Not baseball

I "think" the answer is that it takes more energy to create enough power than the vehicle can produce.

No I'm not an engineer but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night.

The route I use every day to commute is posted with dozens of these signs...my hybrid Prius never runs out of a charge...trouble is my brakes need to be replaced every 1000 miles or so!

quote:

Why can't an electric vehicle have unlimited range by recharging it's own batteries while it's moving?

Those are called perpetual motion machines and they cannot exist because it violates the laws of nature. The US Patent Office will not reveiw any application for patent involving perpetual motion principles. Basically, it violates the laws of thermodynamics that stipulate that energy can neither be created nor destroyed but merely converted from one form to another.

In the case of the car and supplying its own charge, this would work if there were no other outside forces acting upon the car such as gravity and friction to slow the car down. The losses attributed to those forces and others can not be recovered or overcome by merely storing charge on the battery from the resultant motion. The way these hybrid cars operate, they use gasoline to power the cars during recharge times and after charging run off the batteries. Without the gasoline assistance to power the engines during the recharge times, the car will eventually come to a stop.

Same principles apply to the windmill and the water wheel. Without assistance from the wind or the water, the wheels or blades come to a stop by the frictional and other forces that act to slow them down. Basically, there are no free lunches

"Basically, it violates the laws of thermodynamics..."

You're right CD...and the laws of Thermopolis, WY too! A Thermopolis policeman nailed me for whirring along in my Prius at 37 in a 25. I had that baby floored! And that Chinook tailwind didn't hurt either.


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"...the car will eventually come to a stop."

You're right again CD...my Prius did come to a stop...right after I had run out of extension cord...they've just got to come out with something longer than the one mile cord...I would've out run him too if that cord hadn't come unplugged.


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"Basically, there are no free lunches."

Bingo CD! Although the few meals, including a couple of lunches, they served me in the lock-up were free...I didn't have to pay for them.

Cleveland Dad nailed it. You cannot create or destroy energy.

quote:

In the case of the car and supplying its own charge, this would work if there were no other outside forces acting upon the car such as gravity and friction to slow the car down. The losses attributed to those forces and others can not be recovered or overcome by merely storing charge on the battery from the resultant motion. The way these hybrid cars operate, they use gasoline to power the cars during recharge times and after charging run off the batteries. Without the gasoline assistance to power the engines during the recharge times, the car will eventually come to a stop.

It really wouldn't work because you have to get the car moving first to start the process and this takes some type of energy. Even if you pushed the car by hand to get it started, you would have to consider the bologna sandwich you had for lunch as fuel which your body has converted to usable energy.

Woodrow - rofl -

quote:

Even if you pushed the car by hand to get it started, you would have to consider the bologna sandwich you had for lunch as fuel which your body has converted to usable energy.

Fungo - you are correct as usual I didn't feel the need to explain the "Flinstones" scenario but yes, even Fred Flinstone and Barney Rubble required some energy to get their cars moving

The amazing thing about the Flinstones was that once they got their cars moving, they seemed to cruise along fine without further assitance

The bologna powered car that Fungo discusses. Could also be fueled from bronto burgers

ClevelandDad,

WOW,

Did you stay at the Holiday Inn too?

technically it is possible that the alteneator recharge the batteries when the car is moving, but the "politic power" still having too much interest in Oil.

It is possible. It is called solar power. Unfortunately, there isn't really enough energy available from the amount of sunlight hitting a car to keep it running at high speeds and going up and down hills. Hopefully, someday we'll come up with more efficient solar cells and be able to supplement the batteries effectively with solar energy. For now, the weight and cost of solar panels don't payoff in terms of improved mileage at a reasonable cost.

But just like the other posters have noted you can't recharge your batteries just because you are moving. Charging the batteries would slow the car down and the batteries would have to produce even more power to keep the car going. The result would be a car that ran out of juice even quicker. What the advanced electric cars do is use the charging system to slow down instead of using brakes as much as possible. That recovers a small amount of energy and helps the batteries last longer but that is as far as it goes.

Fuel Cell will possibly be the next powers source that could have characteristics of pseudo perpetual motion

I think the De Lorean with the flux capacitor is the answer.

