What do you think we will be using to power transport in the near future?

I think that electric vehicles, charged using off peak electricity or electricity derived from environmentally friendly means, will be what we use when battery technology reaches a state that we can drive 500 - 1000 km inbetween charges.

In the shorter term I expect that biofuels, hybrid, lpg and fuel cell vehicles will reduce our dependance on oil.
_________________
So even the rain that falls isn't actually going to fill our dams and our river systems

As a kid, I remember seeing "Towards 2000" on t.v.
Over the years this program was on, several fuel sources and motors/engines were featured that would 'change vehicles in the future'.
The engine that really stuck in my mind was one that runs on straight-up, non-processed sea water. Besides some vapour out the exhaust pipe, the motors by-product was drinkable water.

Unfortunately, most of these engines (and patents - of course) were bought-out by the "Texaco" petroleum corporation.....

When the planet is finally out of fossil fuels, we might see some of them dusted off and put into production.....

In the meantime, maybe I should get over my dislike of horses - as the old horse/cart bit is starting to look affordable
_________________
There is no such thing as excessive carnage.

so how exactly did this engine extract power from the seawater?

Did I mention that ws nearly 25 years ago????

Vaguely remember something about hydrogen seperation from the water....
unsure.
_________________
There is no such thing as excessive carnage.

hehe, fair enough, I am just also sceptical of anyhting that seems to need more enegery in that it puts out...

a friend of mine spent a fair bit of time tinkering around with one of those hydrogen-from-water cells..

Of course, its easy to split water (H2O) into Hydrogen and Oxygen with sufficient electrical power to cause electrolysis, the problem is, the amount of electricity used is more than you get back by recombining the hydrogen and oxygen again.

Most of the fuel-from-water patents seem to be based on the idea that pulsing electrical power into the water molecules at the right frequency can induce some kind of resonance that will cause breaking of the molecular hydro/oxy bonds with less effort, allowing there to be a net return when they're recombined.

I checked with some chemists and they reckon its B.S... The amount of energy required to break the bonds remains the same whether its done in one big push, or lots of little ones (like little pushes gradually making a swing go higher - but the energy input remains the same, its just done a bit at a time)

Then they started fiddling with Lasers and secondary magnetic tuning coils and phase-lock-loops and all sorts of band-aids to "optimise the electron ring configuration to be receptive to the resonant pulses", at which point it all started sounding a bit too mumbo-jumbo-ish for my liking and I left them to it. Adding additional power-consuming systems is only moving their goal of over-unity energy gain further off..

Attempting to make a car powered by one of these devices (which is what they all try to do) is just plain stupid as well.. A engine is a highly variable-load situation, so the water-converter needs to constantly be fiddled with to adjust its output to match the engines demmand. Look at the complexity of a carburettor or a fuel injection system that is required to adjust the supply of the fuel to suit the engines demmand. Trying to tune a water-convertor on the fly would be like trying to adjust the pressure in your tires while driving..

As I pointed out to my friend.. all you have to achieve is to produce a certain amount of hydrogen from water with less kilowatts of electrical energy used than the return from recombination would provide and you're laughing. The engine delivery system can come later. Simply filling up a tank of hydrogen for 10c worth of electricity doesnt seem appeal to their mindset as much as a water-powered-car does though.. not sexy enough I suppose..

I think the oil-producers are cutting their own throats with the current fuel prices though.. they're just causing everyone to look harder for alternatives to them.. They obviously never read the goose that laid the golden eggs story..

Another friend of mine (conspiracy theory enthusiast though) suggested that its because they can tell a technical breakthrough isnt too far off now and they want to milk as much money as they can before they are made obsolete.

Look at how many industries have been turned upside down in the last 10 years. Film>Digital Cameras, Telephones>VOIP, Snail-Mail>E-Mail etc etc.

I know a fair bit of atomic theory, but am by no means an expert, yet I do have a vague feeling that there is an not understood interaction at the atomic level that is causing anomalous results that crop up in fringe science from time to time, like cold-fusion and the fuel-from-water guys..

If we can find a set of conditions or a catalyst that can ease the seperation of hydrogen and oxygen, then fuel literally falls from the sky every day, but noone seems to have managed to turn the trick yet..

One possible solution to me looks like orbital solar power stations creating a highly focussed beam of microwave power to a ground collecting station that then uses that to electrolyse water into hydrogen and oxygen. Or even just to boil water to make steam to power our current turbine alternators.

Using electricity instead of petrol to move vehicles makes no sense long-term while the electricity is still being made by burning coal or uranium.. your just moving the pollution somewhere else.. we need an renewable clean source of electricity first.

