The electric is still more efficient according to studies done by tree huggers. It is probably more efficient to use gasoline according to a study done by auto manufacturers.
In reality, it is not exactly known. Some studies have come close to trying to calculate all the steps involved. One that I've read (i don't have the link) had many of the things to calculate. The only way we'll ever know is if we do a earth to car efficiency study. How much energy is expended pumping the oil or mining the coal? How much energy is spent transporting the oil/coal? How much energy is spent refining/generating the final fuel (petrol/electricity)? How much energy is lost transporting the fuel (tankers/transmission lines)? Finally how efficient is the vehicle at getting the available fuel to usable motion?
1) Electricity is almost always made with local coal/hydro/natural gas/sun/wind. Petrol has a large portion from countries that are unstable. Places I don't think the US should stick there long noses and risk my relatives going to war.
2) Generation of electricity has efficiencies based on economies of scale. Much of the really bad pollution is cleaned out. Power plants usually drop their output during the night to points that aren't as efficient. If timers, time of use meters, and other strategies are implemented, electric cars can recharge at night. This additional electric load can be used to keep the plants operating in their most efficient power range. IC engines don't have all those benefits of size. They need to be cheap and useful so some of the pollution is allowed. I think that the refining of oil to petrol is very efficient. They use many of the byproducts in other ways.
3) tankers on the road to transport fuel to the stations is hard on the roads, fairly dangerous, possible terrorist targets. Transmission lines are not lossless. I don't know the exact amount of power lost in the lines and the transformers. But it is fairly clean. Generating your own electricity from solar/wind/geothermal/hydro eliminates the losses in the lines since it doesn't have to go that far.
4) Pumping gas into your car is pretty efficient but the engine itself is very wasteful. So much heat is generated that cannot be used unless your in a cold climate and use the heater. Electric vehicles have inefficiencies from the battery charger (power factor/line losses), charging batteries produces some heat. Discharging batteries produces heat. The speed controller is generating heat and the motor is not 100% efficient (usually 80% - 95%). When stopped in traffic the electric vehicle produces no heat or anything. IC engines keep running even though they don't need too. Can you imagine all the fuel wasted sitting in rush hour traffic?
These are all factors to consider. Down sides of electric vehicles are generally the range and weight. But how often do you really need to travel over 60 miles non-stop? If you do then you shouldn't have an electric vehicle as your main source of transportation. I call electric vehicles a good second and third car. If used as a primary vehicle you should get friendly with your local auto rental for the longer trips that the EV can't make.
What really pisses me off is that more vehicles are hybrids. These would be a great help to the pollution problem. If every SUV, bus, car, minivan were hybrid. They still aren't ideal but they would be perfect as a primary vehicle with your second/third vehicle being all electric. Even better would be a plug in hybrid that could run all electric for short trips (store, work) and then when you need to go farther it can run in full hybrid mode.
70 HP is probably a high estimate probably around 40HP. Weight doesn't make as much difference at higher speeds (>60 km/hr) as pure wind drag. 500Ah is a very high estimate usually more like 50Ah. A couple changes and you have about 50 batteries at 60 lbs each is about 3000 lbs.
40 HP with 144V of batteries (12 12V batteries) is 210A continuously.
50 Ah is probably measured at 20-30 A draws. As the current goes up the Ah of the battery goes down. For example 100Ah battery is rated using 20A for 5 hours but it would probably only measure 90Ah at 100A. The higher the current the lower the capacity of the battery.
Assuming 50Ah batteries at 200A would actually last the full 15 minutes they would still need to have 8 times as many batteries to pull 200 miles at 100 miles per hour. 12*8=96 batteries at 50lbs each is 4800 lbs. I'm pretty sure the DeLorean can't handle nearly 5000 lbs in batteries alone. I'll quit rambling now.
This is not completely true. Even if everybody burned coal completely in there power plants the efficiency would still be about 10% higher and be much cleaner because of economies of scale.
Engines that run on propane are amazingly wear free after 100,000 miles. Tear one down if it has always run on propane and you will likely still see the original honing marks on the side of the cylinder. It will be clean also. No nasty buildup in the cylinder.
The day the car drives off the lot the car is clean. How about 5 years down the road. The car is now not perfectly tuned and pollutes more. The power plant though is still adhereing to the regulations set by the govt. Those regulations may have gotten stricter and the power plant may very well be cleaner 5 years from when you bought your car.
