Kids Build Soybean Fueled Sports Car

Sterling D. Allan writes "High school students from West Philadelphia High School have designed a sports car that can go from zero to 60 in four seconds and get more than 50 miles to the gallon on soy bean oil. CBS News reports that this unlikely car was the star last week at the Philadelphia Auto Show. Once again, are we seeing the fabled instance of revolutionary technology coming not from the big corporations, but from some unlikely garage. Maybe these guys will open source their design."

Biodiesel will have to run on Algae

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing new here.

Diesels can be run on almost any kind of oil: corn, soy, whale...but probably will end up running on a kind of algae [unh.edu] since it is by weight 50% oil or so. Consider this info I got from the wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:

        * Soybean: 40 to 50 US gal/acre (35 to 45,000 L/km)
        * Rapeseed: 110 to 145 US gal/acre (100 to 130,000 L/km)
        * Mustard: 140 US gal/acre (130,000 L/km)
        * Jatropha: 175 US gal/acre (160,000 L/km)
        * Palm oil: 650 US gal/acre (580,000 L/km) [6]
        * Algae: 10,000 to 20,000 US gal/acre (9,000,000 to 18,000,000 L/km)

Sounds economically and environmentally tenable to me. Why economically? We won't have a choice in the matter as economical sustainability will have to equal environmental sustainability since the environment itself is taking such a beating; the exernalities must be considered when it comes to industry since we get exactly one planet to live on. Since the algae doesn't compete with farm land or water, it is the only teneable solution. Emmissions are just fine. The CO2 coming out was the CO2 taken in by the algae during production. For this reason I contend that this is a good way to sequester extra CO2 in addition to closing the carbon cycle: local, state and national governments could subsidize the production of algae-biodiesel (it's cheaper than you might think) to not only lower the the costs of fuel (a boon since the US economy, for example, hingies on cheap fuel) but also clean the air. There are slightly higher NOx emissions but they can be fixed with catalytic converters. Also see this [wikipedia.org].

Re:cost of fuel

[sumdumass]

Trying to run the world off soybeans is an invitation to slash and burn the rain forest for farmland and kill everything in the rivers with fertilizer.

We don't need to run the world off of soybeans. We just need to release a presence of it enough to bring other fuel costs down.

It is a "glue" until alternative means (solar,nuclear,hydrogen,whatever..) can be built into the econemy. If we were to go completley (fossil)oil free today, there are so many cars and other machines that would be useless our econemy and possibly civilization would colapse. Soy oil and ethyl alcohols could keep these machines going until we can replace them with differently fueled vehicle or machines. The average car will last around 15+ years. After about 5 the first owner usualy gets rid of it and it changes hands until some poor sap gets it and it is the best they can afford and the cycle continues. After about 25 years, the car is probably scraped, recycled or preserved in some fasion were the transition from one type fuel to another totaly non dependent oil could be resonably done.

One of the most interesting parts of this article is the mention of sportscar and 50 mpg in the same sentence. Most if not all production diesel (soy bean oil's substitute)powered cars get less then 46 mpg. Some don't even get 25mpg if you count the trucks. Diesel fuel is said to have a higher amount of stored energy and is considered more efficient then soy oil. This same system getting 50mpg in soy might lend diesel fueled car the ability to get 60+mpg while still retaining performance.

Hey, you're missing the point!

[throbi]

You simply don't get it, do you?! Bio-diesel is not about how much you spend on gas.

BIO-DIESEL IS ABOUT CLEAN ENERGY!

While petro-diesel adds extra amount of CO2 (carbon-dioxide) to the atmosphere it causes the green-house effect that heats up the Earth, melts the glaciers, the icecap on the poles, dries out lakes, kills species. Yes, the green-house effect is caused by YOU, too!

Bio-diesel is clean. The soy (peanut, canola, ...) plant through the process called photosynthesis emits O2 (oxygen) and collects the CO2 (carbon-dioxide) in exchange. When you burn the bio-diesel in your engine, the SAME amount of CO2 gets back to the atmosphere, not more! It's a closed cycle. No harm done.

Bio-diesel has other advantages, as well. It's non-toxic. It's non-flamable, ie. does not explode during an accident. Get yourself educated about this matter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel [wikipedia.org]

In Europe there are already many gas stations that sell bio-diesel. And is cheaper, too! But the USA... Come on! Have you heard of the Kyoto pact? Countries by signing that pact made a promise that they will reduce their CO2-emission. Your president did not sign that pact (it was during his first mandate). Because he did not want to tell to his "fellow americans" - to YOU - to get your fat ass out of your car, while he knew, if he does that, he does not get re-ellected. Many lives would have been spared in Iraq... And while YOU can drive your car and have your daily road-rage YOU don't give a shit, that the 4 giants: your Government, the Car builders, the Oil Companies and Weapon Manufacturers go happily hand-in-hand. Ever wondered how come no american company builds hybrids? (Except for those couple of thousand pick-ups GM built for Mimami)...

(No, I don't own a car, I ride each day 10 miles on my bycicle to get to work and I'm healty and have a beautyful body and no overweight. When I rent a car I rent a diesel and I tank bio-diesel only.)

4 seconds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone's regurgitating the same old environmental debates as always. What I'm wondering is how did they manage 0-60 in 4.0 seconds?! A 2005 Mustang GT can't break 5. A 2005 Corvette can do 4.2. Most 'reasonably' priced Porches can't break 4.

http://www.albeedigital.com/supercoupe/articles/0- 60times.html [albeedigital.com]

Re:Food-as-fuel

[spun]

As one of the people involved in this fiasco, let me fill in the details. The group is called Food-Not-Bombs. When I worked with them, we would get donations from supermarkets, wholesale food distributors and bagel shops. We would take the food to volunteer's kitchens and cook soup, usually around 15 gallons. Then we would take it to city hall or the UN plaza and feed people. Right in public where the tourists could see them. Frank Jordan, San Francisco's mayor of the time, was trying to sweep the homeless under the rug. So he was pretty pissed about the whole thing.

