Its interesting to compare US trends from the EPA which claims for 2001 "Emissions declined for the first time since the base year 1990".
Because of the recession and a mild winter. The same sort of thing happened after the Asian financial crisis; emissions from the Pacific Rim took a dive because industry shut down and nobody had the money for fuel for other things either. I saw unleaded premium for under a buck a gallon due to the world oil glut.
I fail to see how they could detect where the CO2 came from, was it Canada, the US, China, or Europe that put it there ?
It's so simple, I can spell it out in two points:
In chemical reactions, chemical elements are conserved. This means that the carbon added to the atmosphere is the same carbon that was in the fuel consumed.
Due to records of production, shipment and sales, we know how much fuel was consumed.
So there you have it. And here's a whetstone, you can put an edge on that dull intellect with a bit of work.
...and add a series resistor in there somewhere...
Thus blowing away most of the power into heat. A cute current mirror would be better.
What do you mean, "most of the power"? You've calculated the fraction of power sent to the LED vs. the fraction dissipated in the resistor, right? Try supporting that assertion with your calculations.
While you're at it, tell me where to find a current mirror which is 100% efficient.
These news agencies should not let their reporters cover a science/tech related story if they cant grasp the basic concepts. They are just spreading their ignorence to the readers.
I like that idea. Wait, no; I really like that idea. And maybe make the articles hyperlink to a glossary entry for each term the first time it is used.
Bad writing leading to additional confusion on the part of the public has been one of my perennial complaints since the 1980's. Apparently, it's gotten to the point where people have to list energy (not power) consumption in "kilowatts" (not KWH) because the public is confused by the correct usage.
Nanomuscles weigh just one gram but can lift 140 grams...
I could make a one-gram device lift 140 kilograms, if I only had to lift it a tiny distance (like a millimeter). This is why ants can lift such "large" weights compared to their own; they are lifting by millimeters rather than meters, and the mechanical advantage overcomes their other disadvantages.
It sure would be nice to have science reporters who actually understand the science, and quit leaving holes like this in their reporting.
There is a simple and obvious reason for the decrease in reported Federal wiretaps:
No statistics are available on the number of devices installed for each authorized order. This report does not include interceptions regulated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978
(FISA).
The obvious explanation is that the agents have knocked so many holes in the "Chinese Wall" between domestic criminal surveillance and foreign snooping that they just ask the guys on the foreign side (where they don't need no steenking warrants) rather than troubling a judge.
Or maybe I just need to check the shielding on my tinfoil hat, but history says that the above is probably much closer to the truth than anyone in the administration wants to admit.
From the article, the data analyzed were the spectra in certain IR bands which can penetrate the hydrocarbon smog. This isn't the kind of thing which generates neat pictures; however, a map of Titan which shows the ice "land" and the hydrocarbon "sea" would be. That might not have made it into the article because it's still being generated, or saved for publication in something more prestigious than a news release.
The problem with trying to recover energy from vibrations of things like cell phones is that
they don't get bounced around too much,
if they soaked up too much energy from the bouncing around, they'd feel like lead on your waist, and
there are mechanical problems with making a significant weight which can be moved back and forth far enough to recover much of the available energy.
Other avenues appear to be much more fruitful, such as making the soles of shoes (which dissipate energy of flexure) into generators. If you take 2000 steps around the office each day, and with each step you capture 5 inch-pounds of work with each of two shoes, that's 20,000 inch-pounds a day (1667 foot-pounds, about 0.6 watt-hour). Using your shoes, you are the moving mass and the power capabilities are scaled up correspondingly.
Plus, it gives you a reason to pace while you talk.
I recalled something about a piezo generator for underwater use, which relied on the flapping motion of a flag-like object to drive it from a current of water. I couldn't find it, but I did discover this. It would let you power things even if the ductwork wasn't vibrating.
Read the white paper. It describes the compression and expansion clearly.
Funny, I thought I had. I must've been misled by the utter lack of coverage of the pertinent issues in the animations.
