Autistic Geek

I just love what you can find on the Internet. I stumbled across a 1983 photo of my old high school apparently take from a train on the other side of US-11.

Part of the school was distroyed by an arsonist sometime around 1994 so when they rebuilt they also covered all the slanted roofs in this awful bright red metal roofing

Images taken from http://www.dekalbk12.org and http://flickr.com/photos/timandrenda/2147172617/

OK, I’m no physicist. In fact I currently hold a degree in nothing. Fine. Read on taking that into account.

Hydrogen

Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, but it’s expensive to isolate for use en mass. Fuel cells are fragile and currently require the use of rare materials to produce. And unless you live in Southern California, you wont find a hydrogen filling station commonly available in the United States. See this Wikipedia article for further details. The point, hydrogen powered vehicles are still years from the masses.

Solar

Currently, photovoltaic cells, cannot produce the energy necessary to sustain power to an electric motor. They can however be used charge batteries, and batteries can sustain an electric motor for a short period of time. The higher the electrical capacity (more batteries), the more your vehicle weighs, thereby requiring more energy to move the vehicle. In addition to that, a lack of photons (a.k.a. night), has a tremendous effect on the power output of the photovoltaic cells. The point, not enough juice.

Gasoline-electric hybrid car

A gasoline engine is used to charge batteries as needed and is responsible for propelling the vehicle part of the time. An electric motor/generator draws power from the batteries charged by the gasoline engine to propel the vehicle. When you let off the accelerator pedal, the generator part of the motor takes advantage of the kinetic energy of the rotating wheels to generate power for the batteries and to decelerate the vehicle. The point, although you can go further before you’re looking to fill the tank, you are still a slave to the gasoline pump.

What I have yet to see

Before you read on, I need to address use of this idea. I believe this is important enough to the world that I do not want to be compensated financially for it. However, I will fight anyone patenting the idea for the purpose of keeping their competitors from producing it, or completely moth-balling it to keep it off the market. This is my intellectual property, it falls under the guidelines of the GNU General Public License Version 3. Meaning that you or anyone else as the right to use, modify, and redistribute the property as long as the core intellectual property remains clearly identified as mine. Products, physical of otherwise, derived from the idea are yours to do with what you please. And although my wife disagrees with me on not taking compensation from profits made producing/selling vehicles using this idea, I have to agree with her that it would be nice if those who did profit from it gave the idea’s originator a vehicle using the technology every five or so years. Nice but not required, talk to your PR personnel.

Here goes.
The vehicle is moving against the air, if you didn’t realize this your dog with it’s head out the window and whoever designed your car’s radiator sure did. Light-weight caterpillar style turbines attached to alternators on the roof could be used to take advantage of the forward movement thought the air and generate electric energy. Whenever the vehicle was moving the batteries would be charging. The higher the speed the more watts each turbine would produce. I’m setting an efficiency goal of having four to five turbines traveling forward at 45 miles per hour being able to produce enough energy to keep the batteries at least 90% charge for at least four hours while powering the electrical motor propelling the vehicle, before a unit goes into mass production.
Meet the goal and you have a vehicle that does not need fossil fuel at all. The only pollution generated would be that produce by all vehicles at the end of life, the space they take up in a junkyard. Can you say recycling? The batteries count just like break pads, you’d need to replace them every few years because they would hold less and less charge over time. unless they finally develop a rechargeable battery that doesn’t eventually die.

But what happens when you teenager runs down the batteries watching DVDs or using some other battery draining device while the vehicle is not moving? Well to protect the turbines and alternators from the elements they need to be enclosed in some housing that allows airflow from the front and out the back. Use that housing to hold photovoltaic cells, they would produce enough energy (in daylight) to get the vehicle moving again in about half an hour, spend the half hour lecturing to your teenager at whatever volume fits the situation. If all else fails, plug it into an electrical outlet for ten minuets to get a partial charge, the get moving and let the turbines do the rest.