Clearly, a good economy is, among other things, diverse.
Showing posts with label Transportation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Transportation. Show all posts
Monday, August 3, 2015
Light and Heavy
I've been thinking about two things that commonly have the adjectives "Light" and "heavy" attached to them. Specifically, rail, and industry.
While light and heavy rail have disputes on the border between these two, both are transportation systems involving a track, and a train that rides upon them. The light rail systems typically involve fewer cars, are more passenger oriented, and stop more frequently. The heavy systems are more cargo-oriented, have many more cars, and stop less frequently.
Industry, meanwhile, comes from the Latin word industria, meaning "productivity." Light industry tends to be companies that require less capital to start up, produce more consumer goods than industrial ones, and use the results of heavy industry as its primary feedstock. Heavy industry tends to be more expensive to set up, starts with raw ores, and produces primarily industrial goods. As examples, steel is heavy industry, whereas soap dispensers made of steel are light industry.
A national economy requires all four of these things. A lack of heavy rail means that all goods transportation are made with relatively inefficient means, be it muscle-based transportation (by humans in the poorest of economies, by animals in slightly richer ones), or by massive trucks that cause massive smog. A lack of light rail hinders the movement of human beings. Even the car-based transportation in my part of the world is inefficient, as the downtown region inevitably clogs on a daily basis, resulting in transport taking an extra hour, or in particular aggravating times, two. A lack of heavy industry means that all goods are based on things you can farm or import. A lack of light industry took down the communist economies, as at first, the nearly starving peasants were happy to be working at all, but eventually, the inability to buy things other than food and shelter started to grate on people. The economy resorted to military keynesian policies, meaning that lots of people were making tanks, who then had basically nothing they could buy with those wages.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Netcycle
In Vietnam, rising wealth has lead to a major increase in motor vehicles as a means of transportation, and with the rise of motor vehicles has come a rash of street racers. The police dislike it, as the races run faster than many of the riders can control, often causing property damage and personal injury. The police's first motivation is to stop vehicles who participate in this type of activity, ASAP.
In my country, the United States, a fast vehicle that refuses to pull over for the police is herded onto a road with no traffic, and a strip of spikes is laid on the road. As the vehicle approaches, the spikes are activated. The spikes puncture the tire in such a way that the vehicle comes to a halt. The spikes are then quickly retracted so that the chasing police car can run past it without this tire damage. The vehicle's driver is then forced to yield.
Vietnam isn't wealthy enough to buy such machinery, nor industrialized enough to make it themselves, so they dipped into their historical engineering and decided to stop the bikes with fishing nets.
Apparently, due to Vietnam's long history of fishing, the average Vietnamese person can throw a net very very precisely. This net, thrown into the motorcycle's motor, jams it in such a way that the motorcycle rolls to a controlled halt. Other methods had previously been rejected because the motorcycle lost control, which often resulted in the very crashes that the police were trying to avoid. It's cheap, simple, and effective.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
The Solar Road
Every summer, America's roadways become miserable hot strips that go on and on for miles, adding to the already hot and miserable condition of the weather. The black asphalt soaks up the sun, producing loads more heat. This of course, has given scientists a genius idea: replace it all with solar panels. Wait, what?
The idea revolves around glass. Glass that can support the weight of all the cars, but is totally transparent. Beneath this glass road is an endless extent of solar panels that turn the light of the sun shining upon them into electric power. Sometimes this is interrupted by a car driving over it, but there would be more sun than not.
Due to the sheer bulk of Americas roads, much of them in rural areas where cars don't drive over them for days at a time, replacing all roads with this new kind would produce enough power to keep the entire country running. Dirtier powers like Oil, Coal, and even Nuclear would be practically obsolete. (China would take note, I'm sure.)
The idea revolves around glass. Glass that can support the weight of all the cars, but is totally transparent. Beneath this glass road is an endless extent of solar panels that turn the light of the sun shining upon them into electric power. Sometimes this is interrupted by a car driving over it, but there would be more sun than not.
Due to the sheer bulk of Americas roads, much of them in rural areas where cars don't drive over them for days at a time, replacing all roads with this new kind would produce enough power to keep the entire country running. Dirtier powers like Oil, Coal, and even Nuclear would be practically obsolete. (China would take note, I'm sure.)
Friday, June 17, 2011
GE's Walking Truck
Hack a day brings to my attention that in the 1960s, General Electric had a project with the military in which they produced Quadrupedal walking armored vehicles, which would be used to transport soldiers and their large amount of very heavy supplies across uneven terrain that trucks and even tanks couldn't cross. The project had mixed results.
Apparently, the vehicle was built, and it did transport people at speeds up to 30 miles per hour for very little fuel, and could deftly walk across surfaces that would flip over a tank. It was even sensitive enough that an operator could gently rest a foot on a lightbulb. (Critics note that the lightbulb was placed on a pillow, rather than a cement floor, which is slightly cheating.)
On the downside, though, the user interface was incredibly poorly conceived, and operators needed WTF breaks every 15 minutes, because everything was controlled with a ludicrious array of levers, which drove people absolutely bonkers. I see an immediate improvement that could be produced.
There are two kinds of quadruped animals whose gaits may prove useful to this machine, and that I could describe. The dog and the horse. I learned the dog's foot habits from my pet dog as a child, which I noticed had two gaits. At slower speeds, a walk, the dog would align feet by sides. So first she would step with her front and rear left feet, then her front and rear right feet. When speeding up, there would be a point at which she would switch gaits to the running gait. With the running gait, the front and rear feet were treated as a set: first the front feet together, then the rear feet together.