Advantages:
Since the piston does not form part of the combustion chamber, there is much more freedom in designing the combustion chamber for efficiency -- lower surface/volume ratio (unlike a Wankel) and few crevices that trap unburned charge
I count that as a disadvantage. The separate combustion chamber means that there is extra surface area for heat loss, and passages for pressure drop (esp. past the valves). Heat loss and pressure drop = energy waste.
The compression ratio, and perhaps the displacement, could be varied by changing the port/valve timing
Assymetrical compression/expansion ratios are easy -- a larger expansion ratio could provide better efficiency
The external combustion chamber allows better handling of the heat issues -- e.g., the piston is not exposed to the primary flame front; cooling can be uniform around the chamber
Cooling means heat loss; what you want is an engine which can operate with as little cooling as possible, preferably none. The adiabatic engine is the holy grail of internal-combustion engine designers.
Among the disadvantages of the toroidal engine are the huge swept area of chamber walls and sliding seals. If these seals are to be tight, they are going to have high friction (and thus high friction losses, due to the large F dot ds), as well as high wear. My conclusion is unchanged: this engine is not going to go anywhere before internal-combustion engines are largely replaced by fuel cells.
I looked at the paper link, and the first-page graphic is someone in a lab coat looking through a microscope, casting a shadow of an ostrich in the fabled "head-in-sand" pose. The rest of it is written not much above that level.
In short, it's not a scholarly work, it's a scare piece pandering to an ignorant (and largely scientifically illiterate) public. What's really pathetic is that the NYTimes gave these idiots any press. Blank newsprint would have greater potential for education.... At least it does have a bit of redeeming value; you can use those column inches to light the fireplace.
After reconsidering the flash animations, I realized that this engine does not have a compression stroke. (The compression part of the 4-stroke cycle is the thing which made internal-combustion engines efficient enough to be worthwhile; without compression, you cannot extract nearly as much energy from the burned gases before you are back down to atmospheric pressure and have to exhaust them with all their residual heat.) If there is to be any compression, this engine is going to have to generate it externally, e.g. with a supercharger or turbocharger. As thermodynamic cycles go, this engine is a retreat to the mid-19th century.
I notice that the engine is being plugged for cogeneration. This actually makes sense in context, because an engine which gets as little as 10% conversion of fuel to work is infinitely more efficient than a furnace which gets 0% conversion of fuel to work! However, I still think that piston engines are going to be better in such applications, for these reasons:
They are more efficient,
They can share manufacturing technology,
The noise problem can be solved other ways, and
The higher thermal efficiency of the piston engine is going to give a higher return on investment in the cogenerator.
As always, I might be wrong - this is my off-the-cuff appraisal.
You have two (hopefully dynamicaly balanced) flywheels (aka "Gyroscopes") with their axes perpendicular to eachother... very similar to the gyroscope arrangement in a navigational gimbal...
A navigational gyro table uses three gyroscopes as sensors; the actual rotation of the table to keep it fixed in space is done with motors, not torque from the gyros. If you applied any torque to the gyros, they would precess and wouldn't be pointing in the same direction any longer.
The total gyroscopic moment of the wheels in the toroidal engine can be computed as the vector sum of the angular momenta of the two pieces. This isn't quite intuitive, but it's not rocket science either.
What would happen if you mounted this engine in a car? Worse yet, and [sic] aeroplane?
It's easy to answer this question, because it's been done.;-) The WWI aircraft rotary engines were radials with the crankshaft mounted to the firewall and the propeller bolted to the block. The effect of the rotating mass was to make the aircraft yaw when pitched up or down, and pitch when yawed left or right. This coupling effect made some maneuvers easier than others, and thus more predictable for enemy pilots - I'm sure lots of Allied airmen died because the Germans knew what to expect, and thus where to shoot.
If the mass/speed of the wheels is high, then the entire engine will not want to rotate in any direction. Forcing it would cause very high bearing forces and a torque that would try to rip the two disks apart.
