on a number of occasions. The auto industry is an extremely conservative industry with a very backwards business model and an exceedingly slow cycle time, hamstrung by regulations, supply agreements and partnerships that perpetuate the status quo. And they know all of this stuff, and it drives them crazy, because every exec has about a dozen big ideas for what they want to do but can't for some reason or another. At the same time, they have a formula that works, keeping them competing in an industry that tends to eat new know-it-all manufacturers for breakfast.
I wish the new startup well, and I wish I could say it's just a case of "may the best tech win". But it's not really. First off, Detroit is an "Old Boys Club", so a lot of their success will have to do with how well their team can infiltrate the culture, winning over power-brokers and former power-brokers who still have lots of buddies in the company, one rung of the ladder at the time. Secondly, you have to play by their rules. That means meeting over obscenely expensive dinners and drinks (and, from what I've been told, although I've thankfully been spared this for obvious reasons, strip clubs). And third, even when you do things right, it's slllllllllooooooooowwww. Assuming you do things right, have a good product, and properly cover your arse legally, and nobody scopes you to the field first, whether with independent development or ripping you off.
That said, startups *can* and *do* regularly make it in the industry, at least as suppliers. Although going from nothing to being a whole engine supplier is a pretty huge step, and they really should start out smaller. Honestly, given their situation, I'd strongly advise trying to work their way into some of the Tier 1 suppliers. It should be a lot easier than approaching the Big 3 directly (I really wouldn't expect them to give this startup the time of day).
Yes, Carnot's Law still applies to the sun. But on the upside, the theoretical maximum efficiency is very high, since the difference in temperature between the surface of the sun and the surface of the Earth is so great. In practice, there are a number of other limitations, however.
A Titan exploration craft wouldn't likely be a "rover" (although it could be). Anything more elaborate than the Huygens probe will, of course, be nuclear powered, but that's about all we can say for sure. Many different options have been explored, including, but not limited, to:
* Hydrogen-filled balloon (hydrogen doesn't burn on Titan, and all lifting gasses would work exceedingly well in the low gravity/dense atmosphere)
* Nuclear RTG hot air balloon (actually, the math suggests it'd work way better than you'd expect in the extreme cold of Titan; a fixed degree temperature differential is proportionally more lift, conductive losses fall off proportional to the temperature, and radiative losses (the main heat loss mechanism on Earth) proportional to the temperature to the fourth. Combine that with the much smaller surface area of the envelope (low gravity, dense atmosphere), and a mere RTG turns out to be sufficient)
* Either of the above two, as an electric fan-propelled blimp.
* Electric helicopter
* Electric fixed-wing aircraft
* Electric variable-pitch wing aircraft
Of the latter three, the helicopter has the advantage of easy landings but covers the least ground. The fixed wing aircraft covers the most ground but requires a large generator (and thus large, and thus expensive, vehicle) and cannot be trusted to safely land. The variable-pitch winged aircraft combines the advantages of both (landings, recharging between flights while studying the surface, and covering ground rapidly), but offers greater engineering complexity.
Either way, to be sure, a Titan probe would be like nothing we've ever launched before. :) And while Titan takes a lot of delta-V to get to, it's nice that you can aerocapture pretty easily. I find it a fascinating place because of all of the known organic photochemistry going on in its upper atmosphere, and the "tholins" in the Saturnian system in general. We have a tectonically-active Mercury-sized organic chemistry lab operating in our solar system, but we spend our efforts exploring a red rock which has a highly oxidizing regolith that stops organic chemistry in its tracks. Not that Mars isn't worthy of any exploration, but come on, spread the love around. :)
Well, who would buy the bank's lead-filled trinkets if the bank foreclosed?
Indeed, the Great Galactic Ghoul could possibly get another meal here...
Who needs a laser? All you need is a nuclear weapon and a hundred thousand tonnes of molten iron ;)
The real problem is this: You can't beat Carnot. If you could, you could produce infinite energy.
