On 9/2/05, Tom Slick North <prodog@swbell.net> wrote:
>
> It's times like this that make me realize just how important the research
> that I'm doing in Grad School is...
>
> I'm working on a specific type of alternative fuel powered vehicles...
> Cryogenic Engines - an engine powered through the use of liquid nitrogen.
> There are three such vehicles in existence so far, the First was built here
> at the University of North Texas, and a second was built around the same
> time and the University of Washington. The third was built at the Kharkiv
> National Automobile and Transportation University in the Ukraine (the
> project lead had come to UNT to work on cryogenic engine research).
>
> My area of research is to find was to improve the efficiency of current
> cryogenic engine design... Hopefully, we will be able to get enough energy
> from the expansion of the liquid nitrogen (-196 deg C) to ambient
> temperature, so that we will no longer have to rely on fossil fuels...
Sounds like interesting work, but how do we "make" LN2 and how do we
keep it cold? Same issues we face with most of the other alternatives
(Hydrogen, electric cars, etc.) - energy needs to be converted
somewhere, converting energy takes energy, and much of that "original"
energy conversion is still done with fossil fuels - we're just
relocating the "problem."
I'd love to relieve our dependence upon forces outside our control for
supplying energy, but can it be done safely and at a reasonable cost,
and with public acceptance? We couldn't even convert something as
trivial as how we measure things (metric system), I don't see a
critical mass converting their personal energy supplies & use to
non-fossil.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Oct 01 2005 - 12:50:23 EDT