Not a big issue. The real problem is torque on the vehicle, particularly on slippery surfaces when going over a sharp hump. This can be remedied by lightening the rotating parts.
The real issue is that this engine probably can't be manufactured to the required tolerances (especially over temperature), and its large surface areas will probably keep its thermal efficiency lower than piston engines. This puts its claims well toward the "scam" category
No they are not useless from a technical POW. One of the alternative designs should be used if we had to redesign all of engines, factories, fuels, motor oil and car's form factors.
Bull puckey. The choice of engine is at least somewhat independent of the choice of fuel; for instance, a spark-ignition piston engine will burn the same fuel as a spark-igniton Wankel, a diesel will burn anything that will ignite easily enough, and a Stirling or gas turbine can run on just about anything that burns, period. Fuels include:
light and medium petroleum distillates;
petroleum byproducts such as propane;
methane (fossil or biogenic);
vegetable oils and derivatives such as biodiesel;
heavy petroleum fractions;
wood, wood gas and charcoal;
coal.
For any one of those fuels, I can cite an example of one of the above families of engines running on it. If an engine isn't being widely used, it's because it's difficult to manufacture or requires expensive materials. Right now we are using the least-expensive (and thus most cost-efficient) technology we've got, and that's the right thing to do.
The design we use now is not the best one, it just happens to be the one whole automobile industry is shaped around.
In a word, hogwash. There are a host of different engine designs around, and some of them have even achieved some presence in the marketplace. Examples:
Wankels
Stirlings
Gas turbines
We don't use the Wankel because it has too much chamber surface area per unit displacement, causing heat losses to be greater than a piston engine and losing the efficiency race. We don't use Stirlings because they are external-combustion engines requiring very high temperatures to be efficient, and the materials for the hot-side heat exchangers are not cheap. We don't use gas turbines because they require (again) heat exchangers to be most efficient, and (for vehicles) nobody's come up with a design which isn't either too bulky or loses too much efficiency to leakage; for road vehicles, turbines remain the province of superchargers, not the main power producers.
A lot of research money has been expended on these engines in the past. Superior technologies do win out, just as fuel injection has displaced carburetors from all US production cars. If you can come up with a way to beat the technical problems which prevent any one of these engines from being manufactured as cheaply as a piston engine while meeting the same efficiency, emissions, noise etc. requirements, the world will beat a path to your door.
What part of "For that, we'd have to go upward" didn't you understand?
I think you got the economics wrong. Physics, too
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5595 Days and Counting
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At current rates of improvement, solar panels will be cheap enough to paint on roofs, and efficient enough to produce a house's requirements on a cloudy day.
You are making two assumptions in the above statement:
That the historical rate of improvement will continue.
That energy storage will become a great deal cheaper as well.
The first assumption is debatable, and the history of batteries shows that the second is extremely suspect. The suitability of a solar-electric energy supply for our whole economy cannot be taken for granted at any particular time; all we can do is use it where it works today, and let the market for better products push the improvements.
Solar falling on roofs imposes a limit on the amount of power which can be supplied for use on Earth. Depending on the exact challenges which face humanity in the future (e.g. having to remove a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere in a BIG hurry), we may need power at a quantity or price which rooftop PV cannot match, if only due to the cost of the real estate it sits on. For that, we'd have to go upward.
Too bad doping the carbon nanotubes to conduct, and using the cable to generate power like the shuttle's tether is not compatible with using it as an elevator.
All the Tethered Satellite System did was convert some of the Shuttle's kinetic energy of motion into electricity; it wasn't supplying any energy that hadn't originally come from rocket motors (a very inefficient way to power something). Besides, a geosynchronous skyhook would not be moving relative to the Earth, and therefore would not be moving relative to Earth's magnetic field; conductivity or no conductivity, there would be no V-cross-B to create a potential difference.
So if we work this out (.42 x 12 hours x 130W/m^2) we end up with 655W per day per square meter.
