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**JF Priest** · **JF Priest** Subscriber User ID: 47416 04-29-2012 08:19 PM **Posts: 23,872**

Sunny Wrote:

Oh please don't tell the rich soccer moms that drive those huge hybrid SUV's! What else are they going to drive up your ass and smirk at you because they think they are so much better than you.

**Luvapottamus**

LoP Guest Wrote:

Agonist Wrote:
LoP Guest Wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_brake

One on each tire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerati...k_absorber

Replace your 4 shock absorbers with one of these.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternator

One on each tire and one attached directly to the engine.

Add in solar collectors across the top of the car and possibly a pair of small wind turbines on the inside of the hood (generates electricity while moving as well as cooling your components) and do a bit of tweaking to maximize your charge capacity and you could probably eliminate the need to plug in your car.

The only thing that might allow you to never plug in would be the solar panels. Wind turbines create drag as well while moving and would introduce minimal power output and your solar panels would be unable to compensate fully for the power used to drive the vehicle. Eventually you would come to a halt regardless of what you do to the vehicle. So in your case, you might be able to replace plugging in your car with parking it and allowing the sun to recharge your car if the conditions are correct.

So you lose 5-10 mph off the top end speed and slow down your 0-60 speed rating by a second or two. You extend the range of the car by charging the battery continually while driving with the potential of not having to plug in after your done with your driving. If I had the money for the parts I'd put one together. I don't so I'm throwing the ideas to the winds to see if someone does.

I don't know how you'd replace your shock absorbers with an alternator.

Maybe you posted the wrong link. You could install a bunch of those shakem' up flashlights next to your shock absorbers, but the added weight ain't gonna help.

chuckle

**LoP Guest** lop guest User ID: 93512 04-29-2012 08:37 PM

Luvapottamus Wrote:

LoP Guest Wrote:
Agonist Wrote:
The only thing that might allow you to never plug in would be the solar panels. Wind turbines create drag as well while moving and would introduce minimal power output and your solar panels would be unable to compensate fully for the power used to drive the vehicle. Eventually you would come to a halt regardless of what you do to the vehicle. So in your case, you might be able to replace plugging in your car with parking it and allowing the sun to recharge your car if the conditions are correct.

So you lose 5-10 mph off the top end speed and slow down your 0-60 speed rating by a second or two. You extend the range of the car by charging the battery continually while driving with the potential of not having to plug in after your done with your driving. If I had the money for the parts I'd put one together. I don't so I'm throwing the ideas to the winds to see if someone does.

I don't know how you'd replace your shock absorbers with an alternator.

Maybe you posted the wrong link. You could install a bunch of those shakem' up flashlights next to your shock absorbers, but the added weight ain't gonna help.

Instead of just cushioning the ride it takes that 'event' if you will and uses it as an opportunity to generate more electricity.

I thought it was interesting.

**mstra** lop guest User ID: 93508 04-29-2012 09:16 PM

Luvapottamus Wrote:

mstra Wrote:
Luvapottamus Wrote:
It's been solved.

Not for cars though.

It's been solved for the grid.

http://lunaticoutpost.com/Topic-Donald-S...-Batteries

No, it hasn't, and I went to your link. Here is what I wrote above: Solve the problem of storing a quantity of electricity as electricity, change the world.

Batteries do NOT store electricity as electricity, they store it as chemical potential, like vinegar and baking soda, and they are huge, heavy, and full of toxic components.

Well now you're just being goofy.

You don't need to store electricity as electricity for the grid.

Regarding electric vehicles and solar panels,

those work pretty well now when the panels are on the roof of your garage.

Using conventional lead acid batteries, and a fiberglass porsche 550 spyder kit car, a dude in Mendocino county California came up with a satisfactory electric vehicle.

He only builds a few a year.

The EV-1 worked fine for most commuters.

