except the british navy was the most powerful navy in the world.
By who's account? The British Navy was smaller than the US Navy throughout WWII, and was highly dependent on battleships instead of carriers. It was decisively proved in the Pacific theater that a battleship was no match for the range and offensive ability of a carrier.
Here's a link showing Britian's WWII Naval capacity:
You'll note that they went into the war with only ONE carrier as opposed to the four or five that the US had. The US also had a comparable number of battleships (many lost in the attack on Pearl Harbor). Once the war got in full gear, however, the US managed to construct dozens of Essex class carriers, and a hundred or so Jeep Carriers. Escorts were not a big problem either. Look at this link for a list of retired aircraft carriers. Just about everything up to CV-45 was either in or built for World War II.
That's an amazing naval force that no country in the world has EVER managed to replicate.
Which for many people, including myself, would be nearly sufficient to cover their daily commute (mine is 10 minutes each way, so 33 hours of charging needed per day)
Not quite. You have to look at the *power* your vehicle actually uses. When we're talking drive time, we're speaking of some specific power level. In most of the posts here, we're using interstate cruise levels. (~2kw) Most in-town driving consists of a great deal of stop and go driving. The acceleration inherent in such driving utilizes massive amounts of energy. (Easily 10kw or multiples thereof!)
At least for the near future, I see technology like this being used as a fuel economy feature. Much like the fuel injection and turbocharger features on today's vehicles.
assuming they recapture most of the waste water
You know, that's actually a pretty bright idea! We've been trained to think from the perspective of exhausting the waste gasses, but there's no reason why a hydrogen vehicle couldn't be a closed system. At the very least, you could exchange the water and hydrogen at the pump, thus ensuring zero ecological damage from exhaust! (Pumping millions of tons of water into the air could have negative effects on weather patterns.)
I haven't read this article, but if you read a few other articles on the situation, it clearly states that the "anti-spyware" program is in fact spyware itself. i.e. It only makes the problem worse instead of better.
This is true. The second World War could not have occurred without being staged by the end of the first World War. None the less, the Nazi's and socialism were what filled the vacuum left by the Nobility. It just so happens that Germany was most receptive because of the way they were treated at the end of WWI.
The best analogy would be the World Wars. It might be considered one long war, but there was a long break where hostilities stoped.
That's a *very* poor analogy. The first World War (referred to as "The Great War" in its time) was about the end of nobility in a modern and technological society. The web of force, power, and politics had finally caught up with the Nobility as the world got smaller and smaller.
To be specific, each country had made a defense pact with several other countries in an effort to hedge their bets and maintain power. The result was a complicated set of treaties that only required ONE attack anywhere in the world to trigger all out war.
The second World War was really about Eugenics and social superiority. The Nazis felt they were bred to be superior (period), the Japanese felt they were superior to the Chinese, and Mussolini felt his system of government to be superior to all others. So Hitler started a war to "reclaim" land he felt rightfully belonged to Germany, and Japan used it as cover to forward their goals. Mussolini was just without direction and ended up being responsible for Germany's failure to conquer Russia. (Mussolini's failures meant that Germany had to divert troops and miss their window for attacking Russia.)
The United States was in a unique position in these wars, because no one really had any sort of claim on our land, plus we were half a world away at a time when sea travel was still the most viable method for moving tons of traffic.
While no one knew it at the time, the US focus on aircraft carriers also gave them the most powerful naval fleet in existence. This combined sea and air power gave us the ability to perform strikes anywhere in the world, while the enemy could only hope to get potshots off from U-Boats.
So no, the two World Wars were not really just one big war.
Yeah, there was. Something about pouring gasoline and dropping a cigarette. Their conclusion was that the cigarette would flame out before it managed to ignite the toilet. Of course, I don't think they took the Water Heater into account as a possible ignition source. (i.e. The cigarette was possibly incidental.)