In horses, there are three gaits: a walk, a jog, and a run. For the horse's walk, the four feet move completely independent of each other, as if two separate people were walking, one in front of the other. At the jog speed, or trot, legs are moved in diagonal pairs: The left front and right rear, then the right front and left rear. The horse's run resembles the dog's run, except that the feet pairs do not hit the ground at the same time. (There tends to be a slight delay, but the front feet will hit the ground within a half second of each other, while the rear feet will hit the ground a second later, also within a half second of each other.)
With some testing, an embedded computer could be made to copy these gaits in the walking truck, which could allow the operator to move across smoother surfaces in the same manner as driving a truck, taking manual control only when the terrain becomes too rough for automated motion. This would save the driver a lot of WTF breaks.
Apparently, the vehicle was built, and it did transport people at speeds up to 30 miles per hour for very little fuel, and could deftly walk across surfaces that would flip over a tank. It was even sensitive enough that an operator could gently rest a foot on a lightbulb. (Critics note that the lightbulb was placed on a pillow, rather than a cement floor, which is slightly cheating.)
On the downside, though, the user interface was incredibly poorly conceived, and operators needed WTF breaks every 15 minutes, because everything was controlled with a ludicrious array of levers, which drove people absolutely bonkers. I see an immediate improvement that could be produced.
There are two kinds of quadruped animals whose gaits may prove useful to this machine, and that I could describe. The dog and the horse. I learned the dog's foot habits from my pet dog as a child, which I noticed had two gaits. At slower speeds, a walk, the dog would align feet by sides. So first she would step with her front and rear left feet, then her front and rear right feet. When speeding up, there would be a point at which she would switch gaits to the running gait. With the running gait, the front and rear feet were treated as a set: first the front feet together, then the rear feet together.
In horses, there are three gaits: a walk, a jog, and a run. For the horse's walk, the four feet move completely independent of each other, as if two separate people were walking, one in front of the other. At the jog speed, or trot, legs are moved in diagonal pairs: The left front and right rear, then the right front and left rear. The horse's run resembles the dog's run, except that the feet pairs do not hit the ground at the same time. (There tends to be a slight delay, but the front feet will hit the ground within a half second of each other, while the rear feet will hit the ground a second later, also within a half second of each other.)
With some testing, an embedded computer could be made to copy these gaits in the walking truck, which could allow the operator to move across smoother surfaces in the same manner as driving a truck, taking manual control only when the terrain becomes too rough for automated motion. This would save the driver a lot of WTF breaks.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Contraflow
Most American cities have some sort of highway system for transportation. Highways are streets that have very high speed limits and offer a sort of right-of-way to the drivers on them, and traveling for a semi-long distance in America is really tricky without one. Most cities' highways dangerously fill up when the workday starts or stops, which is really annoying.
The natural disaster that occurs in my region is hurricanes, and something interesting happens when one is coming. The authorities set up a "contraflow" system for the highways, in which the other direction of a highway is reversed, since all traffic needs to be leaving town at the time. (They come back after the hurricane.) This gave me another idea to defeat the whole rush hour phenomenon.
Highways now are set up evenly divided between the two directions. If a highway has eight lanes, it will have four going in one direction and four going in another. With this, I replace the barriers with a more mobile one, such as slots with metal doors that we can remotely pop up or down, and we divide it six lanes in one direction and two in the other. We switch configurations at noon and midnight. It won't totally solve the problem, but it will now be much much easier to deal with.
The natural disaster that occurs in my region is hurricanes, and something interesting happens when one is coming. The authorities set up a "contraflow" system for the highways, in which the other direction of a highway is reversed, since all traffic needs to be leaving town at the time. (They come back after the hurricane.) This gave me another idea to defeat the whole rush hour phenomenon.
Highways now are set up evenly divided between the two directions. If a highway has eight lanes, it will have four going in one direction and four going in another. With this, I replace the barriers with a more mobile one, such as slots with metal doors that we can remotely pop up or down, and we divide it six lanes in one direction and two in the other. We switch configurations at noon and midnight. It won't totally solve the problem, but it will now be much much easier to deal with.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Pushcar
Ever seen toy car racetracks? The cars are pushed by a small plastic hook pulled through the tracks by an electric motor. I wonder if there's some way to apply this to larger scale....?
If so, it could have big savings on gasoline.
If so, it could have big savings on gasoline.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Freeway Redundancy
I used to live in Los Angeles. The Westernmost cities of the United States tend to have a grid shape where the terrain permits. There are a lot of advantages to a grid shape, one being that it's much much harder to get lost. Another is that one blockage can always be routed around. The Internet was built on this idea, though in practice it has a lot of choke points.
Then I ended up moving east. The easternmost cities of the United States tend to have roads based on cattle trails, so everything bends and curves around for no apparent reason. And one immediate thing I notice: There are ways around clogs, but they're not always direct. In fact, they often make little to no sense. Except New York. New York is a grid.
Most communication, including transportation, benefits from redundancy. When there's more than one way to do something, no blockage is genuinely possible. You can always go around. This is helped by GPS devices that know where you are, and where the roads are, and how your road can lead to your destination. This is helped more by ones that have live traffic reports, quickly showing to you to the fastest possible route.
Another theory says that traffic grows to fit road capacity.
Then I ended up moving east. The easternmost cities of the United States tend to have roads based on cattle trails, so everything bends and curves around for no apparent reason. And one immediate thing I notice: There are ways around clogs, but they're not always direct. In fact, they often make little to no sense. Except New York. New York is a grid.
Most communication, including transportation, benefits from redundancy. When there's more than one way to do something, no blockage is genuinely possible. You can always go around. This is helped by GPS devices that know where you are, and where the roads are, and how your road can lead to your destination. This is helped more by ones that have live traffic reports, quickly showing to you to the fastest possible route.
Another theory says that traffic grows to fit road capacity.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Hub and Wheel Transport
Shipping company FedEx has a very interesting system for achieving shipping efficiency: It all goes through one point. Hub and Spoke seems like a poor model for moving goods, especially considering it can up to double the distance that a given package has to travel. The primary advantage is in the economy of scale.
