Welcome, Rodders47. I think it's a good idea, it's just that it seems hard to implement, the same way it's hard to implement electric motors or flywheels in front tyres: too much weight on the un-suspended portions of the car. But, hey, what do we know? The flow of energy is comparable to the one we have in exhausts, I believe.
WhiteBlue wrote:... there are only two ways to grab energy on our planet.
one is to tap into depots build up by the ecology in historic past. we call that fossile energy.
the other way is to utilize what the sun is showering down on us all the time...
First, I would like to point out something I find beautiful: even fossil energy is sun energy. When you burn a log or coal in your chimney or you pump gas in your car, you're using stored sun energy. So, the chimney is just freeing an "old ray of sun" into you. I love that concept and I find it "very poetic"...
Now, about WhiteBlue comment, there are two additional ways to get energy:
Third, nuclear
fission, that is, conventional nuclear reactors, that use "fossil" energy from other stars. You can calculate that if the ratio of U-235 to U-238 in a supernova is 1.65 (a reasonable value), most of the uranium on Earth was created by a single supernova, some 6.5 billion of years ago, although is more probable that it was created by several of them, ranging from 6 billion to 200 million years ago, or so I've read.
There is also a
fourth, much more promessing idea: nuclear
fusion. In essence, you want to create a small sun on Earth. I've been reading about it since the Tokamak design was made a reality in the 70's.
Nowadays, we have two devices that could be (I'm sure they will be) the solution to our predicament:
- HIPER, a
laser inertial confinement device. It works by firing lasers (the rows of green and blue tubes, to the left) into small pellets of hydrogen fuel (contained into the sphere to the right). The device heats the pellets so rapidly that they don't have the time to explode before fision occurs.
It's like creating miniature suns (5 cm or so across) that glow briefly before they extinguish.
Recently (2006) a technique was developed to use much more efficient lasers, which means that the amount of energy input is favorable when compared with the energy output. Construction will start around 2010.
HIPER, laser fusion device
- ITER, a
tokamak device. It works by confining plasma using magnetic fields. Tokamaks have become energy efficient with recent advances in the understanding of the Z-Pinch, a way to confine the plasma so it doesn't touch the walls of the reactor. Plasma, to ignite like the sun, must be at 10 million degrees of temperature and it cools rapidly, so if it touches the walls, the reaction stops.
It's like suspending a small sun (some meters across) in a magnetic field.
Construction of ITER started this year at Candarache, France, and the device will be online in 2011. Btw, Candarache is about 100 km west of Monaco...
DEMO, a more powerful power generator is proposed to start construction in 2010. ITER should provide 10 times the energy input, DEMO should provide 25 times the input. DEMO should provide 2 Gwatts, comparable with conventional power plants.
JET core (Joint European Torus, predecessor of ITER). To the right, an image of the plasma is superimposed on the photo (the purple glow is the plasma)
Before WhiteBlue says so, yes, it's true these are
proposed devices, not real working things, but I'm pretty confident that, after 30 years of continous development, the figures expected for the energy "yield" of these devices are right. We will see a profound change in energy generation before 2020 and (I hope)
newspapers headlines about the success of these techniques in 2012.
Tokamaks can have another grave issue: the tritium you need as fuel has to be produced by conventional nuclear reactors, with the contamination of radioactive byproducts they represent. I hope that clever designs proposed for tokamaks can produce the tritium they need from their own nuclear reactions without the need for
fission reactors to be employed as fuel sources, something like the breeder reactors of today.
All we lack is not a way to
produce electric energy, but to
store it. Batteries were invented more than 2 centuries ago and their energy storage density is ridiculously low.
So, F1 engines in 2020 could look like this:
Emmet Brown and Marty McFly's flux capacitor
Of course, that's a joke, because what we should expect is electric cars, driven by nano-capacitors (if they improve their energy density 100 times or so) or fuel cells (fueled by hydrogen produced through electricity).
We've talked about the profound changes in racing that electric motor-driven cars would represent:
viewtopic.php?t=2599
Some pictures and quotes from that link:
Atom X1 beating a Porsche Carrera
Comment by the Porsche driver:
"It never occurred to me that I would lose," says Kim Stuart, the Porsche's driver. "It was like a light switch. He hit the pedal and was gone."
Atom electronics: total control of traction (no need for traction control at all, it's done through regulation of engine)
The engine that beat a Porsche
That's the future (at least for me), not the pathetic attempts at KERS that FIA is making, as mx_tifosi, WhiteBlue, Miguel and others point out.
I'll play along for the moment.