Biomass makes great fuel. 20 acres of poplars would make a commercial operation. You chip the wood into outdoor pits, and add high grade yeast and digest until you have about 13 percent alcohol. Then add a fluid called dodecanol. This turns to a white floating solid, absorbing all the burnable resins and alcohols. You skim and distill. The dodecanol recovers and the process repeats. It makes a good diesel engine or general fuel. Waste can be dried and used as fill of combusted in a co-gen operation.
Hydrogenization of fuels through steam reforming and usage in a fuel cell immediately is a major area of research. It yields less than straight hydrogen-electricity in efficiency, off to about 54%. But it is easily double that of an efficient diesel. And since it deals in small amounts of hydrogen at a time,it is very safe.
Really, hydrogen is NOT explosive. Only in a narrow range in the presence of air is it "explosive". As a bottled gas, it is safer than propane or methane. It will not explode if the tank is punctured by a projectile, unlike the other two, but will burn invisibly. In reality for the enormous amounts of free hydrogen aboard the Hindneburg, it was a very survivable accident. 26 people aboard lived. That is beause the flames went straight up, and did not hug the ground. This is a safety feature of the gas. It is, however, very volatile and it practically leaks through any ordinary seal. It will leak in a tank that will not leak heavy gases like propane. It can be stored in iron chips and this has been experimented with in public transport. It is a safe method, but the tank is heavy.
The best efficient motive power, is gas - gas-steam turbine-electric with some battery storage. A relatively small turbine turns all the time and charges a battery. For city driving the duty cycle is figured so that the battery is discharging half the time, and the rest of the time, it is being charged to fill the power usage anticipated. On free wheeling highway usage, the battery would deplete mandating periodic stops to bring the deep cycle batteries back to peak. The advantage would be that the turbine would be extremely efficient use of thermal power at constant speed, and the electric drive motors would only use the power demanded of them when moving. So there would be no idling or stop-start losses.
Amazinly the losses in stop start driving are not in acceleration and lugging, but slowing down and standing. The motor is MOST efficient when lugging and slow speed accelerating! Everything you have probably heard about engine efficiency is probably wrong. This was documented in tests conducted by an engineering firm in 1954 and reported on by Popular Mechanics. I read the original article several times. Several ordinary 4 cylinder sedans of that era where optimized in an engineering efficieny competition which allowed special driving techniques and mods. The main car mods were elimination of the flywheel, taking off the exhaust manfiold and pipes,( -- headers ask any stock car racer.. fastest way to gain horsepower) removing the cooling system, and all belts, advancing timing to backfire, removing weight, total loss oil bearings, 150 lb pressure in front tires, leaning carb, and driving in third gear.
The driving method was to start with the starter motor in 3rd gear, accelerate to 15 miles an hour, turn the engine off, and clutch in to coast back to walking speed.
On-off inefficient? Lugging inefficient? Accelerating inefficient? Wrong, buddy, dead, dead, wrong. Everything you have ever heard is wrong. Free wheeling at 60 is the worst form of gas wastage. Freewheeling of any sort wastes acres of gas, despite the constant speed of the engine! So did I contradict myself? No, the engine is most efficient at constant speed, but ONLY if it is under constant load!! (acceleration or generation qualifies as that) As soon as you start pushing wind and overcoming friction (bearing friction slowing you down) -- you are wasting gas.
So what was the winning mileage over our test track for the winning auto? Guess.. I dare you..
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Well it was 150 miles per gallon. I kid you not. Fact.
If you only have 1 gallon of gas and have to make that last 150 in the family flivver, do or die, phone me up and I will tell you how it can be done. Needs tools.
I believe I could make a car with a gas engine, and some extensive electric mods, get a real, all conditions, city and highway, about 55 miles per gallon. I am talking a family car here, not some mini scrap import. I am talking doing this with conventional heat and fuel-power balance and usage engineering, not air-fairy perpetual motion garbolation.. I know what the efficiencies of standing generation is. It is maximum 49%. (That right now acheivable today figure would triple a car's city mileage and double its highway mileage.) It is at best as practiced in industry in large scale, 38%. The Hearne Generating plant was about 38%, and some Jap plants are around that. (The problem with the large plants is heat rejection to a sufficiently cold resevoir, versus using the heat as it loses "value".) They stop using the heat when it falls below a certain temperature as their turbines are set at one heat-value operation range. So they go to one exhaust temperature to maintain speed of the turbines and blow the exhaust out high stacks. To go multi-stage and try to get more out of the heat at lower temperatures and pressures has not been tackled. Heat of rejection resevoir is the key to obtaining efficiency. Strange idea but true.
A diesel engine climbing a hill gets about 27% thermal efficiency. Most of that power goes into overcoming friction. Around town the efficiency goes down to about 15%. Compare this to the slow speed Stirling engine which uses freon and gets 70% efficiency.
So how do you overcome this inefficiency? Well use the motive power to just drive the wheels, and avoid weight and friction penalties. As well balance the power generation to usage with a resevoir. And use as much of the heat as possible to generate. This means a triple hybrid engine.
A strange fact that most people cannot handle is that the colder the country you operate in the more efficient your steam engine gets. I remember a layman type guy telling me that the cost of operation of steam engine in Northern Ontario was more because it of the cost of getting the steam up to heat in the winter was more. He didn't get it. We gained about 100 degrees of efficiency over a comparable engine operating in Texas. Huge.
We have NEVER engineered the automobile for efficiency. That is becaue the Car companies do not have to operate the vehicles they make in order to save money. They just make them for consumption. They don't buy the gas. We do.
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