Alternative automobile fuels

I was snooping around on the web and found an air powered car, and a car powered by used vegetable oil.

What about hydrogen and nuclear?

I guess these just grabbed my attention as sources I have never seen before. The vegie oil car seems to be more of a novelty, besides, anyone driving or following that car might crave fast food.

The air powered car (if perfected) seems it would be a great short trip vehicle.

Originally posted by star882:
What about hydrogen and nuclear?

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<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">I'm sure Darell will tell you all about it, but producing hydrogen takes a lot of electricity, so it would not be very efficient...
As far as nuclear... I don't think this will be considered safe enough, unless you want to have GITD babys in the future...

Hydrogen is an interesting choice for vehicles...the reason it's so popular with the government (Opinion--) is that it's the most abundant resource on earth, You could create a car whose tailpipe emissions consisted of water. It needs an infrastructure so all the gas companies can add hydrogen to their pumps and charge us (The government can tax us too) for it.

Hydrogen would be used with fuel cells to produce electricity for motors. It would be an electric car, you'd just fill it up instead of charge it up.

You loose the convienence of being able to fill-at-home so to speak, but you gain the convienence of being able to "charge" in 5 or 10 minutes.

Problems with hydrogen?
We can't refine it efficiently--yup, hydrogen is the most abundant thing around, but it's (alsmost) always "married" or another element, and geting it to "devorse" is incredibly hard, or rather takes a lot of electricity. It's being worked on but right now it takes so much electricity to refine it that if you look at the whole picture, hydrogen is less efficient than gasoline!

There's no infrastructure--everyone has (or can easily get) electricity, but we don't have a practical way to deliver hydrogen nation, scratch that, worldwide...what good is a hydrogen car if the closest H pump is 30 miles away from your house?

I don't know much about the used vegetable oil fuel other than they did a thing on Channel One (Icky icky icky!) on the kid that came up with it--your (current) car can be converted to it if it's a diesel.

Actually you can burn used vegetable oil in diesel cars and trucks and they actually sell it in some larger cities, I know Seattle and Chicago. It doesn't have sulfur in it so it is extremely clean and it is renewable. I will be getting a VW Jetta TDI diesel, 42-29mpg.

Darell the only issue with diesel is the Sulfur content and now Calif has mandated a low sulfur content diesel, making it actually cleaner to burn then gasoline!

I recall reading something about how the result of that 'marriage' Saaby referred to of hydrogen with another chemical, is a fine powdery substance..I'm not sure if it would be a powder when it is dispensed at the 'hydrogen station' - perhaps a sludge? - but after it is used, it is a dry powder that is stored in the car, where it can be pumped out and recharged with hydrogen in a type of recycling process...Darell, do you consider this when you say the refining of hydrogen is inefficient?

It can be "refined" into a number of different things. One of the newest concepts is getting it out of Borax (the soap) or combining it with borax or something like that...I read it in a recent issue of car and driver, I'll re-read and explain it in more detail later

But maybe this is what you were thinking of?

Why not make a hydrogen generator that uses water and electrcity?
Both items are common at home, so why not make one?

Besides the fact that producing hydrogen at home is going to be dangerous, it still is highly inefficient energywise...

Water is not necessarly the only byproduct of the burning of Hydrogen. The heat of combustioon can cause reactions with the gases in the air to create some nasty stuff.

I run my 2000 Volkswagen Golf TDI (Turbocharged Direct Injection) Diesel on biodiesel or a mixture of biodiesel and regular petroleum based diesel fuel. Biodiesel is vegetable oil methyl esther. Transestherification of vegetable oil makes it less viscous so it will run in a diesel engine without modification. I use it partly for environmental reasons and partly because it is kick *** diesel fuel--low sulphur, high lubricity and cetane and it reduces particulate emissions which is a good thing for a vehicle with exhaust gas recirculation (reduces soot buildup in the EGR and intake systems).

Many people run straight vegetable oil (SVO) in diesel engines, but they almost always run a mixture of SVO and petroleum-based diesel fuel and/or preheat the SVO before it reaches the injectors.

Commercially manufactured biodiesel is available in many cities in the USA and Europe. I get mine through Dr. Dan's Alternative Fuel Werks in the Ballard Neighborhood of Seattle (See www.fuelwerks.com)

For info on TDIs see Fred's TDI Forums at www.tdiclub.com.

For information on biodiesel, check out the Biodiesel link at www.mauigreenenergy.org.

going off topic...

dilettante I have been all over Fred's and am trying to get all the info I can on the TDI. Have you done any mods to yours? Any you would really recommend or not recommend?

by the way I am registered as "nevermab" over on tdiclub.

Wait...I have a really really cool (But not very environmentally friendly) fuel for ya. Have to have some SERIOUS mods to your car to run it, and as soon as you mod your car to take it it becomes very very street illegal. You'll have to take up a career running it down 1/4 mile drag strips in small western towns....