You mean WH (watt-hours) per day; the watt is a measure of power, not energy. Using watts as a measure of enery is as meaningless as using horsepower as a measure of fuel consumption; it all depends how long the power is on.
The EV1's standard battery compliment is a 18.7kWh valve regulated lead acid battery assembly. The EV1 will go about 130 miles at 45mph on a single charge. In order for your PV setup to generate enough power to recharge your EV1 once a day you'll need 28.55 square meters of PV paneling plus inverters and batteries to store the power while your EV1 charges at night.
You are assuming that the car would run to its range limit every day. But according to Commuter Cars (click on specifications and go about 3/4 down), the average commuter travels 22 miles per day. If we just assume that this means 20% depth of discharge on the batteries, the energy required on an average day falls to 3.74 KWH. At 655 WH/m^2/day, filling the batteries could be done by a 5.71 m^2 array with a peak power output (at 130 W/m^2) of about 750 watts. At $5/peak watt, that would be $3750, for all the "fuel" you need to get to work and back, for probably 20 years or more.
I have difficulty overstating the effect of this revised assumption. If you assume that the batteries will be drained every day and they aren't, you'd have the great majority of your solar generation going to waste. You'd expect that to raise your costs ridiculously high, and sure enough, it would.
Check out the pricing, a 12kW system even after California's $4/W rebate costs you over thirty six thousand dollars ($36,000+). Adding the cost of a 6kW and 12kW system to recharge your EV1 you're out more than $54,000 up front.
Another product of watt vs. watt-hour confusion? You appear to be assuming that the array would have to be able to recharge the vehicle in one hour. An 18 KW system, by your 0.21 capacity factor (42% over half the day) stated above, would produce 18 kw * 24 hr * 0.21 = 90.7 KWH/day. That is enough to charge about 4 and 4/5 18.7 KWH battery packs!
Your unit errors above roughly quintuple the required investment, even granting your pessimistic assumptions about daily driving range.
If you need the self satisfaction of owning a PV system and an electric car and have almost ninety grand to plop down then your idea has merit. For the rest of the country and ostensibly world reality is a harsh mistress.
A decent new car costs 20 grand; a cheap new car costs 12 grand. If I could supply all the energy for my typical daily commute with an additional investment of 4 grand and that investment lasted for 20 years, I think I could stand it quite easily. In many parts of the world, motor fuel is upwards of $5/gallon; at those prices, solar-electric might already be competitive. If global warming mitigation forces us to adopt carbon taxes or the like, it will be competitive everywhere.
The argument was that a better reduction would be had for lower cost by pushing for hybrids. Reaction was swift with the eco-types crying foul even though the switch to hybrid will yield far better results (ie. we can do it on a far larger scale sooner and using our existing infrastructure and it will yield great results).
Tell me something I don't know. My position on this subject was proclaimed publicly on the 'net better than a decade ago. Back then we still had sucky batteries that a century of physics and chemistry research hadn't improved by more than a relatively small increment; it was painfully clear that the CARB was populated by idiots thinking that their mandates could accomplish in a decade what a hundred years of science could not. I argued that hybrids were the only way to go, because chemical fuels were still the only way to store sufficient energy within the mass/size constraints of practical vehicles. The constant-load characteristic of hybrids also improves emissions, which is CARB's first mandate.
I have since refined my analysis; it appears quite practical to have a half-electric (not merely hybrid) vehicle which can run a substantial distance on batteries alone (perhaps 20 miles) and then start up a sustainer engine for the rest. This offers the prospect of cars which have the option of charging from the wall, but don't have to, and also have the option of burning fuel for short trips, but don't have to do that either; you could get around locally even with a total fuel cutoff (as long as there was electricity) and of course you could still get around in a blackout. The real irony is that CARB is still cluelessly glued to the absolutist position, and when they could not achieve it they had no fallback; because their Holy Grail was unattainable, they wound up attaining much less than they could easily have done. If they really want to promote greenhouse-gas reduction they should just tax gasoline up to $5/gallon and watch everyone start buying hybrids.