I just wish CNN would have someone actually look over their articles before they publish them to their website. They're so full of spelling and other errors (that they obviously just sent through Word) that it's pathetic.
That's because CNN always breaks the story first. I've done some writing myself. Writing a good piece in fifteen minutes is hard. Writing a well edited piece in fifteen minutes is near impossible.
The fumes apparently escaped the pipes, and the heater was nearby (a fairly common thing). The story (with a picture even!) is here. Other versions can be found by typing "toilet" into Google News.
Actually, I've found CNN's site to be more useful for breaking news. Google News seems to have a niche in finding a specific story I want info on.
For example, my wife came to me yesterday and said that she had heard a story on the TV in the gym about some guy's toliet exploding. I searched on Google News and found that some idiot in Salt Lake City had collected gasoline leaking from his car and poured it down his toilet. The gasoline came in contact with the water heater, blew up his bathroom, and set his house on fire. So much for Myth Busters disproving the exploding toilet, eh?
What about it? You have to charge the battery from somewhere. And batteries have energy losses. Thus you'd lose 10-20% of the energy you get from the wall by using the rechargable battery. It's much more efficient to use that power directly.
even burning a little petrol to power the electroliser would still be more efficient than all petrol wouldn't it
No. You can't get more energy out of a system than you put in. So take the amount of energy you get out of the gasoline (45Mj/kg, IIRC) and multiply that by the electrolyser efficiency. (Probably about 50%.) Thus for every kilogram of gasoline you burn, you get about 22.5Mj of hydrogen energy.
Burning the petrol directly would eliminate that inefficiency and provide more energy to your vehicle.
You, and others, keep saying this, but this is inaccurate. The average solar energy striking the earth's surface is around 1000W/m2.
I'm afraid that it is your figures that are inaccurate. Punch your location and a date into NASA's Insolation Database, and you'll get exact figures for how much energy hits the ground. In North America, you're only going to get about half of what you state.
solar car people work on 1000W/m2 in their calculations.
The fact is, that nothing (so far) can replace hydrocarbons in terms of energy/unit. Perhaps someday, but we are a looooonnnnggg way from the "Hydrogen Economy".
You forgot nuclear. It's about the only useful fuel above hydrocarbons. Given the limited supply of hydrocarbons, it may also be the only viable choice for power generation.
Technically, nuclear is the only way we know how to generate power. All other methods merely extract energy from fuels that store the Sun's energy (which is also nuclear).
Yes, but the way you wrote it, it sounded like you mentioned the 20% without actually doing the figures for it. Sorry, for some reason I just had a lot of trouble parsing what you were saying.
That's per square meter, and that's where 55.3Mj:day comes from (3.75m^2:day). Even at your 10% efficiency, that's 2764s, or 46 minutes of cruising, more than ample for driving.
Is it? 2 kw is EXTREMELY low. We're talking about the cruising rate on the Interstate after you've reached ~60 miles per hour. In town traffic saps energy much faster.
Perhaps we should do a better comparison here. According to this link, there's 8.76 kWh per liter of gas. Converting that to joules per gallon, we find that a gallon of gas contains 119.2Mj. Your 55.3Mj works out to about one half a tank of gas. That is sufficient to get *some* people to the store and back. Unfortunately, quite a few people are just outside that range. I probably couldn't even get my Cavalier to work and back on that. (~12 miles round trip)
It *might* work if you built it as light as a Geo Metro, but keep in mind that all those panels, electrolysis equipment, and hydrogen storage is heavy. You're much better off buying a home fueling station that you mount on your roof. Not only will you have a lot more solar surface area, but you could mount fans to acquire wind power as well.
Efficiency of solar->electric->hydrolysis is much worse than direct hydrolysis can be.
Direct hydrolysis from what? If we're talking from a wall socket, then it's out of the range of this discussion.