Ready for this awesome fuel?

Jet fuel!!

(Evil laugh)

Originally posted by Brock:
going off topic...

dilettante I have been all over Fred's and am trying to get all the info I can on the TDI. Have you done any mods to yours? Any you would really recommend or not recommend?

by the way I am registered as "nevermab" over on tdiclub.

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<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">My only mods have been to the air-intake and oil filtration systems. I cut out the "snow screens" in the intake snorkel. These tend to get clogged up and are hard to clean (although it doesn't even say to do so in the manual). It's easier just to change the air filter more frequently. I also have a couple after market air filter elements, which I alternate. When I take one out to clean it I replace it with the other. I have K&N and Piper-X elements for the OEM air box. You can read about both of these at Fred's. A lot of people run the Piper-X cone filter, too.

I also installed a bypass oil filtration system from www.oilguard.com.

The only other "mod" I have is a factory metal skid plate which I installed because I take the car to trailheads and it only has 4 1/2" of ground clearance and an aluminum oil pan. Better safe than sorry.

I've been pretty conservative with the mods and researched biodiesel for a year before I started using it. I want this car to last for a long time.

A lot of people also disable the Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) and/or Closed Crankcase Ventilation system. Oil vapor from the CCV system and soot from the EGR system can create deposits in the intake system of TDIs (and other cars). I'm thinking about a CCV filter Racor is supposed to release soon and run biodiesel to reduce particulate emissions (soot) because I did not want to alter the polution controls on my car.

I have a few friends who have chipped their TDIs. Upsolute is the most popular chip. Stock is "good enough" for me--these cars have plenty of low end torque for their weight. They're fun to drive bone stock (but even more fun chipped ).

One close friend of mine has a Jetta that has a chipp, cone air filter, larger fuel injectors, exhaust, etc. etc.--just about every performance mod discussed on Fred's. It is a scary fast car (not just a scary fast diesel).

The cool thing about building TDIs is you can get a really fast car that will still give you 40 mpg IF you can keep your foot out of it.

Oh--you'd probably want HID e-code headlamps as well

P.S. Brock, if you are interested in TDIs, check out the next Northwest get together. There's a pretty large and active group of TDI owners in the Pacific Northwest. Keep an eye on these two forums for info on get togethers:

http://forums.tdiclub.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum&f=23&DaysPrune=5

http://forums.tdiclub.com/NonCGI/ultimatebb.php?ubb=forum;f=18

I'll also e-mail you via your website. You can check out my car and my buddy's moddes one.

Back on topic, you can burn Jet A in a TDI--just make sure you use a lubricity additive. You can burn all kinds of things. People run TDIs on home heating oil, kerosene even though running non-taxed fuel is a no no.

I don't know if this classifys as a fuel type but it is an energy type, but a few years ago, my high school was part of a build your dream car project sponsored by Chrysler. Our idea was reletively ''outthere'' but it has since progressed.

The idea is to store energy in a flywheel that is sealed in a vacuum, suspended by magnetic bearings. Spin the flywheel to 100k and let it provide electricity from a generator. Each 90lb flywheel setup produces 25hp, so a few will be needed. To recharge, just plug up somewhere and spin the flywheels back to 100k, and you are ready to go.

The idea never took off for automotive use, but they are thinking about it for industrial use.

Here is a link

http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/Factory/1723/Fly_Wheels.htm

I remember reading about fly wheels in popular science a long time ago. I'm not sure if at that point they were thinking of that as the only power source or not though. I do remember a picture of the "catastrophic failure" if the vacuum failed! I wonder what having several really high speed gyroscopes in the car would do to the handling. The car sure wouldn't sway side to side very much

Now how did I miss this thread for so long? Wow.

Not sure where to begin.

Biodiesel - is NOT a novely. We have plenty of them running happily around here, and they work quite well.

Hydrogen - I have BIG problems with Hydrogen vehicles. In my eyes the main reason our gov't is supporting them is because they do not exist, won't exist for quite some time, and we are therefor forced to keep burning oil. In fact, the first fuel cell vehicles will probably have gasoline reformers on board. Yup, you'll be powering your electric vehicle with gasoline. Neat. Hydrogen may be everywhere, but batteries can be charged through power outlets... and those are REALLY everywhere!

Deisel - Yes sulfer is the big baddie here. Without it, diesel burns much cleaner, BUT oil is still being consumed and imported from abroad.

Nuclear - I already have that. Most of the electricity that goes into my car comes from our planet's reactor - the sun.

What did I miss?

Originally posted by star882:
Why not make a hydrogen generator that uses water and electrcity?
Both items are common at home, so why not make one?

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<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">The big question is *why* make one? Just so you can have hydrogen to shove into an electric car? If you directly charged batteries instead, you'd need half the electricity to drive any distance.