Although I am way too blonde to really "get" what CD and Fungo assert...it still seems like the motion of the wheel could create the whole turbine effect generated off of water.
You both really ruined my inventive illusions of taking the whole popsicle stick in the wheel spokes to the next level.

quote:

Unfortunately, there isn't really enough energy available from the amount of sunlight hitting a car to keep it running at high speeds and going up and down hills.

Couldn't you just hold a magnifying glass out the window, pointed at one of the solar panels?

Let me know - Krakatoa, Holiday Inn room 324, Thermopylous, Wyoming.

wow you guy's know some stuff!

I'm getting dizzy just reading it all ...

quote:

Originally posted by 20dad:
wow you guy's know some stuff!

It's amazing what you can learn when you nose around the pantry.


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Gold star for you FutureBack.Mom...you're absolutely correct!

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FutureBackMom...

That is one of the funniest things I have ever seen posted.

Yeah, I know, cadDAD needs to get out more....

cadDAD

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quote:

Originally posted by FutureBack.Mom:
I'm getting dizzy just reading it all ...

We are allowed to have fun every now and then on the hsbbweb - right?

I don't tend to get involved with threads that deal with Linear vs Rotational hitting or what the implication of Greg Maddux's mechanics were when he was still in high school.

Pythagorus must be rolling in his grave right now The blond has indeed identified the correct position in space that x is located via the vector arrow, thus her answer is correct. If the question were interpreted as find the value for the hypotenuse x when the value of the other sides were 4 and 3 cm respectively, then we all know that x is equal to the square root of the sum of the squares of the opposite two sides (learned from the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz), thus x equals 5 cm.

Since the hybrids recharge by braking, I can only assume that it is not possible to generate enough energy from braking to power the entire car without the help of an additional energy source. Plus, CD says it's so and if there's one thing i've learned in 25 years as a trademark/copyright lawyer working with patent lawyers, it is best not to argue with them about this type of stuff.

Aww...don't listen to CD! He doesn't know what he's talking about.

This is a very interesting "not baseball" topic. I did not stay at a Holiday Inn last night, but my bachelor's degree is in science, so it's fun hearing everyone flex that part of their brains (especially Woodrow, hilarious as usual ... ... but FBMom, that was really funny too)!

I'm wondering if this fuel and power topic might be analogous to the development of computers and the Internet:

Parents my age, think back to when you were in college, 20 to 30 years ago. What did the Internet mean to you? I had not heard of it. How large was a computer, and how many people did you know who owned one? How much did a computer with minimal processing power cost?

Think back to just 10 to 15 years ago. Wasn't it cool to be able to hook up a computer - small enough to sit on your desk at home - to an Internet connection in your home? And how about when high speed Internet became available ... and then became affordable?

Now, I am working on one computer at my home with ten times the processing power and 100 times the hard disk space of a decade ago, using a super high speed connection (except today; it is not working and I'm on dialup, but that's beside the point). My husband and son each have their own laptops and connect through mine as a wireless server, moving to anywhere in the house they wish without losing their connection. Today I brought a laptop from home to work, sat in a conference room to demonstrate a Flash widget I had developed, and connected wirelessly and instantly to a high speed network there. I could not have conceived of any of that 10 years ago, and certainly not 20 years ago.

So as I read your posts above, I started dreaming a bit. Ten years from now, what will be the energy/power evolutionary equivalent of the development of the wireless high speed internet connection and modern laptops? Solar panels that are tiny enough, efficient enough, and inexpensive enough to be featured on every car without adding much to the cost or weight of the car? Or a series of small but powerful solar-energy generating stations along every highway system, with "wireless-equivalent" devices in every car which absorb needed power from the stations as they speed along?

Or 20 years from now, will we even travel in cars on a daily basis? Or will we commute via personal transportation capsules (PTC's, I just made it up) which glide through the air following computer generated paths from origin to destination???



Julie

Julie - you ask great questions.

BTW - my background is Engineering but I don't consider myself smarter than the next guy. A carpenter or a plumber could do cartwheels around me in their areas of expertise.

I started with microprocessors in 1979. Back then there was the Motorola 6800 and the Intel 8086. There was no Microsoft. Apple made the first commercially available computer and they were limited in their capabilities. Anybody remember the game pong or space invaders?

