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Fueling your Car

Tesla Gets A Semi And Updated Roadster.

It’s been hinted at, guessed about, and now it’s for real. Tesla has given us a semi. 2019 is the year that is currently scheduled for first delivery and reservations are currently being taken in the US for just five thousand American dollars.Tesla has unveiled the new truck at a lavish event and simply stated, the design and specifications are stunning.

  • Zero to 60 mph in five seconds, unladen,
  • Zero to 60 mph in twenty seconds with an 80000 pound (over 36200 kilos) load,
  • Will climb a five degree slope at a steady 65 mph,
  • No shifting and clutching mechanism, regenerative braking recovers 98% of energy and no moving engine parts reduces maintenance, costs, and wear,
  • New megachargers add 400 miles range in thirty minutes,
  • Enhanced Autopilot, the Tesla Semi features Automatic Emergency Braking, Automatic Lane Keeping, Lane Departure Warning, and event recording,
  • Has an autonomous convoy mode, where a lead truck can control following trucks. Tesla has also changed the way we view a semi, with the cabin designed to be driver-centric, and with stairs to allow better entry and exit from the cabin. The cabin itself will allow standing room and for the driver two touchscreens for ease of use and providing extra information at a glance.

Tesla has also revealed a throwback to their origins, with a revamped Roadster. It’s also some numbers that, if proven, are truly startling. Consider a 0-100 kph time of 1.9 seconds, a standing 400 metre time of 8.8 seconds, 0 – 160 kph of just 4.2 seconds, over 250 miles per hour top speed and a range of over 600 miles. It’ll be all wheel drive, a four seater, have a removable glass roof, and will start at a current mooted price of US$200000.

More information can be found via The Tesla website

Information provided courtesy of Tesla.

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Uh-Oh, I’ve Used the Wrong Fuel. Now What?

As humans, we’re prone to an error or two from time to time. In fact, we could hardly consider ourselves human if we were perfect and not making the odd mistake. And while it’s not common to mix up different fuel types when putting them into your vehicle, it can and does happen. After all, for those pump nozzles to be colour-coded, and even slightly different fits, someone must have realised there was a problem. However, even if you end up making this surprisingly not so uncommon mistake, you can rectify the issue and minimise the prospect of any long-term damage to your vehicle.

When petrol is inserted into diesel vehicles, the more common mix-up, the engine and fuel injector system are most prone to issues. Petrol acts as a solvent to reduce the lubrication within a diesel fuel pump, in turn creating weakness within the diesel fuel pump. Where metals make contact with each other, a lack of lubrication can mean that tiny fragments are created. The impact of these fragments can be notable as they make their way through the rest of the fuel system. Engines potentially may also be exposed to damage as a result of the extreme and ill-regulated compression of petrol fuel.

Although diesel used in petrol engines still has the chance to create catastrophic damage, petrol engines tend to suffer immediate performance issues that are symptomatic of a fuel mix-up. This may include a poorly running vehicle, or one that won’t start at all.

If you’ve realised you’ve made a mistake, the most fundamental rule is to refrain from starting the ignition. As soon as you switch that key, fuel is circulated right through the system, extensively expanding the areas at risk.

Your first point of call should be to ask a licensed towing agency to transport the vehicle to a workshop premises, or alternatively, you will need to put the car into neutral and push it away. The problem with the latter approach however, is that there are few places immediately near a service station where it is appropriate to syphon fuel. Doing this on the side of a road, particularly major roads where service stations are located, is not the most logical location. Furthermore, you also run the risk of polluting the environment via waterways and the ground.

If on the other hand, you don’t immediately realise your error and only start to notice performance issues a short time after fuelling up, stop immediately and arrange for your vehicle to be towed away. The damage at this point, and certainly beyond, is more likely to be meaningful if left longer without being addressed. Diesel systems are likely to require a rework of the whole fuel system or worse, while petrol engines are more likely to need the fuel drained, lines flushed and filter changed.

Using the wrong petrol grade however, is of less concern. Although a lower grade still has the potential to have wider implications for a high-grade system, this is more reserved for specific vehicles. Even some high performance vehicles will slug away on a lower grade without any lasting damage, only a temporary reduction in performance levels. And if you fill up with a high grade fuel in your 91ULP vehicle, learn from your mistake and appreciate that the only damage was a few dollars difference between the cost in fuel grades – certainly not a few thousand dollars in repairs!