Let us take the example of mail. I can mail a letter to a faraway country for a mere $5, which will travel by plane and be in the recipient's hands by the end of the day. This could not possibly be so if this were the only letter going, because it costs $40,000 for the plane to even take off, and the plane cost several million dollars to purchase in the first place. However, there are lots of letters going. The plane will be full of letters, and each letter writer has paid $5 to send the letter. The millions of letters have funded millions of dollars for the operation to go through, and so it does, and everyone gets their letters for a reasonable price.
Similarly with the parcels. Lets say that I'm sending Christmas presents to various friends and family members located all over the country. A traditional distributor has to put them all on separate trucks that all race to their respective destinations, but the hub and spoke model can take them to the nearest big city (Houston), which puts them on a train with all the millions of other packages. One big advantage of a train is that once you have one going, adding one more package is so trivial as to be practically free. All of this goes to the center distributor.
And at that center, they have a concentration of expertise. People who excel at making sure the package is definitely on the right train, knowing that "Settle" is a common typo of "Seattle," knowing that people tend to mispell "Jonston Road" or whatever, and being able to fix it. And again, the train going to Seattle has every package in the country that's headed there. One train is way way way cheaper than ten thousand trucks.
This makes me wonder if there would be a way to do this for personal transportation. One very fast subway takes you to a big station at a common location (like the center of a large city), and from there, one can take very fast trains straight to whatever other place you need to go to. All trains would be high speed express trains, and collisions would be impossible because no two trains overlap in any way. You might have to go from point A to point B first, but B to your destination C isn't interrupted by all the people who first want to stop at D, E, or F.
Let us take the example of mail. I can mail a letter to a faraway country for a mere $5, which will travel by plane and be in the recipient's hands by the end of the day. This could not possibly be so if this were the only letter going, because it costs $40,000 for the plane to even take off, and the plane cost several million dollars to purchase in the first place. However, there are lots of letters going. The plane will be full of letters, and each letter writer has paid $5 to send the letter. The millions of letters have funded millions of dollars for the operation to go through, and so it does, and everyone gets their letters for a reasonable price.
Similarly with the parcels. Lets say that I'm sending Christmas presents to various friends and family members located all over the country. A traditional distributor has to put them all on separate trucks that all race to their respective destinations, but the hub and spoke model can take them to the nearest big city (Houston), which puts them on a train with all the millions of other packages. One big advantage of a train is that once you have one going, adding one more package is so trivial as to be practically free. All of this goes to the center distributor.
And at that center, they have a concentration of expertise. People who excel at making sure the package is definitely on the right train, knowing that "Settle" is a common typo of "Seattle," knowing that people tend to mispell "Jonston Road" or whatever, and being able to fix it. And again, the train going to Seattle has every package in the country that's headed there. One train is way way way cheaper than ten thousand trucks.
This makes me wonder if there would be a way to do this for personal transportation. One very fast subway takes you to a big station at a common location (like the center of a large city), and from there, one can take very fast trains straight to whatever other place you need to go to. All trains would be high speed express trains, and collisions would be impossible because no two trains overlap in any way. You might have to go from point A to point B first, but B to your destination C isn't interrupted by all the people who first want to stop at D, E, or F.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Pneumatic Net
I just read an interesting proposal of adding to, or replacing, the internet with a network of pneumatic tubes to allow it to handle any physical object. This will require some explanation.
Before personal computers were common, large organizations like banks typically had a pneumatic network for exchanging paperwork. One would roll up the relevant paper and put it into a tube, and then put the tube into a slot. A vacuum would then pull this tube to its destination. One could exchange anything that fit into that tube through the network. So while the most common use was paperwork, one could also send keys, a packet of potato chips, or really anything that could be fit into the little canister.
Computers did away with pneumatic networks for the most part because of the difficulty involved. Setting it up was difficult. A preposterously complex network of tubes had to be built in the building, you had to have a dedicated routing room, because the vacuum only went one way, and you had to have really powerful pumps to abruptly suck the air out of any particular tube. So when personal computers became common, most organizations ran screaming from pneumatic systems. After all, the routing room had to sort who got what canister by hand.
I don't see a worldwide pneumatic system coming about without some serious automation of identifying and routing, because the internet has billions of nodes. The routing room, wherever on earth we put it, would have to be a nightmarish maze of pipes with many many OCR readers and supercomputers and robot claws for identifying the tube, putting it in the correct destination, and sending it on its way. No human being could ever hope to keep up. Hence the sheer insanity of this idea.
Before personal computers were common, large organizations like banks typically had a pneumatic network for exchanging paperwork. One would roll up the relevant paper and put it into a tube, and then put the tube into a slot. A vacuum would then pull this tube to its destination. One could exchange anything that fit into that tube through the network. So while the most common use was paperwork, one could also send keys, a packet of potato chips, or really anything that could be fit into the little canister.
Computers did away with pneumatic networks for the most part because of the difficulty involved. Setting it up was difficult. A preposterously complex network of tubes had to be built in the building, you had to have a dedicated routing room, because the vacuum only went one way, and you had to have really powerful pumps to abruptly suck the air out of any particular tube. So when personal computers became common, most organizations ran screaming from pneumatic systems. After all, the routing room had to sort who got what canister by hand.
I don't see a worldwide pneumatic system coming about without some serious automation of identifying and routing, because the internet has billions of nodes. The routing room, wherever on earth we put it, would have to be a nightmarish maze of pipes with many many OCR readers and supercomputers and robot claws for identifying the tube, putting it in the correct destination, and sending it on its way. No human being could ever hope to keep up. Hence the sheer insanity of this idea.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Human powered copter
Imagine a device with a little seat, a large propeller, and huge rotors. A small counterotor in the back retains the balance. Sitting in the seat and violently pedaling, the user could lift himself aloft.
