Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Mad ideas that overcomplicate existing complications |12:20 PM| I have edited this entry to be the text of the email I just sent my old physics teacher: The McCutcheon.
I came up with what is probably a ridiculous idea for car improvement. A great deal of heat is wasted during the combustion process of a car.
Currently, there's not an easy way (That I know of) to turn heat into mechanical or electrical force, at that (relative to say, a coal furnace) low heat/temperature. I imagined a bulb that would sit on the exhaust pipe from the cylinder, made out of a material that expands violently when its temperature reaches a certain point, one that would expand quickly within a narrow set of temperatures.
I have to take a brief sidetrack, and discuss a principle with which I am not too familiar. (Here's where my knowledge of physics breaks down utterly. ) If you have a container of a gas that is under pressure, and you release that pressure, the container cools. As an example, butane refill cartridges, canned air, C02 bottles. It comes down to pressure equaling heat, but I can't write the equation out at the moment. Let's say instead of release the gas in the container to reduce pressure, you increased the volume of the container itself. That'd reduce pressure and heat, wouldn't it?
Let's say I have the bulb made of the substance I mentioned earlier. It uses some of the energy of the heat from the combustion gasses to expand. Now suddenly, the gasses in the container are much colder. The material shrinks back to original size, upping the pressure on the gas inside, but said gas is now being pushed out of a valve on the other end of the bulb instead of being repressurized. During the expansion stage, any number of things could be strapped or connected or whatever to this bulb as a way to harness some of this "reclaimed" energy.
Mad ideas that overcomplicate existing complications |12:20 PM| I have edited this entry to be the text of the email I just sent my old physics teacher: The McCutcheon.
I came up with what is probably a ridiculous idea for car improvement. A great deal of heat is wasted during the combustion process of a car.
Currently, there's not an easy way (That I know of) to turn heat into mechanical or electrical force, at that (relative to say, a coal furnace) low heat/temperature. I imagined a bulb that would sit on the exhaust pipe from the cylinder, made out of a material that expands violently when its temperature reaches a certain point, one that would expand quickly within a narrow set of temperatures.
I have to take a brief sidetrack, and discuss a principle with which I am not too familiar. (Here's where my knowledge of physics breaks down utterly. ) If you have a container of a gas that is under pressure, and you release that pressure, the container cools. As an example, butane refill cartridges, canned air, C02 bottles. It comes down to pressure equaling heat, but I can't write the equation out at the moment. Let's say instead of release the gas in the container to reduce pressure, you increased the volume of the container itself. That'd reduce pressure and heat, wouldn't it?
Let's say I have the bulb made of the substance I mentioned earlier. It uses some of the energy of the heat from the combustion gasses to expand. Now suddenly, the gasses in the container are much colder. The material shrinks back to original size, upping the pressure on the gas inside, but said gas is now being pushed out of a valve on the other end of the bulb instead of being repressurized. During the expansion stage, any number of things could be strapped or connected or whatever to this bulb as a way to harness some of this "reclaimed" energy.
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