**mstra** lop guest User ID: 93508 04-29-2012 09:44 PM

mstra Wrote:

Luvapottamus Wrote:
mstra Wrote:
No, it hasn't, and I went to your link. Here is what I wrote above: Solve the problem of storing a quantity of electricity as electricity, change the world.

Batteries do NOT store electricity as electricity, they store it as chemical potential, like vinegar and baking soda, and they are huge, heavy, and full of toxic components.

Well now you're just being goofy.

You don't need to store electricity as electricity for the grid.

Regarding electric vehicles and solar panels,

those work pretty well now when the panels are on the roof of your garage.

Using conventional lead acid batteries, and a fiberglass porsche 550 spyder kit car, a dude in Mendocino county California came up with a satisfactory electric vehicle.

He only builds a few a year.

The EV-1 worked fine for most commuters.

Try this again-

No, I'm not being "goofy". We are talking about storing enough electrical power to run a car, or a city. You want to talk about building chemical batteries the size of WalMarts to run the neighborhood appliances, fine. It's a piss poor answer.

This is not a new topic for me; I sent away for the patents for the Pogue carb when I was twenty. I lived off-grid for seventeen years with my own power generation and storage.

What the man said in the post that started this thread was that the 450 lb Lithium ion battery for the Volt, which costs thousands of dollars, stores less energy, fully charged, than is in a gallon of gasoline. That is a fat fact. And as long as the only way we have to store electricity is in huge heavy expensive chemical batteries that go bad regularly, storing electricity is pretty much useless for transportation.

Off the top of my head, here are some figures. 1 horsepower = 750 watts. Let's say you want a 100 hp vehicle, to be safe in tough driving conditions, or to haul a little cargo, not a golf cart. To run that motor for one hour would require 75000 watthours of electricity. At 25 volts DC, you would need 75000 / 25 = 3000 amp hours. A good sized lead acid backup battery holds 200 amp hours. 3000 / 200 = 15 full sized batteries to run that vehicle for one hour. Each battery weighs 130 to 150 lbs, so 2000 lbs of batteries to run a 100 hp vehicle for one hour. During which you might travel sixty miles with constantly decreasing power until the batteries are dead. I'll let you do the math of what sort of solar array it takes to output 75000 watts.

I'm not even talking about how to charge the batteries, though. I'm saying batteries, which haven't changed all that much since Ben Franklin flew his kite in the 1700s, are a stupidly inefficient way to store electricity, and until we do find a way to store electricity AS electricity, electric vehicles are not viable except as fancy golf carts that haul around more battery weight than they do cargo.

**AMPAMPERSAND**

mstra Wrote:

AMPAMPERSAND Wrote:
Agonist Wrote:
Not possible.

Most cars in America drive 20 -30 miles to work, sit for 8 hours then drive 20 -30 miles home, solar panels cannot recharge those batteries in 8 hours? about 70% of the top surface area of a parked car could hold or be made of solar panels, could it not? what is not possible? Maybe the oil companies don't want it to be possible?

This is the ignorance that the government counts on. You obviously have never studied even basic physics. If you wish to be taken seriously, learn something, starting with what a watt hour is. Then figure out how many watts the sun puts out per square meter, and how far that many watts, over say 8 hours, will push a 1500 lb vehicle. After 8 hours, if the whole roof was an efficient solar panel? Might make it around the block, if it was flat land.

Wow you're a pompous asshole! I asked a question, I never claimed to be Physicist, or an electrical engineer.....so f*ck off!

~~Aunt Flo~~ · **~~Aunt Flo~~** Banned User ID: 91955 04-29-2012 11:21 PM **Posts: 2,284**

I'm still waiting for the algae-burning Obamamobile.

Klrgjqkc

**Luvapottamus**

mstra Wrote:

Try this again-

No, I'm not being "goofy". We are talking about storing enough electrical power to run a car, or a city. You want to talk about building chemical batteries the size of WalMarts to run the neighborhood appliances, fine. It's a piss poor answer.

