Conspiracy to delay the Electric Car?

SUre SNGX. I'd love to know the ins and outs of Biodiesel as it happens. I might even start running my car on it if I can.

It's also worth noting, further to SNGX's comments, that current petrol engines are incredibly inefficient anyway. I'm not sure if that's a cost cutting thing or a technology thing (I suspect the former).

Ya let's hear it. I've never even heard of Biodiesel. Guess I'll have to look it up some time.

Where is the car that runs off ones own body heat? lol

The one third efficiency of ethanol is from *expert*

We can agree to disagree about this 1/3rd value. I only quote from a supposed expert and I admit experts have often been proven slightly off target.

Interesting debate though and the solar cell bottleneck has something to do with silicone purification or concentration. Once that is ironed out, panels will be 10x more efficient and a fraction of current prices.

100 years ago this same transition happened with glass production.

Just recently computer memory was in short supply and now it is as cheap as dirt.

There are several other things that have become amazingly cheap as of late and you can find dozens of different items like perfectly good electric watches, calculators, am fm radios ad infinitum at the local One Dollar Store.

When hydrogen is combined in the cumbustion chamber with petrol it allows all the hydrocarbons to burn, raising gas efficiency from the physics limit of 37% to an actual 97 -98% level. The exhaust changes from a dumping of carbons and monoxide to a very clean limit of lost carbons and droplets of water.

Hydrogen will most likely come into common use as an injected supplement to gas engines , extending milages threefold or so.

This stuff comes from University of British Columbia sources and must be taken as anecdotal until I can get concrete links. It*s been months since I read up on this stuff. TG

Spike, Ethanol in Brazil? Western Canada also.

The two gas reailers selling the Gas / ethanol mix in Western Canada provinces are the Mohawk and the Huskey chains.

Same price as regular gas but with a little lower octane. There is no noticable performance difference. Maybe on a dynometer.

Sold as an ethol - gas mix in Brazil too, is it? TG

I just found out "who killed the electric car" was a movie. lol

So that's where this came from. Where is my electric motorcycle? Surely...

Did any of you see something on TV recently about some inventor that has made himself an electric motorcycle?? Seems like it was some kind of hybrid engine, I cant remember exactly.

I don't have TV, couldn't say. Just seems to me because a basic motorcycle or even scooter which is worthy of the hiway, can be small and light and only carry one person, that it shouldn't be to hard to get enough power to drive it electrically.


[off topic]
It's funny, I just saw a guy who attached some kind of simple motor, maybe a weed wacker or something, onto an "arm" on the back of a regular bicycle. So he can ride the bike as normal, but if he starts the motor, he just reaches back and lowers the motor (because it's on an arm with a handle), and the motor simply touches the rear tire, turning it for him. No chain or belt drive or whatever, just touches the spinning part of the motor down onto the tire itself, and makes it turn. It was kinda cool, and funny.
[end off topic]

You are right, it seems like the power to weight ratio would be lower on some type of scooter or small motorcycle. Looks like it would be easier to make some type...if nothing else some type of hybrid. The cops at the Atlanta airport ride the little 2 wheel jobs with the centrifugal wheels....I cant for the life of me remember the name of them. But I heard they will go around 35 MPH. And run for several hours. But even with their batter technology, they are still way out of the price range for the average person to utilize as a practical means of transportation.

Ethanol is a joke. The pollution made to produce it is as great if not greater than burning the same volume of gasoline in your car.

Last thing,
About:http://tonyguitar.blogspot.com/2006/06/laser-toner-savings.html#links
In my HP LaserJet IIP's(1989) manual, they tell you to do this in the troubleshooting section on the manual.

Not with batteries.

Well, a lot of prototype of electric cars were actually more powerful and efficient than gas cars.

One was developed in Quebec in the '90s but the project stopped because of money problems.
http://www.crest.org/discussion/ev/200001/msg00612.html <- The guy describes the report here.
Other info :
http://storageforum.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=24932#24932

They seem to come up with other cars with different technology tho. http://ww.tm4.com/

I'll try to get some videos of it.

Very good read. The motor wheel sounds like the bomb.

I SO wish I could adapt a basic motor wheel to the rear of my bicycle! It obviously would need very very little horsepower and a low top-end speed. I would think a fairly small battery and relatively little addition to the rear wheel would be suficient. Then then the motion of the turning wheel could, in turn, generate power to recharge the battery again, thus self-sustaining itself and requiring very little "recharge" time at home. Theoretically, if you were continually riding, it would continually charge and never run out of juice!

Dude, I so wish I was an engineer. lol

Actually, it seems like they re-started working on it, but instead modified the motor-wheel into a single motor for all 4 wheels instead of one per wheel. The only thing is that the car demo that is using this is pretty SMART-like. (Small)

The actual report I saw isn't available online, but other reports using some small parts of it are. If you want to watch two 12 minutes 160x120 clips in French I can give you the links (To see the 10 years old car for a few seconds) I think I might as well record them and just give the interesting parts)

In fact, Hydro-Quebec / TM4 didn't invent the motor wheel but modified it to make it efficient at low power (Because the original motor-wheel apparently was only efficient using high-power)

Any electrical motor can do this. The only problem is that it can only be used for breaking. (You will need to go very fast to be able to still go forward while plugging the motor backwards)

In the video you see the wheel switching from forward to reverse about 5 times in 2-3 seconds.

Would you really need the SAME motor for this? What if you just added a secondary system? A small alternator-type device to use the motion of the wheel. So the motor wouldn't have to turn backwards, it just does its thing independant of this other system used for recharging.

Or is that no good?