An electric will 99% of the time be cleaner than a gasoline burning car (even SULEV).
This is no different than what is already available in Anechoic and SemiAnechoic rooms for RF Immunity and Emissions all over the country. They've made tiles that do this already. TDK makes some. I have a chamber that does this right now. http://www.nceelabs.com
We don't want to run a different OS on the system. We just want to introduce the people to the available OSS software that will run on Windows while they still run their everyday programs (MSWord).
These wave power generators are basically using the side effects of the wind. The wind is usually what causes the waves except when they are caused by earthquakes. Why not just use wind power instead of letting (and losing) some of the energy go into waves? The more times the energy is converted the less energy you have when it is done.
I don't have the link right now, from an efficiency standpoint electric cars are marginally more efficient than internal combustion engines because of the line/distribution losses and conversion of energy from chemical to mechanical (generator) to electrical to chemical (batteries) to electrical to mechanical (electric motor). Electric cars are much cleaner though as far as toxic fumes are concerned.
$33/barrel is that with or without the incentives that the US Govt gives out with my tax dollars? How come Europe pays more than $4/gallon on gas? Where are you gonna find all that oil to keep the world running for the rest of eternity? I don't think we have that much oil.
Where do you get the idea that electric cars have efficiency problems? Compared to ICE cars the efficiency is great. The motor is usually more that 90% efficient. The big problem is energy density in batteries. FCs could be the solution to that.
In very rare cases the following happens:
The electric car is powered by solar and wind electricity. Then who cares about efficiency? Niether the car nor the generation produces pollutants.
How would converting our heating systems to electric be worse for the environment? Using geothermal heating (groundwater and closed loop heat pumps) is good for the environment. This gives us the oppurtunity to use pollution free alternatives (solar and wind and hydro) to heat and cool our homes. Again we have to ask if everything is pollution free, who cares what the efficiency is?
Pure attrition will convert most cars to the newer engines with better efficiency. The only cars 30 years from now that use engines from today will be few and far between. Restored autos and some extremely lucky cars with very high milage will be the only ones with engines similar to the engines available today. Engines today are really only designed to go 150,000 miles. At the average of 15,000 miles per year in the USA this is only ten years out that the engines are dead. So then the people won't have a choice but to shell out the cash and upgrade their existing car to a new higher efficiency model, whether that be electric, hybrid, or FC.
It's pretty amazing what you can do with the solar vehicles considering the truly poor energy density available even in a 1 meter x 3 meter area. The amount of energy it takes to move those vehicles is extremely small. For the high power stuff you need to go to Nedra.com or for the day to day usable electric cars, trikes, motorcycles, and bicycles check out EV Album. Many of these were hand built.
Hardware engineers are usually Electrical Engineers and have taken quite a few physics courses, especially if they want to go into this type of design. At the same time these people need to look into high frequency radar type classes so they can do all the impedance and transmission line calculations. When this stuff starts happening your program crashes. Not even Linux can overcome those type of obstacles.
On a side note. Even if AMD does really well and Intel eventually loses the majority of the market share on X86, Intel still wins because AMD has to pay Intel for the patent use on X86.
Trust me when I say you are not smarter than them.
I think that Transmeta is showing it code morphing technology off by doing this. In the end they will prolly make more money off of licensing the patents than they will of off the chips considering that the cost of everything keeps dropping.
I would like to see scorched Earth released to the open source world. I've contacted the current maintainer of it but he is reluctant to do it. There are a few clones of it in alpha right now but I don't find them to be what I want yet. Of course if I could program something more than a VCR or my TiVo I would pitch in.
The electric is still more efficient according to studies done by tree huggers. It is probably more efficient to use gasoline according to a study done by auto manufacturers.
In reality, it is not exactly known. Some studies have come close to trying to calculate all the steps involved. One that I've read (i don't have the link) had many of the things to calculate. The only way we'll ever know is if we do a earth to car efficiency study. How much energy is expended pumping the oil or mining the coal? How much energy is spent transporting the oil/coal? How much energy is spent refining/generating the final fuel (petrol/electricity)? How much energy is lost transporting the fuel (tankers/transmission lines)? Finally how efficient is the vehicle at getting the available fuel to usable motion?