This is not a new topic for me; I sent away for the patents for the Pogue carb when I was twenty. I lived off-grid for seventeen years with my own power generation and storage.

What the man said in the post that started this thread was that the 450 lb Lithium ion battery for the Volt, which costs thousands of dollars, stores less energy, fully charged, than is in a gallon of gasoline. That is a fat fact. And as long as the only way we have to store electricity is in huge heavy expensive chemical batteries that go bad regularly, storing electricity is pretty much useless for transportation.

Off the top of my head, here are some figures. 1 horsepower = 750 watts. Let's say you want a 100 hp vehicle, to be safe in tough driving conditions, or to haul a little cargo, not a golf cart. To run that motor for one hour would require 75000 watthours of electricity. At 25 volts DC, you would need 75000 / 25 = 3000 amp hours. A good sized lead acid backup battery holds 200 amp hours. 3000 / 200 = 15 full sized batteries to run that vehicle for one hour. Each battery weighs 130 to 150 lbs, so 2000 lbs of batteries to run a 100 hp vehicle for one hour. During which you might travel sixty miles with constantly decreasing power until the batteries are dead. I'll let you do the math of what sort of solar array it takes to output 75000 watts.

I'm not even talking about how to charge the batteries, though. I'm saying batteries, which haven't changed all that much since Ben Franklin flew his kite in the 1700s, are a stupidly inefficient way to store electricity, and until we do find a way to store electricity AS electricity, electric vehicles are not viable except as fancy golf carts that haul around more battery weight than they do cargo.

How did that Pogue carb work out for ya?

Electricity really isn't electricity unless it's flowing.

We have capacitors, but they aren't really storing electricity as electricity. So I'm having a little trouble understanding what breakthrough you are saying we need.

**mstra** lop guest User ID: 93508 04-30-2012 08:01 AM

Luvapottamus Wrote:

mstra Wrote:
I'm not even talking about how to charge the batteries, though. I'm saying batteries, which haven't changed all that much since Ben Franklin flew his kite in the 1700s, are a stupidly inefficient way to store electricity, and until we do find a way to store electricity AS electricity, electric vehicles are not viable except as fancy golf carts that haul around more battery weight than they do cargo.

How did that Pogue carb work out for ya?

Electricity really isn't electricity unless it's flowing.

We have capacitors, but they aren't really storing electricity as electricity. So I'm having a little trouble understanding what breakthrough you are saying we need.

Didn't build the Pogue carb; studied it; it would work, just a preheat type vapor carb that probably wouldn't pass emissions because it would burn so lean there would be NO2 problems. Also no machine shop to play in. I did do some serious design work on a constant venturi carb where the airflow would always be hypersonic at all throttle openings, to increase vaporization and atomization of fuel into teeny bits. Didn't build that one either but I still think the design would work, maybe better than fuel injection.

"Electricity really isn't electricity unless it's flowing."

I don't want to argue semantics. What I'm saying is that presently we have batteries and we have dams with water behind them; that's what we have for storing potential energy for electric power, and neither of them are storing electrical charge/differential/potential. Well over a century after Tesla designed the Niagara Falls plant and 250 or so years after the Leyden jar. Not much progress.

Capacitors store even less, a lot less, though they do store an electrical potential difference. The PES site had some stuff up a couple years ago about a supposed capacitance "battery" that was made of microscopic granule type capacitors but I've heard no more about it. If it worked it was probably buried, but that's an angle worth pursuing.

Another is a superconducting toroid that in theory could take the output of Bonneville dam and keep it circulating in a coil maybe the size of a dining room table; the only ones we know about are cooled with liquid helium. but the room temp superconductors that were being worked on in the early 1980s could have made such a thing practical, but that research was buried too. That's the best I've come up with so far for storing electrical potential per se.