Here's an example of why. Are you familiar with the term "COP" from the heating/cooling world? "Coefficient Of Performance". It's the ratio of how much energy you move against a thermal gradient versus how much energy you put in. Counterintuitively, perhaps, the numbers are often well greater than 1. Home AC systems, for example, are usually COP=2.5 to 4.0, and you may see commercial systems in the ~5.0 ballpark (that is, they move five times more heat energy from the cold reservoir to the hot reservoir than they take in). The closer together the temperature of the hot and cold well, the higher the maximum theoretical COP -- just like the closer together the temperature of the hot and cold well in a generator, the *lower* the maximum theoretical generation efficiency of a generator, due to Carnot's law. Guess what? Those come out to the *same boundary condition*; that is, a 100% efficient engine would harness precisely the amount of work needed to power a 100% efficient heat pump to restore the heat gradient used in generating said work. If you could ever produce more work from a given heat differential than the Carnot limit at that temperature, then you could run a heat pump to more than restore the heat differential used to produce that work, and you now have an over-unity perpetual motion machine. And, of course, in the real world, nothing is 100% efficient.
It doesn't matter whether someone's "clever idea" for recovering ever-more energy from waste heat has to do with infrared electricity production, graphene magic, or pixie dust. It's never going to work beyond the Carnot limit. If someone thinks they've found a way to make it work, they're missing something. "Waste heat" can, of course, always have *some* energy recovered from it, as long as there's any temperature differential at all, but as Carnot's Law will tell us, you rapidly hit diminishing returns. We call it waste when it's at the point that we can no longer justify spending the money to stick even the cheapest of generators there to recover more because the recovery rate is just so low.
In a car, the whole point generally shouldn't be "how can we try to recover these tiny amounts of energy from waste heat". The goal should be, "how can we stop spending the energy in the first place." This means efficient energy storage and reuse, keeping any engines/motors as close to their optimal powerbands as possible, and an efficient primary propulsion cycle (in the case of an ICE, a high compression ratio). You'll generally get way more energy with way less investment (and less mass -- and remember, extra vehicle mass is an energy *consumer*). Any waste heat energy recovery should be as simple as possible, such as using exhaust to run a fuel preheating stage.
Because people like you never notice how much things actually *are* changing here in the real world.
Batteries are my favorite example. I'm constantly hearing people complain about reporting on battery breakthroughs in the lab, sarcastically saying, "Yeah, but when are we actually going to see these in the real world?" -- forgetting how much radically smaller and/or longer lived rechargeable batteries have gotten for increasingly high-power-consumption consumer electronics. Secondary cells have 5x'ed in energy density since the late 80s, and the trend shows no signs of slowing down. Even li-ion seems to have good life left in it (in particular, the anode; silicon (derided on Slashdot as a "sure, when will we finally see THAT?" tech) is now starting to replace carbon for part of the anode materials in commercially available cells, and it has a maximum theoretical anode energy density 10x that of carbon). Li-ion cathodes probably have a good 50% improvement left in them, possibly more; we'll probably see a migration to a Li-S chemistry after that, since that seems to be maturing the fastest (barring unexpected breakthroughs in Li-air, other chemistries, or electrostatic storage).
One nice thing about Li-S is that it's lower cell voltage with a much higher cell capacity, meaning that it's easier to get a specific desired voltage. Electrostatics would obviously be best (durability, temperature sensitivity, voltage discharge curve, etc), but they've also got the longest way to go. Li-air is oft hyped, but it too has an awfully long way to go. Then there's all sorts of other longer-shot contenders out there -- nickel-lithium, sodium-ion, aluminum secondary cells, etc. And then the question of whether flow batteries of any given chemistry will ever compete outside of a very narrow range of applications (such as grid storage).
Nor is a variable-frequency AC electric motor the same type of device as the brushed DC motors that powered the early EVs. Did you not read my post? I already went into all of this.
The first successful "fuel-fueled vehicle" was built in 1769. The first successful "electric-fueled vehicle" was built in 1891. The first-successful "internal combustion engine gasoline vehicle" was built in 1885. The first successful "variable frequency AC electric motor vehicle" was built in the mid 1990s. You're trying to compare a second-generation "fuel" drivetrain (the internal combustion engine) with a first-generation "electric" drivetrain (brushed DC motors). You're doing the same thing with batteries, comparing first-gen batteries (lead-acid) with second-gen fuels (refined petroleum products).
It's even worse than that. By putting the panel on the roof, you've now also got a piece of glass up there that's much heavier than the roof around it. And whatever ripple effects that extra weight (and wiring harness) adds. Losses relative to weight (accel/decel and rolling) are the primary energy loss mechanisms in city driving, and are still a significant fraction during highway driving.