>A solar powered car could never pass safety requirements.
If you are referring to the cars that are built for these races, I can tell you that they are quite safe. There is a metal rollcage around the driver of course. The other materials that the car is made of are designed to be very light, and at the same time, be able to absorb shock. In a race a couple of years ago, a solar car ran into a bridge pylon, and the impact didn't even reach to the metal cage.
Since these cars are driven on roads at the same time as "real" cars, safety is a large part of the design. It would be much easier if the roads were blocked off, so other cars wouldn't be a problem...
>>Unless it clouds over in which case it can take much longer to get to the finish line.
I attend Iowa State, and I was on the Solar Car team my Freshman year. The race they had the year before I joined, was pretty much clouded over the whole time. With high efficiency solar cells, the car still receives energy, just not as much. This is why, in these races, strategy is a must.
>I also wouldn't be suprised if they incorporated some sort of energy reclamation system into the brakes (like the one on the Honda Insight) to help keep the battery charged.
The car we had then did have regenerative braking. Part of strategizing was determining whether it saved more energy on a hill to brake, and reclaim energy, or to give the car more speed, to make it over the next hill.
These solar cars can go surprisingly fast. The car before the Oddysey could go upwards of 60mph, although it was really hard on the engine. The previous car probably weighed much more than the current one, since the old one had lead-acid batteries, and the new one has more advanced - lighter batteries.
This analogy isn't true to the gravitational point. Let's say we have a vacuum with a horse and an wingless insect. We drop both from the same hight... The instant before they hit the ground, they are going the same speed, but the horse has a momentum that is several tens of orders of magnitude larger than that of the insect. That means that a much larger force will need to be applied to the horse by the ground to bring it to rest. This force is distributed over the surface area of the object hitting the floor, but even so, the horse's surface area isn't proportional to it's difference in weight. It's surface area is only a couple orders of magnitude larger than the beetle, therefore much more force is applied per centimeter.
From what I've heard, the reason this came about is some embarrasing internal e-mails from Microsoft that were sitting around on their Exchange servers that were later recovered for use in the hearings.
I also heard that when the message "destructs" into gibberish that it would take half a million dollars and 10 years to recover it.
I heard on NPR recently that in order for the world to maintain its population, each woman needs to have 2.1 babies in her lifetime. The U.S. fluctuates at a birth rate of 1.9 to 2.0. China and Japan are both about 1.2 and even lower in cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong. Europe had a birth rate of 1.6 I think.
At these rates, the world population is supposed to peak in the year 2040. Predicting world population trends is more than an art than a science. Most of these things are best guess estimates.
One problem with the world population declining is that there will be more older people than younger people. In most industrialized countries, 35 is the median age. There are as many people under 35 as above 35. If the pop. started declining, the median age would rise to 50. This would be very taxing on the US's Social Security System (No pun intended).
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>Motor, Motor, Motor. There is a difference.
:)
This is why I'm not on the team anymore....
>A solar powered car could never pass safety requirements.
If you are referring to the cars that are built for these races, I can tell you that they are quite safe. There is a metal rollcage around the driver of course. The other materials that the car is made of are designed to be very light, and at the same time, be able to absorb shock. In a race a couple of years ago, a solar car ran into a bridge pylon, and the impact didn't even reach to the metal cage.
Since these cars are driven on roads at the same time as "real" cars, safety is a large part of the design. It would be much easier if the roads were blocked off, so other cars wouldn't be a problem...
>>Unless it clouds over in which case it can take much longer to get to the finish line.
I attend Iowa State, and I was on the Solar Car team my Freshman year. The race they had the year before I joined, was pretty much clouded over the whole time. With high efficiency solar cells, the car still receives energy, just not as much. This is why, in these races, strategy is a must.
>I also wouldn't be suprised if they incorporated some sort of energy reclamation system into the brakes (like the one on the Honda Insight) to help keep the battery charged.
The car we had then did have regenerative braking. Part of strategizing was determining whether it saved more energy on a hill to brake, and reclaim energy, or to give the car more speed, to make it over the next hill.
These solar cars can go surprisingly fast. The car before the Oddysey could go upwards of 60mph, although it was really hard on the engine. The previous car probably weighed much more than the current one, since the old one had lead-acid batteries, and the new one has more advanced - lighter batteries.
This analogy isn't true to the gravitational point. Let's say we have a vacuum with a horse and an wingless insect. We drop both from the same hight... The instant before they hit the ground, they are going the same speed, but the horse has a momentum that is several tens of orders of magnitude larger than that of the insect. That means that a much larger force will need to be applied to the horse by the ground to bring it to rest. This force is distributed over the surface area of the object hitting the floor, but even so, the horse's surface area isn't proportional to it's difference in weight. It's surface area is only a couple orders of magnitude larger than the beetle, therefore much more force is applied per centimeter.
There is such a thing already. It's called radar and infrared.
From what I've heard, the reason this came about is some embarrasing internal e-mails from Microsoft that were sitting around on their Exchange servers that were later recovered for use in the hearings.
I also heard that when the message "destructs" into gibberish that it would take half a million dollars and 10 years to recover it.
I heard on NPR recently that in order for the world to maintain its population, each woman needs to have 2.1 babies in her lifetime. The U.S. fluctuates at a birth rate of 1.9 to 2.0. China and Japan are both about 1.2 and even lower in cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong. Europe had a birth rate of 1.6 I think.
:)
At these rates, the world population is supposed to peak in the year 2040. Predicting world population trends is more than an art than a science. Most of these things are best guess estimates.
One problem with the world population declining is that there will be more older people than younger people. In most industrialized countries, 35 is the median age. There are as many people under 35 as above 35. If the pop. started declining, the median age would rise to 50. This would be very taxing on the US's Social Security System (No pun intended).
I guess we won't really know until it happens!