What they said was, you can't serve food in public without a permit. And, by the by, they did away with the permit process. Oh, you could still feed people in public if you had a permit, but no one could get one. We kept doing it anyway. So he called in the special squads.

I've watched these goons slam my friends into the ground and drag them off by their hair. For feeding people. They dumped the soup in the gutter, in front of all the hungry people. They poured bleach on the bagels. So we got creative. We would stage five or six fake servings, and while they were hassling the people with the empty buckets, the real serving would go on quietly. Or we would stand in the fountain and serve. The cops hate to get wet.

There were plenty of cameras. I still have tapes. I could show you one where they slam this cute little 5'1" girl down onto the pavement and stand on her back while cuffing her hands behind her, then nearly dislocating her shoulders dragging her off by the cuffs. Fun stuff, but oddly none of the monied interests that own the media had any desire to show those videos.

Sure, there was a big backlash against dear old Frank, and some people even credit the bruhaha for helping get someone else elected. Unfortunately, that someone was Willy Brown, a slick machine Democrat who knew that if he just made things very difficult without actually using the sort of over the top fascist antics that Jordan had, eventually the silly hippies would get bored and go chain themselves to trees somewhere, which is exactly what happened. At the height of Jordan's repression, Food not Bombs served twice a day. Last time I checked, they were serving twice a week.

Re:Food-as-fuel

[Spy Hunter]

Wow, so many questions here could have been answered had there been any real technical information in the article. As it turns out the power plant is an ordinary VW engine which can run on ordinary diesel in addition to various biodiesels including soybean-derived ones. Here's the kind of info I wish Slashdot would put in their articles:

The high school kids have a website [penn-partners.org] and picture/video gallery [gambitdesign.com]. The kids didn't build the car from scratch; it is a kit car [k-1attack.com] based on a Honda Accord chassis. It uses a 1.9L VW TDi (Turbo Direct Injection) diesel (200hp) engine as its main power source driving the rear wheels, and has a 200hp electric motor attached to the front wheels. The electric motor is driven by a bank of ultracapacitors, so it has excellent power for short bursts of acceleration, but when not accelerating the vehicle is powered solely by the turbocharged diesel, so the mileage figure is the same as what you would get if it was not a hybrid (actually it would probably be better, especially since it doesn't do regenerative braking AFAIK).

An Attack racing kit costs about $20,000 (plus shipping, tax, import fees) plus you need a 1990-93 Accord. The resulting car is not street legal, and certainly not very comfortable. You can buy them preassembled, much more comfortable, and street legal for Europe for $70,000 but they're not hybrids and not stripped-down racing kits so likely heavier. Not sure how much the turbo diesel, electric motor, and ultracapacitors cost.

Ultracapacitors are very cool technology [maxwell.com]; IMHO they are likely to come out of the wings, completely replace batteries in almost all applications, and finally produce a viable traditional fully electric car long before fuel cells are ready. Ultracapacitors are already on a Moore's-law-like curve, and nanotech seems poised to help them jump ahead even faster. Ultracapacitors are ideal for car powerplant duty: they can discharge any amount of energy up to their total stored at a moment's notice; they can recharge *just as fast* as they discharge, and they do not degrade in performance with use. They are immune to shock and temperature extremes. There are no chemical reactions involved, so little excess heat and no dangerous gases are generated under any load and there is little danger of chemical leaks.

Ultracapacitors have only recently become practical for applications like this, which is perhaps why we haven't seen any developments quite like this yet from the lumbering car industry. But I would expect to start seeing ultracapacitor-boosted hybrids fairly soon, and I would also expect completely ultracapacitor-powered cars, with no other onboard power plant, in 10-20 years.

Re:Why Farming for Gas Sucks

[jakuaii]

Farming, done the right way, is *not* grossly destructive to the ground. There are regions here in Europe that have been farmed for several thousands of years, and they are still very fertile. Plants do suck nutritients from the ground, but also from the air and solved in the water (minerals); good farming practices such as crop rotation let the soil recover in-between crops.

Of course, every climate and region has different soil. Directly transferring the techniques from soils in mild climate zones to those in the rainforest or sahel zone has proven very destructive. But with the right techniques, it seems that even rainforest soil can stay fertile (and the reason for forest destruction is that people keep on moving and burning down more forest because the soil becomes infertile over time).

So, your argument that oils from farm crops are not viable as fuel because they destroy the soil is flawed. And solar collectors and wind turbines are not the catch-all either and have their own problems. A mix of all these technologies seems to be the way to go.

Re:Why Farming for Gas Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure that there is much that can be done to make farming perfectly safe for the land as well as the outside environment. Off the top of my head are a couple ways this can either be done or demonstrated. First off, Ancient Isreal. The Mosaic law had a command of a sabbath year for crops. That meant, that for six years, you could farm a plot of land with nothing special being done, then, for the seventh year, that land was granted a sabbath, and could not be worked at all. This has another name now, namley crop rotation (anyone who plays Age of Empires know about this).

Also, relating to the so-called damage to the farmed land and outside environment, what about the state of Maine? About 100 years ago, this state used to be 20% forest, and 80% farmland. Now, the numbers are reversed! There is about 80% forest (hence thats why I live in the sticks) and 20% farmland. How much damage could have been done over who knows how much farming, if most of that land now supports a large and growing ecosystem?

I think that the point here though, is education. Not everyone knows about crop rotation and the smart way to farm, but there isn't really a need for super expensive means, these are all fairly simple.