If you read my other posts (including my original First Post for this thread), you'll note that I do indeed agree. Fill stations can possibly utilize Solar power to decrease the cost of creating hydrogen fuel. A home fill station is a fairly natural extension of that.:-)
First point is that 200 W/m is what you get after the 20% efficiency of the cells. There's on average approx 1kW/m insolation.
Another poster just gave me this link. Feel free to look up the w/m^2 in your local area. Even on the best days, it probably does not exceed 500 watts.
200 watts was an all-around average before PV conversion. The approximate maximum without atmospheric losses is 1.3kw/m^2 at 1au. That's all the Earth gets and there ain't no more.
Second point is that electrolysis can be 98% - 99% efficient depending on the rate you want to do it at and the cell design.
Do you have a link for this? I did a search and found them to be ~50% efficient. There was some talk of specialized versions that could do 85%, but I didn't see anything about 98% efficiency.
Third point is that current generation Li-ion batteries can have a higher energy density than hydrogen at 150bar, approx 405Wh/l. PolyPlus have a Li-S battery demonstrating 420Wh/l.
Ah, I see. My only comment is that you're assuming 100% efficiency in the process. Solar Panels are currently at ~20% efficiency, and electrolysis is about 50% efficient. The grand total efficiency (before attempting to burn it for propulsion) is 10%. So out of that 14.7Mj, you're only going to get about 1.4Mj. At a constant 2kw (we'll say it's a small car), you'd get 737s (12 minutes) of driving time.
Improvements in solar panels could improve this, but that's an age old problem. We don't have the technology to use that 14.7Mj, and it's doubtful we will anytime soon. But a solar+wind home refill station might just do the trick.:-)
The Solar panels would be potentially working around the clock (Very little at night)
Sort of correct. They'll produce only a trickle of power in the morning and evening, with their maximum output around noon time. At night the amount of power they produce is too small to measure.
And even some on a cloudy day.
Correct.
If you had a Cell capable of storing X energy + the time running the car and the hydrogen/water conversion would it not be possible in a period of driving lets say 1hr to run the car every day of the week at full potential?
Well, if you read my post, you'd know you'll probably get an average of about 36 seconds of drive time per hour. Since one hour is 3,600 seconds of drive time, you'd need about 100 hours of charge time for every hour you drive.
Keep in mind that 135W is usually the maximum they will produce. The average will be much, much lower. None the less, I'll update the calcs for you:
Let's say the solar panels produce about 180 watts of energy. The electrolyzer is probably about 50% efficient, bringing our final storage rate to ~90 joules per second. That works out to about 324 kilojoules per hour. Which at a "mere" 2kw of constant use would provide exactly 162 seconds of driving time. (Actually less due to further inefficiencies.)
And that can't go any higher than 1.3kw/m^2, because that's all the Earth manages to get from the Sun. In reality, we'll never see that 1.3kw/m^2 unless we manage to rip away our atmosphere. (Not a good thing.)
The 200w/sq. m is based on monocrystalline silicon PV.
Actually, I was speaking of 200w/m^2 before PV conversion. At 1au, the Earth receives about 1.3kw/m^2 in space. By passing through the atmosphere, most of that energy is lost.
The best you could do is ~1kw/m^2 somewhere near the equator.
With PV losses, your actual power produced will range from 40 watts/m^2 to an absolute maximum of 200 watts/m^2.
Slashdot Mirror
except the british navy was the most powerful navy in the world.
. htm
By who's account? The British Navy was smaller than the US Navy throughout WWII, and was highly dependent on battleships instead of carriers. It was decisively proved in the Pacific theater that a battleship was no match for the range and offensive ability of a carrier.
Here's a link showing Britian's WWII Naval capacity:
http://www.naval-history.net/WW2CampaignRoyalNavy
You'll note that they went into the war with only ONE carrier as opposed to the four or five that the US had. The US also had a comparable number of battleships (many lost in the attack on Pearl Harbor). Once the war got in full gear, however, the US managed to construct dozens of Essex class carriers, and a hundred or so Jeep Carriers. Escorts were not a big problem either. Look at this link for a list of retired aircraft carriers. Just about everything up to CV-45 was either in or built for World War II.
