Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

Maybe it’s because I’m an autistic, pedantic engineer, but it really annoys me when people use words wildly incorrectly.

An ICE uses gasoline or diesel as a FUEL, but it runs on thermal (heat) ENERGY, and that ENERGY is liberated when the FUEL is oxidised / burnt.

An EV uses electrical ENERGY to run, if that comes from a battery of caps, there is no internal fuel source, if it is a fuel cell, then the fuel cell oxidises FUEL (probably hydrogen) to create electrical ENERGY.

Solar ENERGY is not a fuel.

Wind ENERGY is not a fuel.

Hydro ENERGY is not a fuel.

coal / gas / oil / nuclear FUELled energy stations produce electrical ENERGY.

This shit is important, and everyone glosses over it, including commenter toyotathing, by stating that fuels are nasty and dirty and polluting, and energy isn’t.

Traditional vehicles don’t really run on fuels, it’s the energy that makes them run, the point is that they create that energy on demand from fuel.

EV’s do not create any energy, they only store it, they eliminate the fuel to energy conversion process, which is a two edge sword that one the one hand eliminates the nasty by products of burning a fuel onboard, but on the other hand also eliminates the simplicity of handling fuel for storage and refuelling purposes.

EV energy has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is more than likely going to be burning fuel, though it may be nuclear reactions and not chemical ones boiling the kettles that spin the turbines that make the electrical energy.

Solar and wind power all come from the sun, our local star.

Hydro cam come from solar or gravity thanks to the moon, our local satellite.

The sun of course is just a big inefficient polluting nuclear furnace with no containment, very messy.

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we need to get all these things straight, and not be using FUEL and ENERGY incorrectly.

Which brings us to hydrogen FUEL cell technology, providing electrical ENERGY for a hybrid (not pure) EV.

Borosilicate glass cannot even contain low pressure gaseous hydrogen, just ask anyone who owns a laser tube, over enough years it will all permeate out, over a few years enough will permeate out to screw up the energy pumping with the co2 etc.

Not even a stainless steel pressure vessel will contain 100% of the hydrogen put into it… it will permeate out over time.

Hydrogen has other issues, it’s naturally gaseous, liquefying it under pressure takes an awful lot of energy, as in, it will probably take significantly more energy to liquefy a litre of hydrogen than you can get out of a litre of hydrogen, plus, a litre of hydrogen contains full all energy compared to a litre of diesel or benzine, plus, you also used a hell of a lot of energy cracking water into hydrogen in the first place.

But, you *can* call it a fuel, and in theory you can burn it in oxygen and get bugger all out apart from energy and water, nota bene, bugger all != nothing…

I don’t buy into fuel cell hybrid vehicles for one simple reason, ethanol / biodiesel powered ICE is easier and cheaper to do.

Fuck emissions, at this point in the discussion, they are not relevant.

So we have a choice, thermal energy or electrical energy, either one will power a vehicle, but thanks to semiconductor technology and digital electronics, we can exercise incredible levels of control over electrical energy, thermal energy, not so much, you can effectively open or close a valve or turn a wick up or down.

So the problem then becomes converting fuels into electrical energy.

At best it is a fairly inefficient process, and the smaller and lighter and more responsive / performance oriented you want the converter to be, the more inefficient it is going to be.

Take the trunk away from a tesla and add a few hundred kilos and you can fit a space craft style solid state nuclear > electric power cell, good for 20 years at maybe a kilowatt or so, so 24 kwh per day, it’s going to limit your range, but you’ll never need to recharge per se.

A fixed speed diesel electric genset in the trunk will do the same job, bring it up to 3kw capacity and your tesla range will essentially be unlimited, until the fuel tank for the genset needs refilling.

BTW 3 square meters of 100% efficient solar panels in the tropics would pull about 24 kwh per 24 hours, and peak at 3 kw at midday.

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As long as your model 2018 dorkmobile weighs 40% more than the model 1998 dorkmobile, you do not give a fuck about energy efficiency, by definition.

As long as your model 2018 dorkmobile has a 0-60 time, even if it is 60 seconds, you do not give a fuck about energy efficiency, by definition.

As long as your model 2018 dorkmobile does not have a hub motor, and no brakes because the hub motor takes care of that too, you do not give a fuck about efficiency, by definition.

As long as your model 2018 dorkmobile has a manufacturing energy equivalent budget of 30,000 litres of diesel at 49 kwh per litre = 1,470,000 kwh = 58,800 days @ 25 kwh per day which is a good number for per capita civilized energy budget, which is 161 years, you don’t give a fuck about efficiency, by definition.