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Pee Power: It’s No Joke (No, Honestly; We Really Mean It This Time)

fuelcellQuite a few years ago, when this blog site was just starting out, we published an April Fool’s day article that claimed that scientists had worked out how to run a car engine on pee.  We intended this as a joke but it looks as though the last laugh’s on us.  There really is a way to run a vehicle on urine.

This is not to say that the white-coated ones have come up with a system by which you refuel your vehicle by taking a very, very large drink of water then… well, use your imagination! Instead, it’s a system where hydrogen is extracted from urine and is then used in hydrogen fuel cells to power a vehicle.

In fact, according to Gerardine Botte of Ohio University, who developed the process of getting hydrogen out of urine in 2009, it’s easier to get the hydrogen out of wee than out of water. In urea (one of the compounds of urine), there’s four hydrogen atoms per molecule rather than two, and they’re not holding chemical hands as tightly, so they’re easy to split off with a cheap little nickel-based electrode that uses 0.37 V to grab the hydrogen rather than the 1.23 V needed to split water up into H2 and O.

This is very good news for the sustainable fuel world. Hydrogen fuel cells are the next big thing. In fact, Toyota , the people who really popularised the hybrid electric vehicle with the ground-breaking Prius are set to launch the world’s first mass-produced fuel cell vehicle, known as the Mirai (which has already been released in Japan and California).

So how does hydrogen fuel cell technology work?

A fuel cell is kind of like a battery in that it produces an electrical current that can then be used to power a motor. However, unlike a battery, it needs to be supplied non-stop with fuel, which is usually hydrogen and water. There are several different types of fuel cell out there but in general, what happens is this:

  • Hydrogen molecules flow in at one side and the anode catalyst nicks their electrons (a hydrogen atom contains one proton and one electron). This leaves the hydrogen molecules with a positive electrical charge, while the electrons start the circuit buzzing.
  • The positively charged hydrogen molecules are pulled through the electrolyte towards the cathode.
  • At the cathode, the positively charged molecules meet up with the electrons again. They also meet up with oxygen molecules that have been coming in the other way.
  • The oxygen, hydrogen and free electrons react and produce H2O, which leaves as exhaust.

If you want this in more visual form (and don’t mind a little promo material), watch Toyota’s explanation here:

Each individual fuel cell only produces a wee bit of electrical current, so to be really efficient, you need a whole bank of them.

The main snag with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles so far is the usual problem with any new technology: the infrastructure problem. Hybrid and plug-in electric vehicles are already facing this problem, namely the issue of “topping up”. One of the problems that will have to be overcome is that it’s not a wise idea to have large amounts of pure hydrogen hanging around for any length of time as it’s really, really explosive (heard of the Hindenberg disaster, anyone?). However, seeing as we can cope with other highly flammable materials like LPG, acetylene and even petrol, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

The other issue is getting the hydrogen. Yes, it’s an abundant molecule but it tends to be tied up to other molecules so it has to be stripped off. Methane is a commonly used potential source of hydrogen, but you have to get the methane from somewhere, usually as a waste product of industries such as our sugar cane industry. Extracting the hydrogen for use as fuel is fiddly compared to just producing and pumping ethanol from the same source, so it’s usually the ethanol that wins out.

This is kind of why the discovery that you can get the hydrogen out of urea pretty easily is rather exciting, especially as the leftover molecules after you’ve removed the hydrogen are nitrogen molecules, which have potential to be used as fertiliser (in fact, urea is currently used as fertiliser, as any old-fashioned home gardener will tell you). Let’s face it: if there’s one thing we’re not going to run out of in a huge hurry is pee. If we’ve got an increasing human population and we all have to keep drinking, then we’re all going to widdle. In fact, as an extra bonus, if we’re all saving our pee to use in a fuel cell vehicle, this will reduce pressure on the waste water system which means that there will be more water for use in agriculture and for drinking, which will help reduce world hunger, etc. etc. Human pee isn’t the only source, either, as the process works with just about any sort of urine, including cow, sheep and horse pee.