That's an amazing naval force that no country in the world has EVER managed to replicate.
Which for many people, including myself, would be nearly sufficient to cover their daily commute (mine is 10 minutes each way, so 33 hours of charging needed per day)
Not quite. You have to look at the *power* your vehicle actually uses. When we're talking drive time, we're speaking of some specific power level. In most of the posts here, we're using interstate cruise levels. (~2kw) Most in-town driving consists of a great deal of stop and go driving. The acceleration inherent in such driving utilizes massive amounts of energy. (Easily 10kw or multiples thereof!)
At least for the near future, I see technology like this being used as a fuel economy feature. Much like the fuel injection and turbocharger features on today's vehicles.
assuming they recapture most of the waste water
You know, that's actually a pretty bright idea! We've been trained to think from the perspective of exhausting the waste gasses, but there's no reason why a hydrogen vehicle couldn't be a closed system. At the very least, you could exchange the water and hydrogen at the pump, thus ensuring zero ecological damage from exhaust! (Pumping millions of tons of water into the air could have negative effects on weather patterns.)
I haven't read this article, but if you read a few other articles on the situation, it clearly states that the "anti-spyware" program is in fact spyware itself. i.e. It only makes the problem worse instead of better.
This is true. The second World War could not have occurred without being staged by the end of the first World War. None the less, the Nazi's and socialism were what filled the vacuum left by the Nobility. It just so happens that Germany was most receptive because of the way they were treated at the end of WWI.
The best analogy would be the World Wars. It might be considered one long war, but there was a long break where hostilities stoped.
That's a *very* poor analogy. The first World War (referred to as "The Great War" in its time) was about the end of nobility in a modern and technological society. The web of force, power, and politics had finally caught up with the Nobility as the world got smaller and smaller.
To be specific, each country had made a defense pact with several other countries in an effort to hedge their bets and maintain power. The result was a complicated set of treaties that only required ONE attack anywhere in the world to trigger all out war.
The second World War was really about Eugenics and social superiority. The Nazis felt they were bred to be superior (period), the Japanese felt they were superior to the Chinese, and Mussolini felt his system of government to be superior to all others. So Hitler started a war to "reclaim" land he felt rightfully belonged to Germany, and Japan used it as cover to forward their goals. Mussolini was just without direction and ended up being responsible for Germany's failure to conquer Russia. (Mussolini's failures meant that Germany had to divert troops and miss their window for attacking Russia.)
The United States was in a unique position in these wars, because no one really had any sort of claim on our land, plus we were half a world away at a time when sea travel was still the most viable method for moving tons of traffic.
While no one knew it at the time, the US focus on aircraft carriers also gave them the most powerful naval fleet in existence. This combined sea and air power gave us the ability to perform strikes anywhere in the world, while the enemy could only hope to get potshots off from U-Boats.
So no, the two World Wars were not really just one big war.
Yes, but the SpyWiper program is spyware itself. Thus it's fraud.
Wallace 'admit[s] no wrongdoing', but in the next breath says 'The FTC is trying to enforce a law that hasn't even passed'
If you're selling spyware as anti-spyware, that's fraud, genius.
Maybe he's hoping that the public will stand up for poor little him.
Yeah, there was. Something about pouring gasoline and dropping a cigarette. Their conclusion was that the cigarette would flame out before it managed to ignite the toilet. Of course, I don't think they took the Water Heater into account as a possible ignition source. (i.e. The cigarette was possibly incidental.)
I just wish CNN would have someone actually look over their articles before they publish them to their website. They're so full of spelling and other errors (that they obviously just sent through Word) that it's pathetic.