Hopefully its not too far off..
_________________
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people

Andrew had his lawn mower running on Hydrogen at once stage. He mounted an alternator onto the motor and used the power to generate electricity to break the hydrogen/oxygen bonds to fuel the motor on hydrogen. Problem was the little 4HP motor was fully loaded with the alternator and wouldn't last too long.

Andrew had some other ideas about converting a car. He was talking about starting the car on petrol and using a turbo to drive an alternator at higher speeds to generate a higher voltage. He was also looking at using the exhaust to turn the water into steam and then put the voltage through steam to produce hydrogen. I think the idea was that it would use less power to break the hydrogen/oxygen bonds when they are in the gasious form of steam then as the liquid form of water.

Having just read Nick's post about them using salt water (sea water), IIRC salt water has a lower boiling temperature then near pure water, which would make the process of electrolysis easier once it's turned into steam via Andrew's idea. The problems of salt buildup and rush is the next thing

An idea I had going back a few years ago was an idea of an orbiting space ring that rotate around the earth, energising charge coils on the space ring that would excite from rotating around the earths magnetic field. It's a far fetched idea, but I believe it would work, since if you swing a few km's of copper wire out in space you'll get a few volts back.

Another idea was that since half of Australia is litterally desert, we could just grow thousands of kilometers of wind farms....
_________________
https://www.halfdonethings.com/

quote:

---

Originally posted by Spockie-Tech:
Using electricity instead of petrol to move vehicles makes no sense long-term while the electricity is still being made by burning coal or uranium.. your just moving the pollution somewhere else.. we need an renewable clean source of electricity first.

Hopefully its not too far off..

---

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/050725/25tech.htm

http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/features/fex51230.htm

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/air-car2.htm


Three different links to keep the topic rolling.

> http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/050725/25tech.htm

Hydrogen fuel-cell powered car - nice, but where does the hydrogen come from ? Changing from one fossil fuel (petrol) to another renewable fuel (hydrogen) that is still made using non-renewable fuels (coal/uranium fired electricity) is just rearranging the deck chairs.

> http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/features/fex51230.htm

Standard periodical media wank - "inventor still struggling to get his water powered car accepted against the big bad oil companies" - how come none of these stories ever actually show the car driving, nor where the inventor can be reached by a beneficient millionaire ? If all it needed was money to make it work, millionaires who want to become billionaires would be falling over themselves to get in touch with the guy. Totally ignores the "how do you get more energy back from electrolysing water than you put in ?" question. I suspect these guys (if they exist) are just nutty tinkers who are the modern equivalent of alchemists looking for rich kings to throw money at a "lead into gold" research project.

>http://auto.howstuffworks.com/air-car2.htm

Again, a different way of storing energy (air/nitrogen) and using it to power a car.. again though, nothing about a "prime mover" source of energy. Refrigerating nitrogen and using it to power a car looks nice until you get the electricity bill for running your nitrogen refrigerator.

Anything that doesnt involve tapping a natural source of reasonably renewable energy (solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, plant-sourced (methanol/ethanol/biodiesel) is just hiding the problem - you cant live by consuming your capital for long.. you need *income*. Fossil Fuels are capital.
_________________
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people

i dont think that there are any "free lunches"
you cant make energy by running somehing around a loop.
ie water > H2 + 02 > water
you must have a net energy loss doing this. (typically going to heat where you don't want it)
i'd be happy to be proved wrong here but the universe has an "unwritten law" that goes something along the lines of "whatever is not forbidden is mandatory" if there was some way of an energy loop like that existing it would be being used somewhere or we'd be able to detect it somehow (by the ocean exploding periodically or some such)

theres no point using hydrogen at the moment, currently its all made from crude oil and it takes 4x the amount of energy to make it than you would get just burning the oil in the first place.

Solar power sats are cool but there are some pretty big problems involved in doing it (not to mention the environmental impact of launching the many tens of thousands of rockets you need to do it. If you got a coupla billion $$$ sitting around spare though i know some people who can set it up, and outback Aus is a pretty good place for the recieving antenna ;->)

the only solutions i can see that allow for continued growth are nuclear. Fission if designed from the ground up can be made to have a net energy gain and a reduction in radiation (ie you take radioactive stuff out of the ground, then put less radioactive stuff back in it) but you do wind up with plutonium reactors then and people get very narky about terrorists then. (it being a handy thing to make bombs with) but if you have your nuke plant, reprocessor and accelerator all in the one facility well your set. Good for Aus specifically to because we have something like 70% of the worlds known uranium.

