I see. If you can't follow simple efficiency calculations, *I'm* the charlatan.
To put it into words of one syllable: by repeating 90%/80%/90%, I was repeating what I though was clear: your generator is about 90% efficient in turning HP into watts. Your battery is about 80% efficient in storing and releasing electrical energy. then again your electric motor is about 90% efficient in converting that electricity to horsepower. Multiplying those out you get 64.8% system efficiency. { I even gave you a break by not including the efficiency of the switching-mode power regulator. } You just don't seem to get that any horsepower you put into the generator comes back shrunken to 65%. And you consistently ignore the fact that your battery is only good for 1 horsepower-hour. Just Google for Prius battery watt-hours for references. I didn't think I had to do that for you too.
The very fact that you did not get this calculation, as simple as it is, shows you're not hep about electromechanical systems.
Enuf trying to educate people that don't want to learn.
>No, we were talking about your claim of how the battery is useless on the freeway.
Yes, and I gave you chapter and verse why it's useless. You did not respond with anything quantitative, in fact you did not even repeat your adhockery, which is curious.
> Going down the hill it stores energy that would normally be lost. Going back up the hill it spends that stored energy.
And I gave you chapter and verse and actual numbers on that. I think the number was 0.35%. Most people consider that insignificant.
>My record for best MPG over a full tank of gas was 53.1MPG.
How nice for you. However pure gas engine Jettas, which weigh 50% more than your car, and have much more horsepower, have gotten 69 MPG, which is therefore a counterexample.
If you wish to answer in the lanuage of physics and thermodynamics, I'm all for continuing this discussion. But that apparently is not your forte, believing in sales pitches is. Go ahead and be a fanboy for your sled. Some of us are more reality-based. Remember: 1.5 Kilowatt hours of battery, diluted to 50% by your very words, is one horsepower-hour. No way around that.
Another fact: You've obviously never been in a Prius. Or paid attention if you were. You're an armchair expert - I actually own one, so I'd say I'm in a better position to tell the world what this car does do, and what it doesn't do.
On a long highway trip sometimes the car will coast down inclines, charging the battery the whole way. More unassailable physics. Mine is called "gravitational potential energy". Yours is called "pulling numbers out of your ass".
Hmmm... let's see who's the butt-puller here. Here's some facts;
We are talking about a coast-to-coast race. The coasts are very near sea level. The amount of ups very closely equals the amount of downs. If there were more downs than ups, you would be right, a generator/battery/motor setup would be very beneficial.
But in this real world, is we assume the typical 90%/80%/90% efficiencies, the system only has a 65% efficiency, and that's assuming you're going down with no friction or air resistance. If we assume you, like any rational being, would want to go downhill at freeway speeds, that's about another 50% off. So for every 100 feet of drop you can only climb 32.5 feet back up on the battry power. And you can only store 0.75KW-hour, so any drops longer than about 3 miles, the power has no place to go. The contiental divide is about 100 times that long, so the Prius battery can only help to the extent of about 0.325% Not significant, and certainly smaller than the cost of carrying that extra weight.
>The car also runs the engine at the RPMs that allow for peak efficiency as often as possible. Any excess torque generated is sent - you guessed it - back through the electric motor to the batteries where it is stored until you need it.
Peak efficiency of a gasoline engine is at low to medium RPM. That part of the envelope is very small in the tiny engine in the Prius. It's a losing game in all cases to take "excess torque" (no such thing) and store it at 65% efficiency. You're way ahead by just not burning the gas, so you can use it later at 100%.
>This is how I know you're full of BS. What you state is simply untrue. I can hop in my car right now, get on the freeway, and watch the electric motor add torque to the drive train. What you are telling me with statements like this: "Once the battery runs down it's all dead weight."...is that you've never even been in a Prius. The battery never runs down. The control system charges it heavily around 50-60% for reasons of efficiency and battery life. It never gets lower than that. Not once in the 2.5 years I've owned mine. Ever.
So you're saying you're carrying a lot of weight that can only be used down to 50%. That sounds like a drawback.