That's because CNN always breaks the story first. I've done some writing myself. Writing a good piece in fifteen minutes is hard. Writing a well edited piece in fifteen minutes is near impossible.
It's a television show on Discovery Channel.
Official Site
The fumes apparently escaped the pipes, and the heater was nearby (a fairly common thing). The story (with a picture even!) is here. Other versions can be found by typing "toilet" into Google News.
Actually, I've found CNN's site to be more useful for breaking news. Google News seems to have a niche in finding a specific story I want info on.
For example, my wife came to me yesterday and said that she had heard a story on the TV in the gym about some guy's toliet exploding. I searched on Google News and found that some idiot in Salt Lake City had collected gasoline leaking from his car and poured it down his toilet. The gasoline came in contact with the water heater, blew up his bathroom, and set his house on fire. So much for Myth Busters disproving the exploding toilet, eh?
what about using a rechargable battery
What about it? You have to charge the battery from somewhere. And batteries have energy losses. Thus you'd lose 10-20% of the energy you get from the wall by using the rechargable battery. It's much more efficient to use that power directly.
even burning a little petrol to power the electroliser would still be more efficient than all petrol wouldn't it
No. You can't get more energy out of a system than you put in. So take the amount of energy you get out of the gasoline (45Mj/kg, IIRC) and multiply that by the electrolyser efficiency. (Probably about 50%.) Thus for every kilogram of gasoline you burn, you get about 22.5Mj of hydrogen energy.
Burning the petrol directly would eliminate that inefficiency and provide more energy to your vehicle.
4.5kWh average insolation per day means that you are going to get well more than 1000W on a sunny day.
How do you figure? Assuming 10 hours of daylight, I get 450 watts. i.e.:
4.5 kiloWatt hours = 16,200,000 Joules
10 hours = (60 * 60 * 10) = 36,000 seconds
16,200,000 / 36 000 = 450
Do you see a problem in the calculations?
You, and others, keep saying this, but this is inaccurate. The average solar energy striking the earth's surface is around 1000W/m2.
:-P
I'm afraid that it is your figures that are inaccurate. Punch your location and a date into NASA's Insolation Database, and you'll get exact figures for how much energy hits the ground. In North America, you're only going to get about half of what you state.
solar car people work on 1000W/m2 in their calculations.
No wonder their cars never work.
The fact is, that nothing (so far) can replace hydrocarbons in terms of energy/unit. Perhaps someday, but we are a looooonnnnggg way from the "Hydrogen Economy".
You forgot nuclear. It's about the only useful fuel above hydrocarbons. Given the limited supply of hydrocarbons, it may also be the only viable choice for power generation.
Technically, nuclear is the only way we know how to generate power. All other methods merely extract energy from fuels that store the Sun's energy (which is also nuclear).
Did you read my post?
Yes, but the way you wrote it, it sounded like you mentioned the 20% without actually doing the figures for it. Sorry, for some reason I just had a lot of trouble parsing what you were saying.
That's per square meter, and that's where 55.3Mj:day comes from (3.75m^2:day). Even at your 10% efficiency, that's 2764s, or 46 minutes of cruising, more than ample for driving.
Is it? 2 kw is EXTREMELY low. We're talking about the cruising rate on the Interstate after you've reached ~60 miles per hour. In town traffic saps energy much faster.
Perhaps we should do a better comparison here. According to this link, there's 8.76 kWh per liter of gas. Converting that to joules per gallon, we find that a gallon of gas contains 119.2Mj. Your 55.3Mj works out to about one half a tank of gas. That is sufficient to get *some* people to the store and back. Unfortunately, quite a few people are just outside that range. I probably couldn't even get my Cavalier to work and back on that. (~12 miles round trip)
It *might* work if you built it as light as a Geo Metro, but keep in mind that all those panels, electrolysis equipment, and hydrogen storage is heavy. You're much better off buying a home fueling station that you mount on your roof. Not only will you have a lot more solar surface area, but you could mount fans to acquire wind power as well.