1) Electricity is almost always made with local coal/hydro/natural gas/sun/wind. Petrol has a large portion from countries that are unstable. Places I don't think the US should stick there long noses and risk my relatives going to war.
2) Generation of electricity has efficiencies based on economies of scale. Much of the really bad pollution is cleaned out. Power plants usually drop their output during the night to points that aren't as efficient. If timers, time of use meters, and other strategies are implemented, electric cars can recharge at night. This additional electric load can be used to keep the plants operating in their most efficient power range. IC engines don't have all those benefits of size. They need to be cheap and useful so some of the pollution is allowed. I think that the refining of oil to petrol is very efficient. They use many of the byproducts in other ways.
3) tankers on the road to transport fuel to the stations is hard on the roads, fairly dangerous, possible terrorist targets. Transmission lines are not lossless. I don't know the exact amount of power lost in the lines and the transformers. But it is fairly clean. Generating your own electricity from solar/wind/geothermal/hydro eliminates the losses in the lines since it doesn't have to go that far.
4) Pumping gas into your car is pretty efficient but the engine itself is very wasteful. So much heat is generated that cannot be used unless your in a cold climate and use the heater. Electric vehicles have inefficiencies from the battery charger (power factor/line losses), charging batteries produces some heat. Discharging batteries produces heat. The speed controller is generating heat and the motor is not 100% efficient (usually 80% - 95%). When stopped in traffic the electric vehicle produces no heat or anything. IC engines keep running even though they don't need too. Can you imagine all the fuel wasted sitting in rush hour traffic?
These are all factors to consider. Down sides of electric vehicles are generally the range and weight. But how often do you really need to travel over 60 miles non-stop? If you do then you shouldn't have an electric vehicle as your main source of transportation. I call electric vehicles a good second and third car. If used as a primary vehicle you should get friendly with your local auto rental for the longer trips that the EV can't make.
What really pisses me off is that more vehicles are hybrids. These would be a great help to the pollution problem. If every SUV, bus, car, minivan were hybrid. They still aren't ideal but they would be perfect as a primary vehicle with your second/third vehicle being all electric. Even better would be a plug in hybrid that could run all electric for short trips (store, work) and then when you need to go farther it can run in full hybrid mode.
I'll quit rambling now.
I read somewhere that Lance Armstrong can produce 400 Watts continuously and peak at 2X to 3X that amount.
70 HP is probably a high estimate probably around 40HP. Weight doesn't make as much difference at higher speeds (>60 km/hr) as pure wind drag. 500Ah is a very high estimate usually more like 50Ah. A couple changes and you have about 50 batteries at 60 lbs each is about 3000 lbs.
40 HP with 144V of batteries (12 12V batteries) is 210A continuously.
50 Ah is probably measured at 20-30 A draws. As the current goes up the Ah of the battery goes down. For example 100Ah battery is rated using 20A for 5 hours but it would probably only measure 90Ah at 100A. The higher the current the lower the capacity of the battery.
Assuming 50Ah batteries at 200A would actually last the full 15 minutes they would still need to have 8 times as many batteries to pull 200 miles at 100 miles per hour. 12*8=96 batteries at 50lbs each is 4800 lbs. I'm pretty sure the DeLorean can't handle nearly 5000 lbs in batteries alone. I'll quit rambling now.
This is not completely true. Even if everybody burned coal completely in there power plants the efficiency would still be about 10% higher and be much cleaner because of economies of scale.
This talks about the conversion.
Engines that run on propane are amazingly wear free after 100,000 miles. Tear one down if it has always run on propane and you will likely still see the original honing marks on the side of the cylinder. It will be clean also. No nasty buildup in the cylinder.
The day the car drives off the lot the car is clean. How about 5 years down the road. The car is now not perfectly tuned and pollutes more. The power plant though is still adhereing to the regulations set by the govt. Those regulations may have gotten stricter and the power plant may very well be cleaner 5 years from when you bought your car.
An electric will 99% of the time be cleaner than a gasoline burning car (even SULEV).
Actually when the batteries get to a certain SOC the engine will run to charge the batteries.
You should mean Osborne. Tom Osborne is who we all like to vote for.
This also helps out the small farmer. A raise in corn prices is good for all farmers. Better the money go to a farmer versus a terrorist.
This is no different than what is already available in Anechoic and SemiAnechoic rooms for RF Immunity and Emissions all over the country. They've made tiles that do this already. TDK makes some. I have a chamber that does this right now. http://www.nceelabs.com
Get an usher to kick the person out for talking.