Well, an alternator IS actually a motor running backwards. When you turn a motor the other way than the one it's running with no load, instead of using power, it's making some. In fact, alternators work because I forgot that you could just use a pair of diodes(Allows current to go one side, but not the other) to prevent the motor to run backwards. (But the load you put on it will make it harder to run. The more power you use, the harder it will be to turn.)

Who said anything about breaking? lol

I don't have much knowledge of electro-mechanical systems, but it doesn't make sense to me yet. I understand, going from electro to mech back to electro. But it seems like the process of charging the battery wouldn't "use" much energy. A little, but not much.
You remember flashlights where you pump the handle to charge it up? Or shortwave radios with a turn handle? Or kids toy guns where you pump the handle and it lights up and makes noise?
Seems to me, that same kinetic energy can be used from a spinning wheel, without hurting it's normal use. In other words, it isn't like, one motor pushing the wheel, and another equal motor running backwards with equal force. I'm not talking about two central shafts running in opposite directions on the same wheel.

Maybe my logic is screwey, probably is. But seems to me, you've got the primary drive motor connected to the shaft of the wheel, the axle, say. And the battery supplies the power. Now lets say, somewhere else against the wheel, like just inside the rims for example, where the breaks are on a bicycle, there is a small gear which turns when the wheel turns. The faster the wheel spins, the faster this little wheel spins. The small wheel is not putting enough pressure against the main wheel to make a significant hurt of performance. But anyhoo, the small wheel is connected to some kind of system which generates current which flows back to the battery.

Make sense? Of course not, I don't know what I'm talking about. But I think you know what I mean. Is that possible? Or is the power generated by such a small thing not enough to charge such a battery? Would the energy used to move the wheel, HAVE to be equal to the energy needed to recharge? So it would take just as much torque for the "charging" unit to charge, as it does torque to move it?

I guess what it boils down to is, is there any self-sustaining system by which it can use its generated power both to do work, AND regenerate itself wholly? Where, once the process is started, it can run indefinitely?
Kinda like those little silver ball things you see on desks, when you start the outter ball swinging, which transfers energy between the balls to the other side, then that other side ball swings out and comes back, hitting the others and reversing direction. It just keeps going without running out of energy.

Ok I'll shutup now.

Forget about diodes, I told anything.

Well, you understand somewhat, it's just that the most power you pull out of the motor, the harder it's going to be to turn. Say you take a wind generator : If you put no load(infinite resistance), it could run too fast and break. If you put a small load(high resistance), it's going to be harder to turn, because current is returning just a bit in the motor (Putting a bit of force the other way than the one it's turning). If you put a big load(low resistance), it's even harder to turn because a lot of current returns in the motor. If you short both leads of the motor(no resistance), it will just stop turning because the current that is sent out it is going in again. The magnetic fields are cancelling each others. The more current you pull out, the slower it will turn (lower resistance).

So, batteries are a "negative" load, but have a current limit they can deliver and that's why you can pull the motor the other way than the batteries are trying to do. When you do this, the current won't come out of the batteries but goes in instead.

If a car alternator would be connected directly to a couple of full batteries without a regulator, I think the engine would have an hard time. (Why powering defrost is slowing down an engine : Pulls more current, alternator harder to turn, engine goes slower) But the alternator works because it has a regulator and then it's output is limited. Small cranking radios and the like use much less power than the motor can deliver and that's why they're so easy to work with.

Noticed how much strength you need to turn a crank generator? There's a resistance in there. It would slow down your bike to recharge the batteries. That's why chargers are there. They limit the current. Going down an hill with your bike or breaking could be used to recharge batteries.(They would slow you down)

The faster you charge something with a generator, the more mechanical energy you need.

I figured that would be the case.

Then we can leave it up to the future. Think big! A self-sustaining energy source. wow.

Harvard? Berkeley? NASA?

Looks like this is right up our topic alley. Got an invite so am inviting you as well. Did the publisher or Tom Standage learn of our need for the Electric car?

Economist.com invites you to attend an editorial event on
Tuesday, June 27th at 9 a.m. PST/12:00 p.m. EST,
featuring
Economist Technology Quarterly Editor, Tom Standage, as he discusses
critical developments in the field of automobile hybridisation.

By attending this webcast, you can learn how hybrid "hackers" are
accessing the control software of hybrid petrol-electric cars such as
the Toyota Prius, effectively converting these hybrid cars to plug-in
cars capable of traveling longer distances in all-electric mode
post-conversion, improving the car's fuel economy, and reducing
greenhouse gas production in the process.

To learn more about how these hacked hybrids are influencing
everything from lithium-ion battery technology, to big car
manufacturers and America's power utilities, click here:

http://news.economist.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eqPi0KfPTK0Mo0DDZL0EZ
===============

Never had much knowledge about the elecric car, but in this discussion I have learned more than I bargained for and it*s very inspiring. We are really closer to silent clean wheeles than first imagined. TechSpot is da SPOT. TG

I thought I'd post a collection of links on the evolution of water/hydrogen/browns engines. One in particular is posted by a conspiracy theorist (noted by the statement "free energy") but the video itself looks fine......

http://www.keelynet.com/energy/garrett.htm - earliest known patent for water fuelled motor vehicle)

...onwards to more modern "back yard science"...

http://members.tripod.com/~anon99/water_engine/index2.html

http://www.spiritofmaat.com/archive/watercar/h20car2.htm ( - Was slow on my computer to load. Maybe just my ISP?)

http://media.putfile.com/Water-Fuel

http://www.veoh.com/videoDetails.html?v=e63521sqC4TXQ6 ( - Still watching this video. The movie is interesting but the distribution sucks.)