>And if the battery charges up into the green (90-100%) and you're on the freeway, sometimes on a straightaway on the freeway the gas engine will turn off, and those "useless at freeway speeds" electric components will kick in and move you silently down the road.
Let's try some facts, shall we? The Prius has a 1.5KW-hour battery, which you admit can only be half used. On the highway it might need 10 horsepower to run. That's about 7.5KW. So 7.5KW of draw on a 0.75KW-H battery is.... a tenth of an hour, tops. Six minutes. And we were talking about a coast-to-coast trip.
Even then, for those six minutes, you're using power that you burned 1/0.65 times as much gas for. An expensive way to move.
>The embedded system on this car is brilliant. If it senses you're about to waste charge by having the battery at 100%, it'll start to lean harder on the battery.
Nonsense again. The charge/discharge path is only 65% efficient. It never makes sense to go through that path, except in the rare cases when you need the extra acceleration or you're putting along in stop-and-go traffic.
>And if you doubt me, go make a friend with a Prius. Dial up the Energy screen and watch what the car is doing on the drive train. You can watch the system movi
Sarcasm works well on AOL, here maybe be a little bit more factual?
Fact: On a long highway trip the batteries and motor/generator are worse than useless. Once the battery runs down it's all dead weight. No, recharging it from the gas engine is a losing proposition. The generator/battery/motor system is only like 65% efficient. Every unit of energy you send to the battery is a unit you're not sending to the wheels, and you can only get 65% as much back later. It has nothing to do with the relative smarts of me vs. Toyota, it's basic unassailable physics.
>The electric motor in my Prius works at all speeds.
Well, that would be crazy.
> If I take my foot off the gas at 65mph the car coasts and the motor runs in reverse as a generator and charges the batteries.
No, when you take your foot of the gas, you are not asking for *braking*, you're asking to coast.
> If I lightly rest my foot on the gas the gasoline motor stays off and the electric has enough torque to maintain speed.
Nonsense. We are discussing a cross-country trip on highways, not 30MPH backstreets. A Prius can neither go 55 on electric only, not go cross-country on electric. On any significant trip, the electrics are doing nothing for you but weighing you down.
>genrator / battery are being used in one way or another almost all the time. If they were just useless weight, a Prius would get mileage similar to a typical gas car.
Nonsense. The efficiency of the generator to battery to electric motor is no better than 65%. Any energy you pass though this chain is a net loss.
There is no way to come out ahead, or even break even, when running the car on the highway.
Where you get the benefit is at times when you need just a teensy bit of power, like in slow city driving, or need a short boost, like when merging onto the highway. Any other time the electric stuff is just dead weight.
I looked at those references. They are virtually information-free. The first one is from the researchers saying everything is swell.
The second one refers to a software simulation of the core. Whoopee.
What I get from those refs is that this is a very small experimental reactor. Not something that is ready for scaling up to usable (50x) size in prime-time.
Yes, I'm beginning to think this guy might just be clueless about volts, amps, and power. Many folks have thought their body was generating high voltage just because when you touch a voltmeter probe, it may indicate many dozens of volts AC.
Seriously, most digital voltmeters on their lowest range have an input resistance of like 10^10 ohms. It does not take much current to indicate copious volts on a meter.
>Someone pointed out above that melanin is actually a known semi-conductor.
Yes, and someone also said that saw palmetto cures cancer.
Just because something is a semiconductor does not mean it's like, a *semiconductor*. Horse droppings are a semiconductor.
Your typical usable-for-electronics semiconductor has an impurity level of like one part per billion. It ceases to be interesting if the impurity level get much higher than this.
Please posit how this kid has purified melanin to one part per billion, then doped it with the right miniscule proportion of carriers.
Quantitatively, hair is a very good insulator. Like many megohms per square cm. Your typical semiconductor is like ten million times better aconductor.
The pictures show a few strands of hair. A few questions come to mind:
(1) Hair is not conductive. How can hair produce electricity if it can't conduct electrons worth a darn?
(2) Hair is not polarized-- it's the same all the way through and throughout its length. How can there be any potential difference set up across something uniform?
(3) The amount of hair shown captures maybe 0.1 cm^2 of sunlight. Even if it had 100% efficiency, that would only be 1/100th of one watt. How could it be lighting up a 5-watt fluorescent lamp with that?