However, if we were in a position where we could make use of hydrogen, the generators could locally distil sea water (energy hungry but necessary to get rid of the chlorine) and then electrolyse it...
Nah, you're thinking all wrong about it. All you have to do is use an electrolysis solution which is hypertonic compared to seawater, and a water-permeable osmosis membrane between them. As you electrolyze the water you increase the concentration of the electrolyte (say, KOH), and the gradient neatly drives water (and only water) across the membrane for you.
Of course, you submerge your electrolyzers as deep as you can in order to take advantage of the efficiency increases with pressure.
Wouldn't the law of conservation of energy dictate you get almost the same amount of energy back when you recombine...?
No. The law of conservation of energy dictates that you get back at most the same amount of energy as you put in. The Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that, at each step of the way, you have to reject heat equivalent to the entropy generated by your process times the absolute temperature... and that is a minimum too. The rejected heat is lost so far as useful work output is concerned (you might be able to use it for cabin heat or the like).
Study thermodyamics for a semester. It is alternately depressing and extremely enlightening.
The way LEDs work is by allowing electrons and holes to combine under conditions favorable for the production of photons. If a photon is produced, great! If not (say, an impurity traps the energy of recombination), the energy instead goes to vibration of the crystal lattice: heat. The same is true of semiconductor lasers.
It's pretty hard for a crystal of gallium indium phosphide to generate mechanical vibration (no piezoelectric effects that I know of, and no variation in the applied voltage to drive it) or EM at other wavelengths other than thermal IR at the temperature of the device (what quantum processes exist to produce photons at near-IR wavelengths?). So the answer is "You can bet on the remaining energy going to make the device warm."
I have a number of different brands. My experiences:
Lights of America lamps are very cheaply built, and the 3-way ballasts destroy themselves when the bulb starts to die. The bulb is supposed to be replaceable, but if the ballast is dead you have to buy a whole new unit.
I bought some "Eco-Bulbs" (Feit Electric, made in China) and they all croaked in less than a year of relatively undemanding use (though many starts). The dead units were the folded-tube, frosted-plastic cover type, but the one I took the cover off of for better cooling lived no longer than the others. I have a naked spiral tube unit of the same brand (13 W) in a desk lamp, but it does not have enough hours on it to get any idea of the longevity.
Slashdot Mirror
- In chemical reactions, chemical elements are conserved. This means that the carbon added to the atmosphere is the same carbon that was in the fuel consumed.
- Due to records of production, shipment and sales, we know how much fuel was consumed.
So there you have it. And here's a whetstone, you can put an edge on that dull intellect with a bit of work.While you're at it, tell me where to find a current mirror which is 100% efficient.
Bad writing leading to additional confusion on the part of the public has been one of my perennial complaints since the 1980's. Apparently, it's gotten to the point where people have to list energy (not power) consumption in "kilowatts" (not KWH) because the public is confused by the correct usage.
It sure would be nice to have science reporters who actually understand the science, and quit leaving holes like this in their reporting.
Or maybe I just need to check the shielding on my tinfoil hat, but history says that the above is probably much closer to the truth than anyone in the administration wants to admit.
From the article, the data analyzed were the spectra in certain IR bands which can penetrate the hydrocarbon smog. This isn't the kind of thing which generates neat pictures; however, a map of Titan which shows the ice "land" and the hydrocarbon "sea" would be. That might not have made it into the article because it's still being generated, or saved for publication in something more prestigious than a news release.
Neutrinos have mass? I didn't even know they were Catholic!
The problem with trying to recover energy from vibrations of things like cell phones is that
- they don't get bounced around too much,
- if they soaked up too much energy from the bouncing around, they'd feel like lead on your waist, and
- there are mechanical problems with making a significant weight which can be moved back and forth far enough to recover much of the available energy.