...eeeexcept that the rotors would have to be about 30 feet across, and one would have to pedal really really hard. It'd have to be made of the lightest carbon fiber, and even then it probably wouldn't work.
...eeeexcept that the rotors would have to be about 30 feet across, and one would have to pedal really really hard. It'd have to be made of the lightest carbon fiber, and even then it probably wouldn't work.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Traffic Tech
I was born in Los Angeles, a city with miserable amounts of traffic. Every rush hour, the entire city comes to a standstill, because there are too many cars on the road and they are in each other's way. The slightest slowdown anywhere in the traffic grid makes slow-moving, congested, stop and go traffic lines that go on for miles and miles. A traffic engineer once told me that traffic jams like that start when there is over a critical threshhold of cars, and one of them goes slower than 35MPH on the highway. (That would be 20 - 30 MPH under the limit, a significant slowdown.) Often, this is an accident, reducing at least two cars to 0 MPH and other cars around it to speeds under 20MPH as they slow or stop to gawk.
Most of China's cities are even denser than Los Angeles, and can suffer traffic jams that are longer than the city itself. So there's a big effort to push some of this traffic to busses, trains, and subways. And now on top of that, busses just got a big improvement. Busses may just be one very large car, but it's one very large car that takes so many people around that 30 or 40 other people aren't driving a private car. So it reduces traffic slightly. The new busses from China are raised above the street with a hollow first floor that cars can drive right through. Busses and their perpetual stopping are no longer a source of traffic jams. If the bus isn't going fast enough for you, you can drive right under it. If the bus stops to pick up passengers, you'll go right under it and no one on the bus will notice. The people are still transferred about...but as far as the cars below are concerned, it's like it's not even there.
I'm now thinking, what else can we do to alleviate the traffic problem? Near Los Angeles there's a really great light rail system, but it stops short of the city where'd be useful. Why? Taxi lobby bitched and the city caved. It would be helpful if that would be extended, perhaps into a subway system? And speaking of subways, if we build a tunnel highway beneath existing ones, we'd have twice the capacity in the same space.
But to really solve the problem, we'll need some sort of transportation that's completely different altogether.
Most of China's cities are even denser than Los Angeles, and can suffer traffic jams that are longer than the city itself. So there's a big effort to push some of this traffic to busses, trains, and subways. And now on top of that, busses just got a big improvement. Busses may just be one very large car, but it's one very large car that takes so many people around that 30 or 40 other people aren't driving a private car. So it reduces traffic slightly. The new busses from China are raised above the street with a hollow first floor that cars can drive right through. Busses and their perpetual stopping are no longer a source of traffic jams. If the bus isn't going fast enough for you, you can drive right under it. If the bus stops to pick up passengers, you'll go right under it and no one on the bus will notice. The people are still transferred about...but as far as the cars below are concerned, it's like it's not even there.
I'm now thinking, what else can we do to alleviate the traffic problem? Near Los Angeles there's a really great light rail system, but it stops short of the city where'd be useful. Why? Taxi lobby bitched and the city caved. It would be helpful if that would be extended, perhaps into a subway system? And speaking of subways, if we build a tunnel highway beneath existing ones, we'd have twice the capacity in the same space.
But to really solve the problem, we'll need some sort of transportation that's completely different altogether.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Sea Tunnel
Many aquariums now feature a plexiglass walking tube, so you can see the tanks not from the top, or the side, as was traditional in the past, but from the bottom. The fish glide about over your head. It's really quite majestic. And then I heard a restaurant is doing this too, serving the food in a plexiglass tube in the ocean, where the fish glide over your head as you eat....other fish. I won't be dining at this restaurant anytime soon, as it's half a world away from me and charges well over $200 per meal. It's some fancy fish.
But this gave me an idea for something...interesting. We would build a tunnel, with plexiglass, between two islands. Let's start with the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. A small electric tram runs through the tunnel. When customs approves your trip (because this would cross an international border), you get on the tram, and the tram goes into the dark tunnel. Then there is light: you are in a plexiglass tunnel, with the fish idly swimming above your head. The glories of the ocean are all around you, and it is quite arty. After some time of that, then it's dark again, and then you're at the other island, where you disembark. Visitors approved for the trip in the other direction now board the tram.
Further tunnels would go to other islands from here, as there is a chain of islands that eventually reaches Venezuela. Then I would look into other potentially interesting connections. A cross red-sea connection, from Yemen to Ethiopia, perchance? A visible chunnel, from London to Chalais?
The technology would only allow for short tunnels. Tsushima to Busan would be doable. New York to Brest would not. (The deeper part of that tunnel would collapse under the immense weight of the Atlantic, and the entire tunnel would flood.)
But this gave me an idea for something...interesting. We would build a tunnel, with plexiglass, between two islands. Let's start with the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. A small electric tram runs through the tunnel. When customs approves your trip (because this would cross an international border), you get on the tram, and the tram goes into the dark tunnel. Then there is light: you are in a plexiglass tunnel, with the fish idly swimming above your head. The glories of the ocean are all around you, and it is quite arty. After some time of that, then it's dark again, and then you're at the other island, where you disembark. Visitors approved for the trip in the other direction now board the tram.
Further tunnels would go to other islands from here, as there is a chain of islands that eventually reaches Venezuela. Then I would look into other potentially interesting connections. A cross red-sea connection, from Yemen to Ethiopia, perchance? A visible chunnel, from London to Chalais?
The technology would only allow for short tunnels. Tsushima to Busan would be doable. New York to Brest would not. (The deeper part of that tunnel would collapse under the immense weight of the Atlantic, and the entire tunnel would flood.)