Fission power is the "way of the future" as I see it. either lunar H3 or duterium from water as the feed stock (though i personally would like to see H-H fusion, pour cup of water in (add salt to taste) get stupidy large assloads of energy out) ITER in france is starting to get there but the projected time frame of 50-80 years before the first commercial plants is just stupid. We need fusion *now* and its worth blowing big money on.
I'm not saying that fringe science is wrong, but i dont see there being any free lunches.

best alternate energy sources
direct mass > energy conversion. one drop of fuel is enough to run your average car for several hundred years.

Zero Point Energy, possibly the only "free lunch" in existance, but there dosent seem to be any way of generating usefull power from it.
_________________
Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets

hehe you need to watch more stargate, zero point energy for all!

Heres an idea from Mel.. "Why cant we capture Lightning Bolts ?"

Ignoring for a moment the technical/practical aspects of doing so, this is actually a very good idea. Lightning *is* a renewable source of energy generated by the rotation of the planet and atmospheric movements.

A huge source of practically inexhaustible angular momentum already converted into a convenient energy form (electricity) that we know how to work with, has no radiation, pollution or other side effects, and is going completely to waste zapping trees and buildings all over the place..

The first problem most people mention is "But you never know where it is going to strike !" - well, that problem has already been solved. read this.
http://www.esdjournal.com/articles/lightn.htm

Setup a plant somewhere that gets a lot of lightning storms, and we can easily unleash the power of a lighting bolt into a controlled area on demmand (well, when theres a storm around which should be often enough in some areas).

The hard part is *absorbing it*.

A bullet contains a respectable amount of kinetic energy that can move things, but if you want to push your bicycle down the milk bar, getting someone to fire a bullet at your back *isnt* a good way of getting the kinetic energy you want.. Its delievered a little bit too fast for your liking.

Likewise lighting. If we can just come up with the equivalent of a "lightning proof vest" that can absorb all those megawatts into a storage system that can then feed them back at a controlled rate we're home and hosed.

I hate to say it, but what we need is a "Flux Capacitor"..

OK, maybe it wont look like a tube full of glowing gas (although it might).

I wonder if anyone has done any studies on whether it would be theoreticaly possible and economically feasible to build a huge bank of leyden-jar style capacitors attached to a lightning rod, and then fire a laser beam rfom the rod up to the clouds, and suck up the electricity that comes zooming back down as you tap the clouds energy ?

It sounds silly, but it actually might just be feasible.. I cant think of any show stoppers off the top of my head. Remember, once you've built it once, it can keep absorbing "free" lightning bolts for ever.

Theres your source of potential free energy right under our noses..

Thoughts ?

Thanks to Mel for asking the question..
_________________
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people

One little theory I have is that global warming isn't all about greenhouse gases (and there are various theories about how all the evens itself out in the end).
What about all the heat we're generating all the time?

When we burn fossil fuels we're taking something that's just sitting there dormant, and we're releasing energy from it - generally in the form of heat.
The small amount that's converted into electricity ends up being heat as well in the end.

Every vehicle driving along leaves a trail of hotter air than what's in front of it, and every office building's air conditioning system is constantly blowing hot air out to keep the inside air cooler.

Almost all of this heat is coming from fossil fuels or nuclear power, which is all additional to the natural heat cycle of the earth.
Without the releasing of dormant chemical power the world's thermal energy is balanced between heat coming in from the sun and heat being radiated out into space.

Ground based solar and wind power stations are using energy which is already reaching the earth, or being transferred around - so really they're just transferring the heat to somewhere else as electrical power.

If we start putting solar power collectors in space though we're collecting energy that would not normally reach the earth, so extra heat is being pumped in.
Maybe the extra energy would be radiated out into space again, but maybe it won't, or maybe the extra greenhouse gases are really just helping to trap the extra energy and not allow it to escape as easily?
_________________
The Engine Whisperer - fixer of things

I'm sure I've seen someone's experiments on capturing lightning on the net somewhere.

I think the problem with it is that lightning bolts are an almost instantaneous thing, and there's no way of slowing them down.

In theory a tuned circuit of some kind could smooth the voltage spike out a bit, but all that does is convert some of it to wasted heat.

The other problem is that you need some sort of storage system that doesn't take any "effort" to charge up.

Capacitors, etc need current to push volts in to charge them up, and the faster you charge them the more current you need. For efficiency you need low impedance, so you're not wasting most of the power as heat, but that also increases the current that will be drawn from a given voltage source.

Basically I think the problem comes down to static electricity discharges not being compatible with any of the usual transmission or storage systems.
_________________
The Engine Whisperer - fixer of things