Everything about this story sounds major-league bogus.
>Well, in addition to the Chinese HTR-10, which they are now selling around the third world in mass production,...
Whoa there fella, a quick Google does not show any info on sales. The only reference I see is on militarysales.org where it says it's being sold for uses OTHER than energy production. You figure it out.
A 10MW reactor is like 10 times smaller than anything economical, so the buyers are not buying them to save money on electric power.
> South Africa is gearing up production [nuclearstreet.com]-
Whoa again big fella. The references I see say they've just starred building a prototype. That's a long way from a working, proven design, much less something one should be exporting to Timbuktu.
It was a VERY low power reactor, like 30 times smaller than anything useful. And experimental reactors do not count, as they're typically instrumented up the wazoo and built with huge safety factors that are uneconomical in actual production. Plus they're manned by the designers and people trained by the designers. It's not a realistic situation.
And the successor to that one, mentioned in the very next paragraph of the Wikipedia entry, was a huge flop.
>Please point to a single working pebble bed reactor.
>Okay, how about this [wikipedia.org] one, based on the "failed" design you mentioned earlier... Details here. [wired.com]
You get your information from Wikipedia and Wired?
FYI: Under the best of circumstances those are less than reliable sources. And the Wikipedia article refers to a 2005 experimental reactor, and "plans" for a bigger startup in 2013.
There's a reason nobody is investing in this great deal.
The interest on a $8B loan at 8% is about 1.8M per day.
The amount of power made is about that much, at the wholesale rate of.10/KWH
And that's not counting the cost of uranium, labor, maintenance, decomissioning, or insurance..... Not to mention that it takes many years to build one, with the 1.8M accruing each day.
Well, they happen to be right on this one. And what they say does not jibe with what you're claiming. Are you confusing Megahertz and GigaHertz?
An accuracy of 1mm out of 24 feet is an angular accuracy of 0.045 degrees. A $20,000 Agilent network analyzer only has an accuracy of about 1 degree. I think you dropped a decimal point three or four places.
You have problems. If you're not a RF expert, how did you figure out what frequencies you can transmit on, and at what power levels? By accuracy to 1mm I assume you mean that's the best relative motion you can detect-- you'd need really short microwave frequencies to detect that much absolute motion.
How do you know this hasn't been patented like 50 years ago? There are only so many ways to emit continuous or pulsed RF and measure distance-- you're either going to measure intensity or phase or both, at one ot two or three sites, and those concepts were likely patented around 1930.
This does not make any sense to me. A coal plant has scads of waste heat at high enough temperatures to preheat any amount of water. Exactly where does solar heat fit into this picture? It seems like an expensive way to heat water and as a consequence, let more hot coal gas get away.
If you do get challenged, all you have to do is know how to play the game. There are probably a dozen ways to invalidate any patent. Prior art. Usage in interstate commerce more than a year before patenting. Obviousness. Uselessness.
Just have your lawyer send their lawyer a letter stating that you've looked over their patent and there are 343 possible grounds for challenging the validity of their patent, so how's about we just "cross-license" our "intellectual property" and fugeddaboutit?
>Even ENIAC was a Turing machine and so could run anything....
Anything that has a conditional skip and subtract and some memory is Turing-capable.
The original ENIAC was only slightly better than this. And yes it could do "anything", for very limited values of "anything", as it only had like twenty ten-digit accumulators for memory and plug-wired-only programs.
Slashdot Mirror
I see. If you can't follow simple efficiency calculations, *I'm* the charlatan.
To put it into words of one syllable: by repeating 90%/80%/90%, I was repeating what I though was clear: your generator is about 90% efficient in turning HP into watts. Your battery is about 80% efficient in storing and releasing electrical energy. then again your electric motor is about 90% efficient in converting that electricity to horsepower. Multiplying those out you get 64.8% system efficiency. { I even gave you a break by not including the efficiency of the switching-mode power regulator. } You just don't seem to get that any horsepower you put into the generator comes back shrunken to 65%. And you consistently ignore the fact that your battery is only good for 1 horsepower-hour. Just Google for Prius battery watt-hours for references. I didn't think I had to do that for you too.