Other avenues appear to be much more fruitful, such as making the soles of shoes (which dissipate energy of flexure) into generators. If you take 2000 steps around the office each day, and with each step you capture 5 inch-pounds of work with each of two shoes, that's 20,000 inch-pounds a day (1667 foot-pounds, about 0.6 watt-hour). Using your shoes, you are the moving mass and the power capabilities are scaled up correspondingly.Plus, it gives you a reason to pace while you talk.
I recalled something about a piezo generator for underwater use, which relied on the flapping motion of a flag-like object to drive it from a current of water. I couldn't find it, but I did discover this. It would let you power things even if the ductwork wasn't vibrating.
... and clueless marketroids who don't know the difference between 1038 and ten-to-the-38th-power.
Among the disadvantages of the toroidal engine are the huge swept area of chamber walls and sliding seals. If these seals are to be tight, they are going to have high friction (and thus high friction losses, due to the large F dot ds), as well as high wear. My conclusion is unchanged: this engine is not going to go anywhere before internal-combustion engines are largely replaced by fuel cells.
In short, it's not a scholarly work, it's a scare piece pandering to an ignorant (and largely scientifically illiterate) public. What's really pathetic is that the NYTimes gave these idiots any press. Blank newsprint would have greater potential for education.... At least it does have a bit of redeeming value; you can use those column inches to light the fireplace.
I notice that the engine is being plugged for cogeneration. This actually makes sense in context, because an engine which gets as little as 10% conversion of fuel to work is infinitely more efficient than a furnace which gets 0% conversion of fuel to work! However, I still think that piston engines are going to be better in such applications, for these reasons:
- They are more efficient,
- They can share manufacturing technology,
- The noise problem can be solved other ways, and
- The higher thermal efficiency of the piston engine is going to give a higher return on investment in the cogenerator.
As always, I might be wrong - this is my off-the-cuff appraisal.You posted after I decided to post rather than moderate - I agree with you 100%.
The total gyroscopic moment of the wheels in the toroidal engine can be computed as the vector sum of the angular momenta of the two pieces. This isn't quite intuitive, but it's not rocket science either.
It's easy to answer this question, because it's been done.The real issue is that this engine probably can't be manufactured to the required tolerances (especially over temperature), and its large surface areas will probably keep its thermal efficiency lower than piston engines. This puts its claims well toward the "scam" category
- light and medium petroleum distillates;
- petroleum byproducts such as propane;
- methane (fossil or biogenic);
- vegetable oils and derivatives such as biodiesel;
- heavy petroleum fractions;
- wood, wood gas and charcoal;
- coal.
For any one of those fuels, I can cite an example of one of the above families of engines running on it. If an engine isn't being widely used, it's because it's difficult to manufacture or requires expensive materials. Right now we are using the least-expensive (and thus most cost-efficient) technology we've got, and that's the right thing to do. In a word, hogwash. There are a host of different engine designs around, and some of them have even achieved some presence in the marketplace. Examples:- Wankels
- Stirlings
- Gas turbines
We don't use the Wankel because it has too much chamber surface area per unit displacement, causing heat losses to be greater than a piston engine and losing the efficiency race. We don't use Stirlings because they are external-combustion engines requiring very high temperatures to be efficient, and the materials for the hot-side heat exchangers are not cheap. We don't use gas turbines because they require (again) heat exchangers to be most efficient, and (for vehicles) nobody's come up with a design which isn't either too bulky or loses too much efficiency to leakage; for road vehicles, turbines remain the province of superchargers, not the main power producers.A lot of research money has been expended on these engines in the past. Superior technologies do win out, just as fuel injection has displaced carburetors from all US production cars. If you can come up with a way to beat the technical problems which prevent any one of these engines from being manufactured as cheaply as a piston engine while meeting the same efficiency, emissions, noise etc. requirements, the world will beat a path to your door.
What part of "For that, we'd have to go upward" didn't you understand?
- That the historical rate of improvement will continue.
- That energy storage will become a great deal cheaper as well.
