Beer... Apparently the Swedish authorities nab nearly 760,000 litres of alcohol being smuggled into the country each year. So they donate it to public transit! Beer is used to produce a form of biogas which is suitable for powering a variety of vehicles. So far these include public service buses and at least one train, although it has yet to be offered to the public to buy.
Fryer Oil... Pub and takeaway owners have all found a useful source of extra income. If it is for your own use only you can legally avoid paying the tax. Also most cars and vans need little in the way of modification once the oil has been filtered, although some users prefer to mix it with normal fuel rather than using it straight.
Coal Dust... Rudolf Diesel experimented with coal dust as a possible fuel for his patented compression-ignition engine. His backers were particularly keen to find a use for the mountains of dust found in Germany's industrial Ruhr Valley. Getting the mix right proved problematic, and after some unplanned explosions Diesel settled on peanut oil rather than the mineral oil to which his named has since been applied. Interest in coal dust has never entirely disappeared, however, and having been used in power stations it could yet make a return.
Coal Gas... Acute fuel shortages during the WWII encouraged all sorts of experimentation. In London, Edinburgh and other British cities a number of private cars and buses were converted to run on toxic coal gas.
Gravity... In 1911 Isaac Smyth somehow managed to successfully patent the design for a car powered by gravity. A series of weights were hand-winched up to roof level and on being released converted their gravitational potential into forward motion via a series of pulleys and cables. Unfortunately the driven wheels had to be jacked up in order to raise the weights, so the real source of power was the driver's own muscles.
Hamsters... Toyota's fabulous Idea Olympics is an annual event enabling factory staff to show their most outrageous designs. Previous efforts have included a pedal-powered, 22-legged centipede and a giant motorized hand which moves along by bending its fingers. Another was the Hamster Car, which was propelled by amplifying the electric power generated by several on-board rodents running round in their traditional wheels.
High Explosives... In 1919, the Miller 'TNT Special' is a famous American racer, and not to be confused with an extraordinary 1931 attempt on the Land Speed Record. The Miller design used an explosive cocktail which included TNT, dynamite, nitroglycerin and gasoline. Unfortunately the precise details are not known as the car itself is not thought to have survived.
Paint... A 2005 report in National Geographic confirmed that scientists had made a significant breakthrough in their work with spray-on solar cells. A year later staff at the Materials Research Center at Swansea University confirmed that they too could collect the sun's rays using another paint-like material. This could one day be sprayed onto buildings or of course car bodies, turning a vehicle into one vast self-propelled solar cell.
Diapers... Called pyrolysis, involves breaking down the waste products into gas and fuel oil in a sealed container in an oxygen-free environment. In 2007 a power company in Quebec started exploring the possibilities of this technology, spurred on by a seemingly endless supply of disposable diapers pouring into local landfill sites at a rate of 600 million a year. The end result is similar to diesel, and apparently no worse smelling.
Sawdust... The most popular route is by gasification, drawing off the vapours produced when the wood is burned under controlled conditions. The end product, called producer gas, is less efficient than petroleum, by anything from 30 to 50 per cent. But it is also dramatically cheaper - about 1.5 cents a litre - even once the cost of the generating equipment is taken into account and assuming you do not have a local sawmill from which to scavenge the waste.
No comments:
Post a Comment