Another angle worth pursuing is the potential difference in the earth's atmosphere between ground and space, with the atmosphere as the insulator. That potential averages something like 300 volts per meter of altitude. Lightning is the natural method of partially equalizing it. If one were to generate a plasma conductor between the earth's surface and the upper atmosphere that could possibly be tapped. Matter of fact I suspect that was what Tesla was up to with the towers at Colorado Springs and Long Island; they weren't mainly about broadcasting power but about creating a conductor between upper and lower atmosphere potential. Which would be a source of unlimited free power, but not an answer for how to store it.

**mstra** lop guest User ID: 93508 04-30-2012 08:14 AM

AMPAMPERSAND Wrote:

mstra Wrote:
AMPAMPERSAND Wrote:
Most cars in America drive 20 -30 miles to work, sit for 8 hours then drive 20 -30 miles home, solar panels cannot recharge those batteries in 8 hours? about 70% of the top surface area of a parked car could hold or be made of solar panels, could it not? what is not possible? Maybe the oil companies don't want it to be possible?

This is the ignorance that the government counts on. You obviously have never studied even basic physics. If you wish to be taken seriously, learn something, starting with what a watt hour is. Then figure out how many watts the sun puts out per square meter, and how far that many watts, over say 8 hours, will push a 1500 lb vehicle. After 8 hours, if the whole roof was an efficient solar panel? Might make it around the block, if it was flat land.

Wow you're a pompous asshole! I asked a question, I never claimed to be Physicist, or an electrical engineer.....so f*ck off!

And maybe you should shut the f*ck up and learn something instead of displaying your ignorance. Nothing technical on this thread has gone beyond what you should have learned if you were paying attention in tenth grade science class.

If the whole top of a car were a solar panel it might generate 1000 watt hours per day on a clear sunny day. In the example I gave above, you would need 75000 watt hours to charge the batteries. So, 75 cars out in the sun for a full day would charge the batteries enough to run 1 100hp motor for one hour.

**Luvapottamus**

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mU4ROHyW...re=related

**Luvapottamus**

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4tMIvou-...re=related

**mstra** lop guest User ID: 93712 04-30-2012 08:00 PM

Luvapottamus Wrote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4tMIvou-...re=related

Interesting, thanks.

VW XL1: Driving distance on battery power alone: 22 miles. Battery capacity 5000 watt hours. Lithium ion battery weight 132 lbs.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/car-...eview.html

Even with a carbon fiber (read plastic) body, the vehicle weighs 1752 lbs. The carbon fiber body is of course a non-starter on the face of it because it costs 20 times more to make than a steel body. What they are doing is cutting weight any way they can in order to maximize the mpg from the diesel engine.

**Leopardsands** · **Leopardsands** Goth Pug User ID: 76478 04-30-2012 08:28 PM **Posts: 13,699**

**Ragnar Ragnarsson**

I remember reading this story about a flywheel car.

A flywheel-powered car is, in fact, an electric car. It would work in virtually the same manner as the battery-powered electrics now entering mass production. The main difference would be the energy source-- flywheels instead of chemical batteries--and vastly improved performance. The General Motors ev1, for example, a peppy two-seater scheduled to make its debut in California and Arizona this fall, carries 26 conventional automotive lead-acid batteries. It’s the finest electric car in the world, says Bitterly, with a terrible energy-storage system. The ev1’s 1,100 pounds of batteries give it a practical range of just 70 to 90 miles, and those batteries will die within 100 to 200 rechargings--one or two years of typical commuting. You can replace them for about $1,800. Bitterly’s flywheel system, by contrast, stores four times more energy per pound than lead-acid batteries; a simple same-weight conversion to 12 flywheels would boost the ev1’s range beyond 200 miles. Those flywheels would spin up more quickly than the batteries recharge. Also, they contain no toxic materials like lead, and they run just as well when it’s hot or cold. And you would never need to replace them.

http://discovermagazine.com/1996/aug/rei...ngthewh842

That was in 1996, but I assume they got shut down, or put out of business one way or the other.