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Inductive Highway
Electrical cars would be great. Low maintenance. Cheap to power. Super efficient. Extremely quiet. (Unless you want it to be loud, in which case we can make it sound like a well-tuned sports car.) Just one problem: With existing technology, you have a range of at most 50 miles before you need to recharge it. That's not enough in America, where our petroleum-powered cars go 200-300 miles on one tank of gas. (Depending on the efficiency of the car, and the size of the tank. A police cruiser getting 8 miles to the gallon just isn't going to go as far as a small hybrid that gets 60 miles to the gallon.) And where to charge it on the road? The American owner of an electric car probably can't find anywhere to charge it other than his or her own house.
But: All car journeys in America are either short trips around the city for errands, in which case 50 miles isn't that restrictive a limit, or trips to another city, which involve long freeways that are restricted only to cars. Pedestrians may not set foot on a freeway, as it is simply too dangerous. (Freeway speeds vary from 45 - 85 MPH, with the higher speeds being the more remote highways.) And with these two factors, I came up with a way that the freeway itself could power the car.
Electrical engineers have long had a technique to transfer electricity to things that are nearby, but not quite touching: Inductive current. So we would make the entire highway have inductive-current lines down the middle of each lane. Driving the electrical car down the freeway would charge it up, and use this electricity to go faster still. And at the driver's destination, they still have full batteries.
The devil of how to pay for this rears its ugly head, though. People are going to want a free ride, but the operators of electrical plants understandably want to be paid. I suppose while we're using non-contact technologies, Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, can come to the rescue. The driver would have an RFID tag on the bottom of their electrical car, which would indicate an account, and if it was valid, then that section of road gets inductive current turned on, and at the end of the month, the account gets a bill. You're charged per distance of road, which pumped a set amount of electricity into your electric car. This is fair.
The two things I wanted to avoid was accidental contact with pedestrians, which is why I wouldn't put it in ALL sections of road. Basically, the centers of road lanes could at any time become "third rails" (a railroad-based induction charge system), which has killed people in the past. (They touch it, or get very drunk and pee on it, and wind up electrocuted.) I'd also want to make sure this would be safe for gasoline-cars, which show no sign of going away, and even if they were, there would be a long transition period while they were still on the road. If the road set a driver's gas tank on fire, that would be bad.
But: All car journeys in America are either short trips around the city for errands, in which case 50 miles isn't that restrictive a limit, or trips to another city, which involve long freeways that are restricted only to cars. Pedestrians may not set foot on a freeway, as it is simply too dangerous. (Freeway speeds vary from 45 - 85 MPH, with the higher speeds being the more remote highways.) And with these two factors, I came up with a way that the freeway itself could power the car.
Electrical engineers have long had a technique to transfer electricity to things that are nearby, but not quite touching: Inductive current. So we would make the entire highway have inductive-current lines down the middle of each lane. Driving the electrical car down the freeway would charge it up, and use this electricity to go faster still. And at the driver's destination, they still have full batteries.
The devil of how to pay for this rears its ugly head, though. People are going to want a free ride, but the operators of electrical plants understandably want to be paid. I suppose while we're using non-contact technologies, Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, can come to the rescue. The driver would have an RFID tag on the bottom of their electrical car, which would indicate an account, and if it was valid, then that section of road gets inductive current turned on, and at the end of the month, the account gets a bill. You're charged per distance of road, which pumped a set amount of electricity into your electric car. This is fair.
The two things I wanted to avoid was accidental contact with pedestrians, which is why I wouldn't put it in ALL sections of road. Basically, the centers of road lanes could at any time become "third rails" (a railroad-based induction charge system), which has killed people in the past. (They touch it, or get very drunk and pee on it, and wind up electrocuted.) I'd also want to make sure this would be safe for gasoline-cars, which show no sign of going away, and even if they were, there would be a long transition period while they were still on the road. If the road set a driver's gas tank on fire, that would be bad.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Engine Cooking
I once had a dream in which I was taking a number of bizarre, illogical classes. Psychologists would probably blame this on me worrying about my schooling as I fell asleep. Anyway, most of them were stupid, impossible, or both. But one of them strikes me as potentially useful in the real world. It was called "Engine cooking."
In it, we would take a metal mold, fill it with ingredients, stash the mold in the engine compartment of a car, and then go drive around a bunch, then afterwards, we'd retrieve the mold, open it, and note the condition of the food. In the dream, you had to produce not just edible, but good looking food too. No one wants to eat a flat suffle, after all.
This is a potentially useful idea, because engines make a lot of heat. Heat that we currently discard into the atmosphere. Cooking, meanwhile, requires a controlled application of heat. Why not feed one into the other? Especially if you're driving somewhere where you'll need food on the other end, like a party. Bake your cake....by driving there.
Well, the biggest objections would be that engines are full of things that you don't want in your food, like dirt, sludge, motor oil, and insects. Heat transfer isn't ideal without doing something crazy like running the coolant through pipes on the outmost layer of the mold, which would make removal difficult. Also, engines might be hot, but the heat is quite uneven. Food needs to be evenly heated, or you'll have one raw side and one burnt side, neither of which is edible.
So, probably not practical in the real world, where things like physics and chemistry and basic logic apply.
In it, we would take a metal mold, fill it with ingredients, stash the mold in the engine compartment of a car, and then go drive around a bunch, then afterwards, we'd retrieve the mold, open it, and note the condition of the food. In the dream, you had to produce not just edible, but good looking food too. No one wants to eat a flat suffle, after all.
This is a potentially useful idea, because engines make a lot of heat. Heat that we currently discard into the atmosphere. Cooking, meanwhile, requires a controlled application of heat. Why not feed one into the other? Especially if you're driving somewhere where you'll need food on the other end, like a party. Bake your cake....by driving there.