Efficiency of solar->electric->hydrolysis is much worse than direct hydrolysis can be.
Direct hydrolysis from what? If we're talking from a wall socket, then it's out of the range of this discussion.
If you read my other posts (including my original First Post for this thread), you'll note that I do indeed agree. Fill stations can possibly utilize Solar power to decrease the cost of creating hydrogen fuel. A home fill station is a fairly natural extension of that. :-)
First point is that 200 W/m is what you get after the 20% efficiency of the cells. There's on average approx 1kW/m insolation.
:-)
Another poster just gave me this link. Feel free to look up the w/m^2 in your local area. Even on the best days, it probably does not exceed 500 watts.
200 watts was an all-around average before PV conversion. The approximate maximum without atmospheric losses is 1.3kw/m^2 at 1au. That's all the Earth gets and there ain't no more.
Second point is that electrolysis can be 98% - 99% efficient depending on the rate you want to do it at and the cell design.
Do you have a link for this? I did a search and found them to be ~50% efficient. There was some talk of specialized versions that could do 85%, but I didn't see anything about 98% efficiency.
Third point is that current generation Li-ion batteries can have a higher energy density than hydrogen at 150bar, approx 405Wh/l. PolyPlus have a Li-S battery demonstrating 420Wh/l.
I did not know that. Thank you.
Ah, I see. My only comment is that you're assuming 100% efficiency in the process. Solar Panels are currently at ~20% efficiency, and electrolysis is about 50% efficient. The grand total efficiency (before attempting to burn it for propulsion) is 10%. So out of that 14.7Mj, you're only going to get about 1.4Mj. At a constant 2kw (we'll say it's a small car), you'd get 737s (12 minutes) of driving time.
:-)
Improvements in solar panels could improve this, but that's an age old problem. We don't have the technology to use that 14.7Mj, and it's doubtful we will anytime soon. But a solar+wind home refill station might just do the trick.
That's a great link! I'll have to bookmark that. Thanks!
Psst!!! That's KWh PER DAY. I'm talking about watts. i.e. Constant power output. Two completely different measurements.
You don't drive a car 100% of the time.
Correct.
The Solar panels would be potentially working around the clock (Very little at night)
Sort of correct. They'll produce only a trickle of power in the morning and evening, with their maximum output around noon time. At night the amount of power they produce is too small to measure.
And even some on a cloudy day.
Correct.
If you had a Cell capable of storing X energy + the time running the car and the hydrogen/water conversion would it not be possible in a period of driving lets say 1hr to run the car every day of the week at full potential?
Well, if you read my post, you'd know you'll probably get an average of about 36 seconds of drive time per hour. Since one hour is 3,600 seconds of drive time, you'd need about 100 hours of charge time for every hour you drive.
Keep in mind that 135W is usually the maximum they will produce. The average will be much, much lower. None the less, I'll update the calcs for you:
Let's say the solar panels produce about 180 watts of energy. The electrolyzer is probably about 50% efficient, bringing our final storage rate to ~90 joules per second. That works out to about 324 kilojoules per hour. Which at a "mere" 2kw of constant use would provide exactly 162 seconds of driving time. (Actually less due to further inefficiencies.)
And that can't go any higher than 1.3kw/m^2, because that's all the Earth manages to get from the Sun. In reality, we'll never see that 1.3kw/m^2 unless we manage to rip away our atmosphere. (Not a good thing.)
The 200w/sq. m is based on monocrystalline silicon PV.
Actually, I was speaking of 200w/m^2 before PV conversion. At 1au, the Earth receives about 1.3kw/m^2 in space. By passing through the atmosphere, most of that energy is lost.
The best you could do is ~1kw/m^2 somewhere near the equator.
With PV losses, your actual power produced will range from 40 watts/m^2 to an absolute maximum of 200 watts/m^2.