The very fact that you did not get this calculation, as simple as it is, shows you're not hep about electromechanical systems.
Enuf trying to educate people that don't want to learn.
>No, we were talking about your claim of how the battery is useless on the freeway.
Yes, and I gave you chapter and verse why it's useless. You did not respond with anything quantitative, in fact you did not even repeat your adhockery, which is curious.
> Going down the hill it stores energy that would normally be lost. Going back up the hill it spends that stored energy.
And I gave you chapter and verse and actual numbers on that. I think the number was 0.35%. Most people consider that insignificant.
>My record for best MPG over a full tank of gas was 53.1MPG.
How nice for you. However pure gas engine Jettas, which weigh 50% more than your car, and have much more horsepower, have gotten 69 MPG, which is therefore a counterexample.
If you wish to answer in the lanuage of physics and thermodynamics, I'm all for continuing this discussion. But that apparently is not your forte, believing in sales pitches is. Go ahead and be a fanboy for your sled. Some of us are more reality-based. Remember: 1.5 Kilowatt hours of battery, diluted to 50% by your very words, is one horsepower-hour. No way around that.
Another fact: You've obviously never been in a Prius. Or paid attention if you were. You're an armchair expert - I actually own one, so I'd say I'm in a better position to tell the world what this car does do, and what it doesn't do.
On a long highway trip sometimes the car will coast down inclines, charging the battery the whole way. More unassailable physics. Mine is called "gravitational potential energy". Yours is called "pulling numbers out of your ass".
Hmmm... let's see who's the butt-puller here. Here's some facts;
We are talking about a coast-to-coast race. The coasts are very near sea level. The amount of ups very closely equals the amount of downs.
If there were more downs than ups, you would be right, a generator/battery/motor setup would be very beneficial.
But in this real world, is we assume the typical 90%/80%/90% efficiencies, the system only has a 65% efficiency, and that's assuming you're going down with no friction or air resistance.
If we assume you, like any rational being, would want to go downhill at freeway speeds, that's about another 50% off. So for every 100 feet of drop you can only climb 32.5 feet back up on the battry power. And you can only store 0.75KW-hour, so any drops longer than about 3 miles, the power has no place to go. The contiental divide is about 100 times that long, so the Prius battery can only help to the extent of about 0.325% Not significant, and certainly smaller than the cost of carrying that extra weight.
>The car also runs the engine at the RPMs that allow for peak efficiency as often as possible. Any excess torque generated is sent - you guessed it - back through the electric motor to the batteries where it is stored until you need it.
Peak efficiency of a gasoline engine is at low to medium RPM. That part of the envelope is very small in the tiny engine in the Prius.
It's a losing game in all cases to take "excess torque" (no such thing) and store it at 65% efficiency. You're way ahead by just not burning the gas, so you can use it later at 100%.
>This is how I know you're full of BS. What you state is simply untrue. I can hop in my car right now, get on the freeway, and watch the electric motor add torque to the drive train. What you are telling me with statements like this: ...is that you've never even been in a Prius. The battery never runs down. The control system charges it heavily around 50-60% for reasons of efficiency and battery life. It never gets lower than that. Not once in the 2.5 years I've owned mine. Ever.
"Once the battery runs down it's all dead weight."
So you're saying you're carrying a lot of weight that can only be used down to 50%. That sounds like a drawback.
>And if the battery charges up into the green (90-100%) and you're on the freeway, sometimes on a straightaway on the freeway the gas engine will turn off, and those "useless at freeway speeds" electric components will kick in and move you silently down the road.
Let's try some facts, shall we? The Prius has a 1.5KW-hour battery, which you admit can only be half used. On the highway it might need 10 horsepower to run. That's about 7.5KW.
So 7.5KW of draw on a 0.75KW-H battery is.... a tenth of an hour, tops. Six minutes. And we were talking about a coast-to-coast trip.
Even then, for those six minutes, you're using power that you burned 1/0.65 times as much gas for. An expensive way to move.
>The embedded system on this car is brilliant. If it senses you're about to waste charge by having the battery at 100%, it'll start to lean harder on the battery.