Well, the biggest objections would be that engines are full of things that you don't want in your food, like dirt, sludge, motor oil, and insects. Heat transfer isn't ideal without doing something crazy like running the coolant through pipes on the outmost layer of the mold, which would make removal difficult. Also, engines might be hot, but the heat is quite uneven. Food needs to be evenly heated, or you'll have one raw side and one burnt side, neither of which is edible.
So, probably not practical in the real world, where things like physics and chemistry and basic logic apply.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Motorized Fueling Options
Our industrial civilization uses an ever-increasing amount of fuel. Fuel that's getting harder to find. We've mined all the easy-to-get oil, and what remains is hard to get, has safety issues (like the gulf-well you've heard so much about on the news), is expensive to get, like Canada's immense oil sands, or has some other issue.
But without energy, our transportation will not go. Economists remind me that transportation powers civilization. As an example, they say New York has only 3 days of food. If all the trains and trucks stopped, the supermarkets would run dry of food, hunger would set in, and with it, anarchy and riots. And every time the price goes above a certain point, it's freakout city.
So. How to power the trucks and trains? Electricity would require inventing better batteries, because even a small car uses power on the order of kilowatts.
* Coal
America has a metric insane supply of coal. Coal-powered trains have been around practically since trains were invented. Unfortunately, an external boiler on a truck probably wouldn't work as well.
However, there's a second way to use coal. A number of chemical processes can make a gasoline-like fuel from coal or natural gas. This was discovered in World War II-era Germany, which had very few sources of oil available to it on account of world-wide blockade. They wished to use tanks to continue their war, and tanks need gasoline to operate. Strangely enough, this is not the first time that German chemists rose to the rescue for a wartime need, the Haber process was invented for the nitrogen-related shortages of World War I, which now feeds some 2/5ths of the earth.
So, the main advantages to this are that it would be super cheap, use only national resources in most countries, and has an excellent supply. The main disadvantages are that it would exacerbate environmental issues (even clean coal is merely extremely filthy compared to the absurdly filthy regular coal), and the costs of the coal mining industry (which tends to destroy both the land it mines and the people who do the mining.)
* Natural Gas
Natural gas is actually one of many types of hydrocarbons, generally a liquid or gas at room temperature. It would work well as a motor fuel, but the engine would have to be specifically tooled for it. It is widely available, worldwide.
It's reasonably clean, aside from the carbon.
* Nuclear
My favorite power source, available from Uranium, extractable in America in the southwestern desert, Australia, and Nigeria, or Thorium, extractable from seawater. Better suited to large vehicles. Vehicles would travel thousands of miles between fuelings.
Good plan if there's some sort of plan for the nuclear waste. (I recommend recycling it.)
* Solar
Impractical unless on Mercury. Solar energy density not quite high enough.
* Wood
A very plentiful substance produced by trees. Wouldn't work well outside an external boiler, which is far more practical for a train than a truck.
* Antimatter
This would be best, but we have maybe a nanogram of the stuff total. Not nearly enough to power much of anything. Antimatter could react with anything, and would produce no pollution whatsoever. I would recommend using things with negaive value, like toxic waste or garbage, as reaction mass.
* Methanol/Ethanol
These readily available chemicals are easily produced from organic sources, and burn like high octane gasoline. Brazil uses this, but in the US, we'd need to up the gas milage of our fleet, or else 110% of our land would have to be dedicated to fuel-crops. (Needless to say, a tad of a mathematical possibility!)
* Some not yet invented fuel
Chemistry holds a lot of promise.
So then...how to power the fleet?
But without energy, our transportation will not go. Economists remind me that transportation powers civilization. As an example, they say New York has only 3 days of food. If all the trains and trucks stopped, the supermarkets would run dry of food, hunger would set in, and with it, anarchy and riots. And every time the price goes above a certain point, it's freakout city.
So. How to power the trucks and trains? Electricity would require inventing better batteries, because even a small car uses power on the order of kilowatts.
* Coal
America has a metric insane supply of coal. Coal-powered trains have been around practically since trains were invented. Unfortunately, an external boiler on a truck probably wouldn't work as well.
However, there's a second way to use coal. A number of chemical processes can make a gasoline-like fuel from coal or natural gas. This was discovered in World War II-era Germany, which had very few sources of oil available to it on account of world-wide blockade. They wished to use tanks to continue their war, and tanks need gasoline to operate. Strangely enough, this is not the first time that German chemists rose to the rescue for a wartime need, the Haber process was invented for the nitrogen-related shortages of World War I, which now feeds some 2/5ths of the earth.
So, the main advantages to this are that it would be super cheap, use only national resources in most countries, and has an excellent supply. The main disadvantages are that it would exacerbate environmental issues (even clean coal is merely extremely filthy compared to the absurdly filthy regular coal), and the costs of the coal mining industry (which tends to destroy both the land it mines and the people who do the mining.)
* Natural Gas
Natural gas is actually one of many types of hydrocarbons, generally a liquid or gas at room temperature. It would work well as a motor fuel, but the engine would have to be specifically tooled for it. It is widely available, worldwide.
It's reasonably clean, aside from the carbon.
* Nuclear
My favorite power source, available from Uranium, extractable in America in the southwestern desert, Australia, and Nigeria, or Thorium, extractable from seawater. Better suited to large vehicles. Vehicles would travel thousands of miles between fuelings.
Good plan if there's some sort of plan for the nuclear waste. (I recommend recycling it.)
* Solar
Impractical unless on Mercury. Solar energy density not quite high enough.
* Wood
A very plentiful substance produced by trees. Wouldn't work well outside an external boiler, which is far more practical for a train than a truck.
* Antimatter
This would be best, but we have maybe a nanogram of the stuff total. Not nearly enough to power much of anything. Antimatter could react with anything, and would produce no pollution whatsoever. I would recommend using things with negaive value, like toxic waste or garbage, as reaction mass.
