Future of Drag Racing?

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stevieturbo
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Post by stevieturbo »

ppyvabw wrote: nuclear has to be the way forward.
I agree.

If we nuke China etc, that will leave more oil for us, and our V8's


It makes perfect sense !!!!


But from an electric car point of view its easy. Dont use a fuel engine to power anything other than the electric motor. Many big ships dont use their diesel engines to directly power the boat....they power huge electric motors which power it.

So why not a gas turbine to power an electric motor/batterys, which then power the car


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kiwicar
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Post by kiwicar »

"So why not a gas turbine to power an electric motor/batterys, which then power the car"
Er see post above!
Mike
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topcatcustom
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Post by topcatcustom »

ppyvabw wrote:This is something I have a bee in my bonnet about. Electric cars are supposed to be environmentally friendly?

Where do they think the electricity comes from to charge them? Thin air? No, it's a big dirty power station that burns oil, gas or coal. So until we have better long term and cleaner energy solutions to provide the juice for said cars, they have little environmental benefit. Wind farms and hydro electric just don't cut it, nuclear has to be the way forward.
Not only that- but by the time electricity gets to your plug socket it is only a small percentage efficient- once all the fossil fuel has been burnt, gone down hundreds of miles of cable, through several transformers etc. I wouldn't be at all suprised if it was actually more polluting to use an electric car. Also I'm sure charging batteries is not efficient.

There has to be a good alternative power source waiting to be discovered, all the "new" technology coming along at the moment still revolves around the same basic crap we have known for years.
TC
kev_the_mole
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Post by kev_the_mole »

There has to be a good alternative power source waiting to be discovered
Yep, it's called 'Mr. Fusion' and it fits DeLoreans and can be powered by eggshells and banana skins. Trouble is unlimited clean power means unlimited population. Unlimited population with a western standard of living means no resources.

Resource wars are coming to a neighborhood near you soon. :(
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It's an engine Jim.....but not as we know it ;)
kiwicar
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Post by kiwicar »

The one thing that would seriously reduce pollution would be getting rid of catallitic converters,
1. they make "normal" petrol engines aboyt 5% less eficient than not having them
2 they stalled development of fast/lean burn petrol engines because these designes cannot work with the back pressure
3 to actually convert enough hydrocarbon residue to reduce the overall budget of pollution in their manufacture they would have to run a minimum of 80k miles at the efficiency they have when new, the truth is that their efficiency rolls off from a maxmum up to about 40k miles to about 50% of that at 80k miles, they then generally pack up all together in the next 10 k miles so that they never actually reduce hydrocarbon emmisions over all.
4 the above actually does not take account of digging the raw materials out the ground and refining them to s state where manufacture can start.
sorry off my soap box now
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Mike
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stevieturbo
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Post by stevieturbo »

Fossil fuels are not the problem anyay.

People are. There are simply too many of us, and that situation is not going to improve.

Until there are restrictions placed on population growth....the human race is doomed.
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ppyvabw
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Post by ppyvabw »

topcatproduction wrote:
Not only that- but by the time electricity gets to your plug socket it is only a small percentage efficient- once all the fossil fuel has been burnt, gone down hundreds of miles of cable, through several transformers etc. I wouldn't be at all suprised if it was actually more polluting to use an electric car. Also I'm sure charging batteries is not efficient.

There has to be a good alternative power source waiting to be discovered, all the "new" technology coming along at the moment still revolves around the same basic crap we have known for years.
Absolutely. Same deal with hydrogen fuel cell cars. I assumed it was electrolysis of water they used to get hydrogen which would be just as bad. But I was corrected the other day by a guy in the industry. In fact hydrogen is mass produced using steam reformation of fossil fuels which is worse still!

Essentially fusion is the way forward except we cannot do it yet. In the interim we could be building 3rd gen fast breeder reactors which produce more fissile material from fertile material than they use. They can therefore use all the spent uranium we have stored up over the years from which we have only used 2% of the available energy from it I think. Plus we can put Thorium in them, and poorer quality uranium sources. We're talking hundreds of years of juice from fission alone.
kiwicar
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Post by kiwicar »

"Fossil fuels are not the problem anyay.

People are. There are simply too many of us, and that situation is not going to improve.

Until there are restrictions placed on population growth....the human race is doomed."
Spot on
Mke
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