Nonsense again. The charge/discharge path is only 65% efficient. It never makes sense to go through that path, except in the rare cases when you need the extra acceleration
or you're putting along in stop-and-go traffic.
>And if you doubt me, go make a friend with a Prius. Dial up the Energy screen and watch what the car is doing on the drive train.
You can watch the system movi
Sarcasm works well on AOL, here maybe be a little bit more factual?
Fact: On a long highway trip the batteries and motor/generator are worse than useless. Once the battery runs down it's all dead weight. No, recharging it from the gas engine is a losing proposition. The generator/battery/motor system is only like 65% efficient. Every unit of energy you send to the battery is a unit you're not sending to the wheels, and you can only get 65% as much back later. It has nothing to do with the relative smarts of me vs. Toyota, it's basic unassailable physics.
>The electric motor in my Prius works at all speeds.
Well, that would be crazy.
> If I take my foot off the gas at 65mph the car coasts and the motor runs in reverse as a generator and charges the batteries.
No, when you take your foot of the gas, you are not asking for *braking*, you're asking to coast.
> If I lightly rest my foot on the gas the gasoline motor stays off and the electric has enough torque to maintain speed.
Nonsense. We are discussing a cross-country trip on highways, not 30MPH backstreets. A Prius can neither go 55 on electric only, not go cross-country on electric. On any significant trip, the electrics are doing nothing for you but weighing you down.
>genrator / battery are being used in one way or another almost all the time. If they were just useless weight, a Prius would get mileage similar to a typical gas car.
Nonsense. The efficiency of the generator to battery to electric motor is no better than 65%. Any energy you pass though this chain is a net loss.
There is no way to come out ahead, or even break even, when running the car on the highway.
Where you get the benefit is at times when you need just a teensy bit of power, like in slow city driving, or need a short boost, like when merging onto the highway. Any other time the electric stuff is just dead weight.
And why did they choose a Prius? Do they plan to go across the USA on city streets?
Most folks would take a highway, where the electric motor and battery do not get used at all-- they're just useless weight.
Missing the point.
NASA execs used to claim the chances of a bad Shuttle accident were 1 in 10,000.
That's obviously crazy-- you'd have to shoot one up every day for 30 years to get even an unreliable estimate of that level of risk.
Feynman asked around, and the actual engineers estimated 1 in 100 to 1 in 200.
So a better question is, do the astronauts have a right to hear the CORRECT figures, not the wild wishful-thinking executive estimates?
I looked at those references. They are virtually information-free. The first one is from the researchers saying everything is swell.
The second one refers to a software simulation of the core. Whoopee.
What I get from those refs is that this is a very small experimental reactor. Not something that is ready for scaling up to usable (50x) size in prime-time.
Durrrr yourself.
Yes, I'm beginning to think this guy might just be clueless about volts, amps, and power. Many folks have thought their body was generating high voltage just because when you touch a voltmeter probe, it may indicate many dozens of volts AC.
> polarizing the hair.
Blow on it a little?
Seriously, most digital voltmeters on their lowest range have an input resistance of like 10^10 ohms.
It does not take much current to indicate copious volts on a meter.
>Someone pointed out above that melanin is actually a known semi-conductor.
Yes, and someone also said that saw palmetto cures cancer.
Just because something is a semiconductor does not mean it's like, a *semiconductor*. Horse droppings are a semiconductor.
Your typical usable-for-electronics semiconductor has an impurity level of like one part per billion. It ceases to be interesting if the impurity level get much higher than this.
Please posit how this kid has purified melanin to one part per billion, then doped it with the right miniscule proportion of carriers.
Then we can talk about semiconductors.
Quantitatively, hair is a very good insulator. Like many megohms per square cm. Your typical semiconductor is like ten million times better aconductor.
This is really ridiculous.
The pictures show a few strands of hair. A few questions come to mind:
(1) Hair is not conductive. How can hair produce electricity if it can't conduct electrons worth a darn?
(2) Hair is not polarized-- it's the same all the way through and throughout its length. How can there be any potential difference set up across something uniform?