Some hospitals do because of RF Emissions and Immunity requirements not because you're not supposed to talk on them.
Since it is analog it is practically infinite.
... harmonics can influence the the perception/sound of the music.
For comparisons sake:
Highest frequency that can be heard is approx 20kHz.
The 3rd 4th 5th
We'll stop at the 5th harmonic of 20kHz at 100kHz.
Theory says we have to sample it at twice the frequency we want to capture to accurately reproduce it.
In this scenario, lossless would be 200k samples/sec.
For 16 bit sampling the data rate would be 200k * 16 = 3.2 M bit/sec.
That is for one channel.
But that doesn't matter because it is analog.
We don't want to run a different OS on the system. We just want to introduce the people to the available OSS software that will run on Windows while they still run their everyday programs (MSWord).
These wave power generators are basically using the side effects of the wind. The wind is usually what causes the waves except when they are caused by earthquakes. Why not just use wind power instead of letting (and losing) some of the energy go into waves? The more times the energy is converted the less energy you have when it is done.
I don't have the link right now, from an efficiency standpoint electric cars are marginally more efficient than internal combustion engines because of the line/distribution losses and conversion of energy from chemical to mechanical (generator) to electrical to chemical (batteries) to electrical to mechanical (electric motor). Electric cars are much cleaner though as far as toxic fumes are concerned.
$33/barrel is that with or without the incentives that the US Govt gives out with my tax dollars? How come Europe pays more than $4/gallon on gas? Where are you gonna find all that oil to keep the world running for the rest of eternity? I don't think we have that much oil.
Where do you get the idea that electric cars have efficiency problems? Compared to ICE cars the efficiency is great. The motor is usually more that 90% efficient. The big problem is energy density in batteries. FCs could be the solution to that.
In very rare cases the following happens:
The electric car is powered by solar and wind electricity. Then who cares about efficiency? Niether the car nor the generation produces pollutants.
How would converting our heating systems to electric be worse for the environment? Using geothermal heating (groundwater and closed loop heat pumps) is good for the environment. This gives us the oppurtunity to use pollution free alternatives (solar and wind and hydro) to heat and cool our homes. Again we have to ask if everything is pollution free, who cares what the efficiency is?
Pure attrition will convert most cars to the newer engines with better efficiency. The only cars 30 years from now that use engines from today will be few and far between. Restored autos and some extremely lucky cars with very high milage will be the only ones with engines similar to the engines available today. Engines today are really only designed to go 150,000 miles. At the average of 15,000 miles per year in the USA this is only ten years out that the engines are dead. So then the people won't have a choice but to shell out the cash and upgrade their existing car to a new higher efficiency model, whether that be electric, hybrid, or FC.
Doh! firewire 400 Mega bits/s
whassup with slashdot and this 2 minute posting rule?
I think the SCSI spec is 160 Mega Bytes /s while I know firewire is 160 Mega bits /s.
It's pretty amazing what you can do with the solar vehicles considering the truly poor energy density available even in a 1 meter x 3 meter area. The amount of energy it takes to move those vehicles is extremely small. For the high power stuff you need to go to Nedra.com or for the day to day usable electric cars, trikes, motorcycles, and bicycles check out EV Album. Many of these were hand built.
Hardware engineers are usually Electrical Engineers and have taken quite a few physics courses, especially if they want to go into this type of design. At the same time these people need to look into high frequency radar type classes so they can do all the impedance and transmission line calculations. When this stuff starts happening your program crashes. Not even Linux can overcome those type of obstacles.
On a side note. Even if AMD does really well and Intel eventually loses the majority of the market share on X86, Intel still wins because AMD has to pay Intel for the patent use on X86.
Trust me when I say you are not smarter than them.
this is another reason I like Nebraska . Link provided by Everything2.com. Isn't it a wonderful place?
I think that Transmeta is showing it code morphing technology off by doing this. In the end they will prolly make more money off of licensing the patents than they will of off the chips considering that the cost of everything keeps dropping.
I would like to see scorched Earth released to the open source world. I've contacted the current maintainer of it but he is reluctant to do it. There are a few clones of it in alpha right now but I don't find them to be what I want yet. Of course if I could program something more than a VCR or my TiVo I would pitch in.