Re: Any alternatives for conventional gasoline?

On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 10:21:43 -0700, Don Lancaster <don@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Josh Hill wrote:

I'm fairly amazed that people are treating this ordinary engineering
exercise as if it were a proposal to build a warp drive, but I guess I
shouldn't be, since I've seen the phenomenon often enough. Still, I
wish people would do a bit of research before making like they're
oracles: there are inductive vehicle patents available online which
deal with precisely these issues.


The engineering exercise should NOT be treated as a proposal to build a
warp drive because...

A warp drive makes infinitely more sense than inductive coupled roadways do.

Note that rubber tires are not compatible with small airgaps.

Seems to me that "not conducive to" is more accurate: hence the need
for active positioning if efficiency isn't to go down the toilet and
you don't want the pickup apparatus to make physical contact with the
ground. From an engineering perspective, that's fairly
straightforward. From an economic perspective, well, it would
certainly add to the cost of both vehicle and roadway, waste power (I
assume that the secondary would be fairly massive), and reduce
reliability. Which is to say it would be a kludge.

Of course, you could always build giant slot cars . . .

Note that large poles are an enormous waste of resources.

Depends on the alternatives, doesn't it? One could make the same
argument with regards to fossil fuels, or forests and farmland, or
platinum, or the air we breathe.

Induction road drive is ludicrously absurd on both economical and
engineering grounds.

Again, the first seems to me likely, and I've said so consistently. My
point was that there isn't, as several have suggested, a theoretical
barrier to induction-powered vehicles. Their mistake was to assume
that one can't couple the primary and secondary over a large air gap,
but they were thinking transformer design, in which it doesn't make
sense to accommodate a large air gap by increasing the size of the
poles.

--
Josh

"I love it when I'm around the country club, and I hear people talking about the debilitating
effects of a welfare society. At the same time, they leave their kids a lifetime and beyond
of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer. And instead
of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds."

- Warren Buffett
.

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