(3) The amount of hair shown captures maybe 0.1 cm^2 of sunlight. Even if it had 100% efficiency, that would only be 1/100th of one watt. How could it be lighting up a 5-watt fluorescent lamp with that?
Everything about this story sounds major-league bogus.
>Well, in addition to the Chinese HTR-10, which they are now selling around the third world in mass production,...
Whoa there fella, a quick Google does not show any info on sales. The only reference I see is on militarysales.org where it says it's being sold for uses OTHER than energy production. You figure it out.
A 10MW reactor is like 10 times smaller than anything economical, so the buyers are not buying them to save money on electric power.
> South Africa is gearing up production [nuclearstreet.com]-
Whoa again big fella. The references I see say they've just starred building a prototype. That's a long way from a working, proven design, much less something one should be exporting to Timbuktu.
It was a VERY low power reactor, like 30 times smaller than anything useful. And experimental reactors do not count, as they're typically instrumented up the wazoo and built with huge safety factors that are uneconomical in actual production. Plus they're manned by the designers and people trained by the designers. It's not a realistic situation.
And the successor to that one, mentioned in the very next paragraph of the Wikipedia entry, was a huge flop.
>Please point to a single working pebble bed reactor.
>Okay, how about this [wikipedia.org] one, based on the "failed" design you mentioned earlier... Details here. [wired.com]
You get your information from Wikipedia and Wired?
FYI: Under the best of circumstances those are less than reliable sources. And the Wikipedia article refers to a 2005 experimental reactor, and "plans" for a bigger startup in 2013.
And no need to put quotes around "failed", it failed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300
>Modern pebble-bed reactors include maintenance, decomissioning, and uranium as a part of the initial cost.
Please point to a single working pebble bed reactor.
The last one built by the Germans was a big flop.
It's ridiculous to try to compare things that have been around for 30 years with experimental concepts that have not made any progress in 20 years.
There's a reason nobody is investing in this great deal.
The interest on a $8B loan at 8% is about 1.8M per day.
The amount of power made is about that much, at the wholesale rate of .10/KWH
And that's not counting the cost of uranium, labor, maintenance, decomissioning, or insurance .....
Not to mention that it takes many years to build one, with the 1.8M accruing each day.
You're depending on Wikipedia?
Well, they happen to be right on this one. And what they say does not jibe with what you're claiming. Are you confusing Megahertz and GigaHertz?
An accuracy of 1mm out of 24 feet is an angular accuracy of 0.045 degrees. A $20,000 Agilent network analyzer only has an accuracy of about 1 degree. I think you dropped a decimal point three or four places.
You have problems. If you're not a RF expert, how did you figure out what frequencies you can transmit on, and at what power levels?
By accuracy to 1mm I assume you mean that's the best relative motion you can detect-- you'd need really short microwave frequencies to detect that much absolute motion.
How do you know this hasn't been patented like 50 years ago? There are only so many ways to emit continuous or pulsed RF and measure distance-- you're either going
to measure intensity or phase or both, at one ot two or three sites, and those concepts were likely patented around 1930.
This does not make any sense to me. A coal plant has scads of waste heat at high enough temperatures to preheat any amount of water. Exactly where does solar heat fit into this picture? It seems like an expensive way to heat water and as a consequence, let more hot coal gas get away.
Isn't this the way the Roman Empire fell? Lots of partying while the barbarians were pounding on the gates. Gates?
Not to worry. Nobody else does.
In the very unlikely event it happens:
If you do get challenged, all you have to do is know how to play the game.
There are probably a dozen ways to invalidate any patent. Prior art. Usage in interstate commerce
more than a year before patenting. Obviousness. Uselessness.
Just have your lawyer send their lawyer a letter stating that you've looked over their patent and there are 343 possible grounds for challenging the validity of their patent, so how's about we just "cross-license" our "intellectual property" and fugeddaboutit?
>Even ENIAC was a Turing machine and so could run anything ....
Anything that has a conditional skip and subtract and some memory is Turing-capable.
The original ENIAC was only slightly better than this. And yes it could do "anything", for very limited values of "anything", as it only had like twenty ten-digit accumulators for memory and plug-wired-only programs.