The first assumption is debatable, and the history of batteries shows that the second is extremely suspect. The suitability of a solar-electric energy supply for our whole economy cannot be taken for granted at any particular time; all we can do is use it where it works today, and let the market for better products push the improvements.Solar falling on roofs imposes a limit on the amount of power which can be supplied for use on Earth. Depending on the exact challenges which face humanity in the future (e.g. having to remove a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere in a BIG hurry), we may need power at a quantity or price which rooftop PV cannot match, if only due to the cost of the real estate it sits on. For that, we'd have to go upward.
All the Tethered Satellite System did was convert some of the Shuttle's kinetic energy of motion into electricity; it wasn't supplying any energy that hadn't originally come from rocket motors (a very inefficient way to power something). Besides, a geosynchronous skyhook would not be moving relative to the Earth, and therefore would not be moving relative to Earth's magnetic field; conductivity or no conductivity, there would be no V-cross-B to create a potential difference.I have difficulty overstating the effect of this revised assumption. If you assume that the batteries will be drained every day and they aren't, you'd have the great majority of your solar generation going to waste. You'd expect that to raise your costs ridiculously high, and sure enough, it would.
Another product of watt vs. watt-hour confusion? You appear to be assuming that the array would have to be able to recharge the vehicle in one hour . An 18 KW system, by your 0.21 capacity factor (42% over half the day) stated above, would produce 18 kw * 24 hr * 0.21 = 90.7 KWH/day. That is enough to charge about 4 and 4/5 18.7 KWH battery packs!Your unit errors above roughly quintuple the required investment, even granting your pessimistic assumptions about daily driving range.
A decent new car costs 20 grand; a cheap new car costs 12 grand. If I could supply all the energy for my typical daily commute with an additional investment of 4 grand and that investment lasted for 20 years, I think I could stand it quite easily. In many parts of the world, motor fuel is upwards of $5/gallon; at those prices, solar-electric might already be competitive. If global warming mitigation forces us to adopt carbon taxes or the like, it will be competitive everywhere.I have since refined my analysis; it appears quite practical to have a half-electric (not merely hybrid) vehicle which can run a substantial distance on batteries alone (perhaps 20 miles) and then start up a sustainer engine for the rest. This offers the prospect of cars which have the option of charging from the wall, but don't have to, and also have the option of burning fuel for short trips, but don't have to do that either; you could get around locally even with a total fuel cutoff (as long as there was electricity) and of course you could still get around in a blackout. The real irony is that CARB is still cluelessly glued to the absolutist position, and when they could not achieve it they had no fallback; because their Holy Grail was unattainable, they wound up attaining much less than they could easily have done. If they really want to promote greenhouse-gas reduction they should just tax gasoline up to $5/gallon and watch everyone start buying hybrids.
Of course, you submerge your electrolyzers as deep as you can in order to take advantage of the efficiency increases with pressure.
Study thermodyamics for a semester. It is alternately depressing and extremely enlightening.
It's pretty hard for a crystal of gallium indium phosphide to generate mechanical vibration (no piezoelectric effects that I know of, and no variation in the applied voltage to drive it) or EM at other wavelengths other than thermal IR at the temperature of the device (what quantum processes exist to produce photons at near-IR wavelengths?). So the answer is "You can bet on the remaining energy going to make the device warm."
- Lights of America lamps are very cheaply built, and the 3-way ballasts destroy themselves when the bulb starts to die. The bulb is supposed to be replaceable, but if the ballast is dead you have to buy a whole new unit.
- I bought some "Eco-Bulbs" (Feit Electric, made in China) and they all croaked in less than a year of relatively undemanding use (though many starts). The dead units were the folded-tube, frosted-plastic cover type, but the one I took the cover off of for better cooling lived no longer than the others. I have a naked spiral tube unit of the same brand (13 W) in a desk lamp, but it does not have enough hours on it to get any idea of the longevity.
Them's my experiences; your mileage may vary.