* Methanol/Ethanol
These readily available chemicals are easily produced from organic sources, and burn like high octane gasoline. Brazil uses this, but in the US, we'd need to up the gas milage of our fleet, or else 110% of our land would have to be dedicated to fuel-crops. (Needless to say, a tad of a mathematical possibility!)
* Some not yet invented fuel
Chemistry holds a lot of promise.
So then...how to power the fleet?
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Nuclear Trucking
Image via Wikipedia
But gasoline, be it traditional or diesel, is not the only way to power a vehicle. Trains have the option of running electrically from either an overhead line, or a third rail. Electricity is pretty cheap, and is far less subject to these sudden price swings. (Most US electricity comes from coal, which is cheap and steady.) Trucks don't really have that option. (Roads can not be retrofitted to supply the vehicles that travel over them with electricity.)
Since we're unlikely to massively overhaul our collective rail system, I propose a nuclear-powered truck. Cargo trucks are huge. So huge that they can have a small CANDU-esque pebble-bed reactor. The reactor is foolproof. Pebble-bed style nuclear reactors literally cannot melt down. The reactor powers large banks of batteries, which run an electric engine. With a supplemental solar-panel on the truck's roof, I think the truck could run for most of the day, with no gas-ups. Trucks must regularly stop for the driver's sake, as drivers get hungry and tired, and safety regulations require regular food breaks and sleep breaks, noted in the truck's log. (The truck would charge the batteries while halted.)
When not shipping, trucks should be taken in for maintenance, which would include removing the old fuel pellets and replacing them with new ones. The old ones would contain plutonium, and would have to be sequestered as nuclear waste, given to Idaho's nuclear laboratory, or fed into a breeder reactor. Maintenance would also tune-up the electric engine, and likely replace the batteries as well. (Batteries have a limited useful-life.)
This system would, unlike our current petroleum infrastructure, be maintainable with only national resources. Yes, the US has oil, both on land and underneath the coastal waters. We literally cannot extract it fast enough. Anyone claiming that we can is severely underestimating the number of vehicles on the road.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Personal Metro
A man in Russia has done something that would not be possible in America: He built his own private subway system, entirely on his own Soviet-era pension money. Not only that, but he also got all the correct permits and so on, and is legally backed by the Russian government.
Mr. Murlyanchik, the subway builder, has been at this since his retirement in 1984, and has been extending 1 meter per day since then. He has built it so that his neighbors can have stations if they request them, and plans to soon have automated cars capable of carrying 3-4 people patrol the rails that he is now placing in his elaborate network of tunnels. (His tunnels are narrower than commercial subway lines, and therefore of slightly lower utility.)
Also impressively, he has dug under a number of roads that have 60-ton trucks running across them, and his tunnels support that weight easily. This is a man with deep understanding of earth-engineering.
I say that this is not possible in America because here property rights extend from the surface to the center of the earth, and to dig under any other person's plot of land would require their explicit permission. So the subway would have to follow only public roads and lands, and even that would require explicit government permission, of which they are not likely to grant. Also, goods in America are expensive, and the average retiree likely could not afford the thousands of tons of cement that this would require.
I begin to wonder if Mr. Murlyanchik had additional sources of funding, could he reach all the way to Moscow?
Mr. Murlyanchik, the subway builder, has been at this since his retirement in 1984, and has been extending 1 meter per day since then. He has built it so that his neighbors can have stations if they request them, and plans to soon have automated cars capable of carrying 3-4 people patrol the rails that he is now placing in his elaborate network of tunnels. (His tunnels are narrower than commercial subway lines, and therefore of slightly lower utility.)
Also impressively, he has dug under a number of roads that have 60-ton trucks running across them, and his tunnels support that weight easily. This is a man with deep understanding of earth-engineering.
I say that this is not possible in America because here property rights extend from the surface to the center of the earth, and to dig under any other person's plot of land would require their explicit permission. So the subway would have to follow only public roads and lands, and even that would require explicit government permission, of which they are not likely to grant. Also, goods in America are expensive, and the average retiree likely could not afford the thousands of tons of cement that this would require.
I begin to wonder if Mr. Murlyanchik had additional sources of funding, could he reach all the way to Moscow?
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Gasoline, Revisited
Gasoline is pretty cheap in America when I think about it. Compare it with other fluids that people buy without blinking. The cheapest wine costs $19.96/gallon. Cola? A better deal, $1.72 per gallon, but only if you buy in bulk. $3/gallon if you buy from a supermarket. Vinegar? A whopping $8.76/gallon.
American consumers pay this without blinking an eye. But when gas hits $3/gallon? The complaints never end. The current price at the closest station to me is $2.69 per gallon. People see this as expensive, but I'm going to convert it to European standards so my European readers give some perspective. This is .53 Euros/liter after I do the math. I can already hear the derisive laughter.
One reason why the gas prices are this low in the US are because we have oil supplies in the country (even though we use far more than we can readily extract), and the refineries are also local. Another reason is the political will to keep it flowing. Our politicians will move heaven and earth to keep gas cheap.
Last time there was a major spike in the gas prices, there were many speeches about gas being essential to our way of life and demanding action. But there were also considerable funds put into research for alternatives, from ethanol to electric. Funds that promptly dried up again when the price fell, supposedly due severe cutbacks in transportation leading to a fall in demand.
I think it is desirable to have alternatives, especially considering the increasing political hostility of many of the major suppliers. The three biggest suppliers of petroleum I can name offhand, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela, all have deteriorating relationships with the United States. There is a security standpoint, which notes that if the US were blockaded, gas prices would rise to extreme prices, and probably would be unavailable to the civilian population entirely. This would affect more than just personal cars -- most businesses in the US are supplied by truck. Shortage would become the norm, shutting down large sectors of the economy.