Hydrogen fuel cell technology has been tried in Australia when Perth was trialling a set of buses running on hydrogen. Here, we’re lagging behind the US, Germany, Japan and the UK somewhat. Perth had the only hydrogen fuelling station for the now-discontinued bus trial.

It’s all rather exciting, really, as there’s plenty of potential. Here’s to Pee Power!

Safe and happy driving,

Megan http://credit-n.ru/offers-zaim/turbozaim-zaimy-online-bez-otkazov.html

The Biofuel Potential of Elephant Grass

What’s a big fluffy-looking grass that could be one of the answers to dwindling fossil fuel supplies?  The answer is Miscanthus – also known as elephant grass.

MIscanthus_Formatted

Elephant grass (Miscanthus × giganteus) has been getting a bit of interest from the biofuel boffins since as early as the 1980s. And it’s got a fair bit of promise. It’s not an oil-producing plant but it does make a good feedstock for ethanol.

Elephant grass is a perennial (plant it once and then it just keeps on going) that grows from rhizomes (that’s big fat roots).  It puts out fresh shoots every spring, grows up to 3 metres high in summer. In the autumn, it starts to go to sleep, sending a lot of the nutrients (including nitrogen and carbon) underground to the soil and the roots (and also smothers a few weeds with the shed leaves).  This leaves tall stems that are kind of like bamboo standing.  These stems are harvested in late winter or early spring before the new leaves start poking up again, and it’s the stems that get used as an ethanol feedstock.  Then the cycle begins again.

Now, there are a number of issues that have to be tackled when it comes to finding a good plant source of biofuel. Firstly, there’s the land issue. There’s only a certain amount of arable land in the world, and with the global population growing the way that it is, we’re going to need quite a lot of it to feed us all (we probably also need to do something about the amount of food that gets wasted every year, but that’s another story).  Then come the issues with water: again, there’s only so much fresh water out there at any one time for people and animals and plants to use, even if the water cycle means that it all keeps circulating. And you’ve got pesticides: if a crop gets a lot of pests eating it, then farmers need to dump on the pesticides, which (a) takes up a lot of resources and (b) puts a whole lot of junk into the soil and water.

It’s an added bonus if a plant used as a biofuel feedstock is pretty easy-care. That way, it doesn’t mean that the farmers use heaps of diesel in the process of ploughing, sowing, harrowing, weeding, fertilising and harvesting.  Plants that have other benefits also get big tick marks.

Stems of elephant grass ready for harvest at the end of winter.

Stems of elephant grass ready for harvest at the end of winter.

So how does elephant grass stand up?

Elephant grass has a high yield per hectare. This means that for every acre of elephant grass planted, you get a maximum of 25 tons of biomass (depending on the exact variety) that converts to over 3000 gallons of ethanol – better figures than you get for corn grown for biofuel and heaps better than timber.  It’s not a food crop for humans or for animals.  This means that on one hand, it will take up land that could be used for growing food. On the other hand, it means that it won’t drive up the price of food, like corn grown for biofuel can.  It needs a moderate amount of water, but it’s pretty undemanding regarding other inputs.  Because it’s a perennial plant, it doesn’t need to be re-sown every year. It also smothers weeds and puts some organic material back into the soil, meaning that you don’t need pesticides and it cuts down on the amount of fertiliser needed for a good crop – although a wee bit of fertiliser will be needed for best results.  All a farmer has to do, more or less, is stick it in, water it and harvest it at the right time.

And is there anything else that elephant grass is good for? It can be used as a substitute for coal in coal-fired power plants (one US plant breeder claims that 1 acre of elephant grass can power two typical US households for a year).  The stems also get used for kitty litter, bedding for racehorses, paper and composites (eco-friendly plastic substitutes). Unfortunately, these aren’t by-products of the biofuel industry. However, the tall green stands does provide cover for wildlife during summer.  It can also be used as an ornamental plant – although it’s a bit on the large side!

Elephant grass grows reasonably well in the more temperate parts of Australia. In fact, a close relative of M. × giganteus (Miscanthus sinensis – also known as zebra grass) is considered to be an invasive weed in Victoria and New South Wales.  Let’s hope the powers that be don’t just spray it off but make the most of it!  Elephant grass, however, is a hybrid, so it’s not likely to spread as invasively, as the seeds aren’t fertile.

Safe and happy driving,

Megan http://credit-n.ru/forex.html