Now, a streamlined electric bike / scooter with a 1,400 watt motor, limited 30 mph top speed and 15 kwh of battery and minimal weight, now we are talking…

The problem with li-on is the 18650 battery spec, it was great for laptops, but to get any real capacity you need millions of them, and they all need containing and wiring together and thermal management and everything else… if instead of 18 mm dia and 65.0 mm long they were prismatics, say 100 high by 50 wide by 200 long, per 3.3 volt cell, you’d be starting to get somewhere.

Tesla making slightly bigger 18650 is fucking pointless.

I learned to drive (at 12) on a J40 toyota land cruiser, with a whopping 78 bhp bulletproof merc diesel, weighed around 3,400 lb, or 43 lb per bhp, the current j200 is knocking on 300 bhp and weighs in at around 6,000 lb, 20 lb per bhp and twice as many lbs to boot, you see the fucking problem, the 1960’s version was far superior.

A fucking fuel cell isn’t going to fix that.

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Honda experimented on turbos with the pig, aka the cx500, the marketing shit at the time was they started in the hardest thing to turbo, a v twin, to perfect the turbo, the fact that the cx500 was watercooled was of course neither here nor there, fnaar fnaar.

Fuel cells aren’t new, they have been tried in buses and lorries, because they were big slow old boxes, ideal test beds for a fuel cell, but, we keep coming back to the same shit problem, hydrogen makes a fucking shit fuel to catalyse into energy, it only keeps coming back again and again and again because of the bullshit about distilled water out of the tailpipe.

the problem is not to fix the fuel cell and hydrogen fuel manufacturing, storage and transfer problems, the problem is to stop trying to make shitting unicorns and rainbows an indivisible part of every fuel / energy problem that you look at.

EV’s are NOT fucking environmentally friendly, and I do not care if you have a nissan leaf or a tesla roadster, my 20 year old diesel volvo is more environmentally friendly, the ONLY way you can make it less environmentally friendly is to lie through your ass about EVERYTHING EXCEPT tailpipe emissions, when you look at the whole enchilada including all manufacturing and scrappage costs, and divide it by total vehicle miles traveled, the 20 year old volvo diesel wins hands down.

This doesn’t mean I have anything AGAINST an EV, or a hybrid fuel cell EV, I think there is real potential there, but only IF we drop all the bullshit.

We already made and developed benzine and diesel powered fuel cells, it was perfected and then dropped around 2015, they were NOT cheap, but they did work and they were reliable, 10,000 hours constant run times, (2 years 24/7) but they were dropped.

CAPEX and OPEX, per kwh produced they are a fucking expensive way to get kwh, and old 1950’s Lister CS 6/1 startomatic beats it hands down across the board.

A few years ago in the UK petrol cars were shit, so lets everyone buy a diesel, now diesel cars are shit, lets everyone buy a petrol, I suspect the next one with new IC engine vehicles outlawed by 2020 is petrol and diesel are shit, lets everyone buy an EV.

None of the “xxx are shit” were ever true, it was just a way to make the old obsolete so the new could be sold.

I’ll refer you again to the j40 toyota vs the j200, or the series 2 landie vs the new thing, or my 1950’s startomatic to the fuel cell ones, and in almost every case, the older versions were leaner and meaner and more efficient as a result.

Foruma 1 cars must weigh less than 1,600 lbs by rule, two per old j40, four per new j200, and those fuckers the drivers can walk away from 200 mph crashes, so they aren’t exactly the citroen mehari which weighed around 1,300 lbs, or a 2cv come to that, a car that did 62 mpg 50 years ago…

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FUEL v ENERGY

A car that burns 100 kwh of FUEL at 30% efficiency to produce and consume 30 kwh of ENERGY isn’t actually less efficient than an EV that consumes 30 kwh of ENERGY to go the same distance.

The only difference is the EV burned the FUEL remotely at the power station, probably only a few percent only more efficiently than the ICE vehicle… and then there were the transmission losses between the power station and the EV, and the charging losses charging the EV batteries, so there is probably fuck all in it.

A 78 bhp 3,200 lb J40 toyota is always going to beat a 300 bhp 6,000 lb J200 toyota at efficiency though.

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Summary, electrical ENERGY is really easy to control in amazing detail, so there are plenty of good reasons to want to work with it rather than thermal ENERGY.

The conversion of FUELS to ENERGY is always pretty inefficient.

The conversion of ENERGY into FUEL (eg making hydrogen) is about the only thing less efficient than converting fuel into energy.

Going for EFFICIENCY everywhere you can afford to, and ECONOMY everywhere else, beats everything else.

No EV or hybrid or fuel cell does this, that is not what they are about, this is NOT to say that the technology might get there one day, but in 2017 that day is about as far away as commercial fusion, eg “maybe in 5 / 10 / 15 / 20 years… maybe more….”

Confusing fuel and energy will kill you, at the very least economically, if not literally, and real soon now… TM