It would be nice to develop a cheap and abundant alternative, but it may just be wishful thinking. Electricity suffers from storage issues, hydrogen is a carrier, not a source, (and is immensely difficult to keep contained), coal is smoky (and possibly stinky), nuclear is not happening, and solar is totally impractical. Ethanol would require a huge increase in farmland (and would likely drive up food prices from competition), and methane...methane could work. Insert "fart powered car" joke here.
In France's "wine lake," a region in which a large number of amateur wine producers have grown so much wine that the price of wine in the area has pretty much collapsed, it may be practical to have a wine-powered car that would filter the ethanol from the water, and burn the ethanol for fuel.
American consumers pay this without blinking an eye. But when gas hits $3/gallon? The complaints never end. The current price at the closest station to me is $2.69 per gallon. People see this as expensive, but I'm going to convert it to European standards so my European readers give some perspective. This is .53 Euros/liter after I do the math. I can already hear the derisive laughter.
One reason why the gas prices are this low in the US are because we have oil supplies in the country (even though we use far more than we can readily extract), and the refineries are also local. Another reason is the political will to keep it flowing. Our politicians will move heaven and earth to keep gas cheap.
Last time there was a major spike in the gas prices, there were many speeches about gas being essential to our way of life and demanding action. But there were also considerable funds put into research for alternatives, from ethanol to electric. Funds that promptly dried up again when the price fell, supposedly due severe cutbacks in transportation leading to a fall in demand.
I think it is desirable to have alternatives, especially considering the increasing political hostility of many of the major suppliers. The three biggest suppliers of petroleum I can name offhand, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela, all have deteriorating relationships with the United States. There is a security standpoint, which notes that if the US were blockaded, gas prices would rise to extreme prices, and probably would be unavailable to the civilian population entirely. This would affect more than just personal cars -- most businesses in the US are supplied by truck. Shortage would become the norm, shutting down large sectors of the economy.
It would be nice to develop a cheap and abundant alternative, but it may just be wishful thinking. Electricity suffers from storage issues, hydrogen is a carrier, not a source, (and is immensely difficult to keep contained), coal is smoky (and possibly stinky), nuclear is not happening, and solar is totally impractical. Ethanol would require a huge increase in farmland (and would likely drive up food prices from competition), and methane...methane could work. Insert "fart powered car" joke here.
In France's "wine lake," a region in which a large number of amateur wine producers have grown so much wine that the price of wine in the area has pretty much collapsed, it may be practical to have a wine-powered car that would filter the ethanol from the water, and burn the ethanol for fuel.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Drive Train
People in America love driving. But hate paying for gas. Many routes follow identical routes, and the most cost effective way to haul mass is a train, so...
Imagine a large train with many many car-sized platforms. It stops for 3 minutes at every big city, then speeds along at 100+MPH. At the stops, cars can drive on or off.
Every morning, a train goes through the country to the city, and back. There's a 6:00am shift, an 8:00am shift, and a noon shift. Most of the traffic is to the city, so it doesn't stop on the way back. The pattern reverses for trips at 4:00pm, 6pm, and 8pm.
The stops are a platform exactly aligned with the train in height, so cars can drive right across. A ramp from there goes to the nearest road.
For a bonus, the train doesn't have to stop completely if no one is getting on, merely slow down to an acceptable speed.
Drivers would save fuel on the common part of their route. How to pay for the train?
Imagine a large train with many many car-sized platforms. It stops for 3 minutes at every big city, then speeds along at 100+MPH. At the stops, cars can drive on or off.
Every morning, a train goes through the country to the city, and back. There's a 6:00am shift, an 8:00am shift, and a noon shift. Most of the traffic is to the city, so it doesn't stop on the way back. The pattern reverses for trips at 4:00pm, 6pm, and 8pm.
The stops are a platform exactly aligned with the train in height, so cars can drive right across. A ramp from there goes to the nearest road.
For a bonus, the train doesn't have to stop completely if no one is getting on, merely slow down to an acceptable speed.
Drivers would save fuel on the common part of their route. How to pay for the train?
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Working Around the Volcanoes
A volcanic eruption in Iceland has made air travel to northern and western Europe mostly inaccessible. It is not safe to fly planes through the cloud of volcanic ash, as the ash clogs the airplane's air intake and fouls the engine.
So, if you really wanted to go there, how would you do it?
You could, as an immediate alternative, fly to southern Europe, and take trains to your final destination. Europe is quite interconnected with trains, even going to the UK, an island, via a tunnel.
But let's say you really really needed to fly directly to, say, Finland, and you lose a billion dollars for every moment after 8 hours from now. How could you fly directly?
You'd have to modify the plane. It would have to accept air not directly, but through a series of filters. It would need thick and tough hulls and windows. Or, alternatively, instead of gasoline it would have a non-breathing nuclear reactor. The filters would be in layers, and would have to be changed in mid-flight.
And when the plane landed, it would need to be instantly stripped for maintence. Flying through the ash and debris would have eroded every surface on the outside, and many clogged filters would need to be thrown away.
But it would be possible. And if you needed it that badly, you could do it.
So, if you really wanted to go there, how would you do it?
You could, as an immediate alternative, fly to southern Europe, and take trains to your final destination. Europe is quite interconnected with trains, even going to the UK, an island, via a tunnel.
But let's say you really really needed to fly directly to, say, Finland, and you lose a billion dollars for every moment after 8 hours from now. How could you fly directly?
You'd have to modify the plane. It would have to accept air not directly, but through a series of filters. It would need thick and tough hulls and windows. Or, alternatively, instead of gasoline it would have a non-breathing nuclear reactor. The filters would be in layers, and would have to be changed in mid-flight.
And when the plane landed, it would need to be instantly stripped for maintence. Flying through the ash and debris would have eroded every surface on the outside, and many clogged filters would need to be thrown away.
But it would be possible. And if you needed it that badly, you could do it.
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