The Alternative Energy Thread

sorry but hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have been available for ages. The Honda FCX Clarity was available since 2008.

hypercars have been too.

it's nice that they might combine the two, but for the hundred or so vehicles they might build, who cares?

I fart in the general direction of your physics!

Battery uses artificial vanilla.

Fusion Power in a decade? MIT seems to think maybe so. Story.

They're inspired by some of the new fission reactor designs coming out that go the smaller, faster, cheaper route. A conventional tokamak design but with new materials and better magnets. Interesting.

'Twould be awesome, but fusion's been a couple of decades away for quite a few decades now. We'll see.

I'll believe it when I see it. Seems that every few weeks now there is some story about a new project promising fusion power quicker than expected. Hopefully one or more of them pans out, but I also suspect we are just at the peak of the hype phase that fusion goes through every decade or two.

Cargo ships to run off of ammonia.

132 percent efficiency? It's got me beat I guess. When I was in basic training the drill sergeants would scream at us to "give 110 percent!" but I never could figure that out.

Alright, it's time to clean the engines! Crewman Redshirt, get the bleach!

That's evil.


But I lol'd just the same.

Oopsie.

told ya so.

interesting point! On a related note when I lived near Fairbanks Alaska in the coldest parts of the winter you had to plug your cars to outlets set up in parking areas to keep the special engine heaters going so your oil wouldn't gel up, and an interior heater so the seats wouldn't harden up and shatter when you sat on them. If somebody unplugs your car and you had to plug it back in, it would take about 1/2 hour before you could drive it again. What's really wild is after you car has been parked overnight when you drive it it feels like you have four flat tires for a minute or two. The parts of your tires that were contacting the ground are different than the rest of the tire and it feels like you have flats.

Thermal battery.

That's pretty cool.

what if you did this and integrate it with irrigation so there are sprinklers on the underside of the panel and it irrigates the plants beneath?

They did that. Every plot of land was irrigated so that they could be sure the plants all got the same level of moisture.

Dave Roberts shared this on Twitter and I have to say, pretty impressed, although stylistically I've always had issue with the "overcab" design in front but everyone likes VW vans, right?

So maybe it's just me...

This looks like it could be promising.

Look ma, no magnets!

Uh, it's a new type of magnet-free motor.

A/C mag-free motors have been around for more than 140 years.

Yeah, crazy that someone might think that an improvement to an existing technology is notable. Kinda silly to be all excited about electric cars that have improved battery life, since they’ve been around for over 100 years. What’s the big deal about smartphones? We’ve had phones for over a century! A new way to make vaccines? Who cares? Vaccination has been around since at least the 18th Century! Might as well go ahead and close the patent office down as everything’s already been invented.

I thought you were getting off on no permanent magnets.

DC motors with wound stators have been around forever too.

It's nice someone invented an improvement, but no big deal.

Here's more:

2.3. Induction machines
Although induction machines are very common in industrial automation, they are less frequently used in automotive traction applications. The key exception is the Tesla Motor Corporation who has reported the use of copper rotor cage induction machines in all of their electric vehicles. Tesla also licenced this technology to Toyota, who used it in the now discontinued RAV4 EV SUV [25], and subsequently Tesla have reportedly made all of their related patents licensable at zero cost [26

Source


Induction motors are magnet free.

That same source talks about the leaf's motor, a hybrid using only 2kg of magnetic material.

But thanks for making me think about it.

Gee, you think that if I believed it was something like a transformative breakthrough I'd have started a new thread to focus on it, instead of adding it to one dealing with alternative energy? I mean, granted, if we need more rare-earth materials we can just coup whoever we want, but it'd be kinda cool if we didn't have to do that. But hey, who cares, right?

Teslas don't use them.

While we're arguing about induction, can we talk about how much of an energy waste induction charging for cars would/will be?

And cell phones! Oh the humanity!

I want inductive road surfaces so I charge as I drive.

Depends upon one's definition of "rare earth." Cobalt and lithium, are commonly lumped into that category, even if not every definition includes them. (And, by some definitions "rare earth" means that it's hard for us to process them into useable materials, not that they're uncommon.) Regardless of what calls "rare earth" one should think that the idea of toppling a democratically elected government in favor of one that's willing to sell a nation's natural resources at a steep discount (while ignoring the environmental damage created by relatively unregulated mining in those nations) is a bad thing. Right? Or are you okay with paying people shit wages, in shit conditions, to extract minerals we want, so long as it's cheap for you to drive your Leaf?

We're talking permanent magnets, steamboy.