The first computer I owned was a TRS-80 from Radio Shack that came with 32 kbits of memeory which I upgraded to 64k. It was programmed in Basic. To offer some perspective, many of our modern computers come equipped with several gig of random access memory. Say two billion now divided by 32k then equals over 6000 times more memory now. The processsing speeds were a few million times per second versus several billion times per second now a days.

What do I see? Imagine devices where I can read your thoughts and visa versa without the need to type it all out. That will be the future for better or worse.

"Parents my age, think back to when you were in college, 20 to 30 years ago. What did the Internet mean to you? I had not heard of it."

Lucky you Mom...Al Gore was my roommate at Harvard...night after night and all day long that is all he would ever talk about...blah, blah, blah..."Enough of this nonsense about the Internet Al...grab your blankie, stay very warm and go to sleep!"


"Think back to just 10 to 15 years ago. Wasn't it cool to be able to hook up a computer..."

Nope ...can't figure out how to hook them up now and didn't know how to do it then.


"So as I read your posts above, I started dreaming a bit. 20 years from now, some other system that we couldn't possibly foresee because it is so different from every concept of energy today?"

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quote:

Or 20 years from now, will we even travel in cars on a daily basis? Or will we commute via personal transportation capsules (PTC's, I just made it up) which glide through the air following computer generated paths from origin to destination???

MN Mom... don't you watch movies? When they tried that, the guy turned into a fly.

cadDAD

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CADad,

Darn, I obviously spend too much time in front of a computer and not enough watching TV!

Woodrow, sorry, I changed the ending of my post while you were posting a quote. I added my little futuristic prediction of the PTC's off the top of my head, but as CADad said, that probably has been tried before! Back to the drawing board (or dreaming board).

quote:

Originally posted by ClevelandDad:
What do I see? Imagine devices where I can read your thoughts and visa versa without the need to type it all out. That will be the future for better or worse.

I don't need one of those futuristic thought gleaning machines to read your mind right at this moment CD...thinking that I should go jump in a lake was fairly easy to figure out, but what amazes me is that you knew my good Scottish buddy Lorne would be taking the plunge as well. You're scary good CD.

Woodrow, I'm waiting...

...

...

(for a photo of "back to the drawing board) ...

All you need is your imagination!

NOTE: Batteries not included.

CAUTION: Contains small parts which, if swallowed, may constitute a choking hazard.

CAUTION: This drawing board has been manufactured with machinery possibly used in the processing of peanuts.

Personally, I'm a proponent of vehicles powered by renewable resources.

No comment.

"Personally, I'm a proponent of vehicles powered by renewable resources."


I hear you Eddie G. That's one resource I'm flush with.

"No comment."


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It's such a bother to have to get suited up just to go to the john..
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I guess I should do as Doc wants me to do...take a fistful of these each day.

Nice follow-up GotWood4Sale.

For those who work at the JPL and, to the members of the HSBBW with a recreational interest in aeronautical engineering, this one of a kind “Port-O-Jet” is powered by a 50-year-old, 750-pound Boeing jet turbine that can top 46 mph with a tailwind.

JUST DON’T STAND DOWNWIND!

( Brain spinning inside of shortstopmom's head.-if it really is even a brain at all. (?) Its not a for-sure thing anymore after reading this thread. It is apparant that others from the HSBBW have a real brain,..and hers is perhaps a combination of mush and cheesey fried gritz. )

The best I can do to add to this thread:

Warm muffin, anyone?

Wood, where did you find the pic of my mother-in-law. Thats her sister and nephew in the wagon.

The picture coachric? Oh I found it as I was burroing into a stack of boxes full of old pictures...how ironic that I would dig one up with your relatives in it!

And shortstopmom...what a delicious contribution you have made this morning...thanks!

eddiegaedel...look what I found!

They're looking for a Lavatory Assistant requiring a Learner's Permit or equivalent. Must be proficient in the use of a toilet scrub brush and fire extinguisher. There isn't any doubt in my mind where I'd be working this summer...in that sweet ride of your life!

I demand to know how FBM got her hands on MY geometry test.