110mpg mustang

[PA32R]

Originally Posted by igo

I spotted this when the thread was made an I was just waiting to see peoples reactions :-)

yep, in the 95% to 100% bs range

Severely underestimated imho, but without stated controlled conditions, it could be true. I got 152 m.p.g. in my LR3 one time, I frequently get well over 100 m.p.g. Typically, this is correlated with a quickly decreasing elevation and my vehicle in neutral. I've even gotten mileage of aleph null. This will be accompanied by decreasing elevation and a certain silence within the vehicle.

[Duffman]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Not necessarily: the Stirling engine was developed a couple of centuries ago, and is still superior (in efficiency) to any IC engine.

I had a couple professors ingrain in me to be careful with terms like more efficient and in your case superior. If the stirling truly was superior, they would be everywhere, including in cars, ships and aircraft.

[landspeed]

What you need is a stirling engine hybrid, so you put key in, start driving, boil water, etc, etc The battery would also even out the fact that Stirling engines don't respond quickly to changes in energy demand up or down.

About the 110mpg car - the important thing here is that we don't know what fuel it is using. It might be a cold fusion car extracting the small amount of heavy water from normal water

[MazdaMatt]

how far could a nuke plant push a car using a gallon of plutonium?

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Duffman

I had a couple professors ingrain in me to be careful with terms like more efficient and in your case superior. If the stirling truly was superior, they would be everywhere, including in cars, ships and aircraft.

Notice I said superior in efficiency. Until recently, fuel efficiency has not exactly been a high priority anywhere. Oil has been so cheap that few made any attempt to use less. Factor in the Stirling engine's other inherent qualities - long warm-up time, slow response to acceleration, etc, and you find that that in a world of cheap gas the IC wins out.

However, as the other poster said, the Stirling engine's qualities match well with a hybrid drivetrain. You start and accelerate on battery power, and the Stirling comes on to provide cruise power and keep the battery charged.

If you read up on the history of the Stirling engine, you'll see that a lot of work was done with them during the first oil crisis, back in the 1970s. Then, since that incident was purely political, oil became cheap again, and the work was shelved. Today oil prices are not likely to return to the levels of a few years ago, and there are other factors such as the need to reduce CO2 emissions that won't change. We also have the electric side of the hybrid drivetrain, which wasn't workable in the '70s.

[wagonman76]

I havent seen anything on it but the linked article.

It sounds possible, but I bet those specs are only extremes. Its probably capable of that kind of speed and power, with very little mpg. Or capable of that kind of mpg but with very little power. He never did say anything about what kind of range he gets.

Ive read that electric cars have much more torque than gas engines. And you can get infinite mpg with plug-in hybrids, assuming you only drive it till you use up the initial charge.

To help it out, it could also have a tube frame made of something lightweight, and plastic body panels.

Hot air and BS, ROFLMAO. Earlier this week I watched a show on history channel about the many uses of dung. One of the things was burning it for fuel to generate power. That was the main part I wanted to see, and wouldnt you know it, right as soon as they started talking about it, they got cut off into a commercial, right in the middle of a sentence.

[Duffman]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Notice I said superior in efficiency.

You totally missed the point. If an IC engine weighs half as much and produces the same HP, then the ICE is more efficeint. If an ICE of equal power can be manufactured for less cost it can be considered more efficient. If I need to take a 5 minute trip and the IC engine is ready to move instantly compared to a 5 minute warm up time then the ICE is again more effiecient. Saying that a sterling is superior is outright wrong. Saying it is more efficeint could be true but you cant lay it down as a blanket statement.

I dont see sterlings used on trains, which many use diesel engines that are never shut down and power an electric drivetrain. I dont see sterlings used on the largest ships in the world either that travel for weeks on end. In fact they are using diesels that are over 50% efficient. In fact I dont see sterlings used anywhere, so why are they so great?

[oldschool]

Ok, now that all your BS meters have been pegged, lets think outside the box( and yes this is purely speculation).Doug has an electrical engineering degree, and apparently is a master mechanic too. He has been working with Ford for a few yrs now till the Big 3 started layin off folks and all the people he was workin with took an early retirement. (this all from research on the web) He has a patented block girdle that helps keep the block together under extreme stress. Articles from as early as January of this yr stated he was getting 80 mpg, said they had made some mods to the block but that most of the mods were of an electrical nature. Pondering all this and the claims he makes; one of the things I would conclude that he has done is eliminate the camshaft and incorporated a fully electronic and infinitely programable valve train; in other words selinoid activated valves controled by a computer. This is the only way (in my eyes) he would be able to meet all the claims he has made, and the article says he has been workin on this for 10 yrs now. If thats the case, then I would expect the fuel induction system has been dealt the same thought and modification as the valve train.
I'm not sayin he has it , but a few yrs ago students at MIT composed an article stating that with present available technology (and they outlined it) there was no reason an suv couldn't get 40mpg+.

BTW John Goodman seems to be makin quite a hit too with GM stuff, mostly puttin diesels in Hummers and the like and gettin some big mileage numbers and pretty good power and acceleration numbers, and he says 90% of what he is using are stock GM parts.

[oldschool]

LOL its early; my bad , it was John Goodwin,,

Motorhead Messiah | Fast Company

[SuperTrooper]

I've been following Goodwin's story for a while. He makes no "secret" of what he's doing and implies no magical knowledge. If you've got the money you can access any ideas he's come up with. No BS there.

The Mustang story would have been more believable without the wild acceleration claims and saying the idea is 60 years old. That perks up everbody's BS detectors.

The Goodwin article brings up the big chicken-and-the-egg problem of alternative fuels: people won't buy cars using alt fuels without an infrastructre in place, and the companies that would provide that infrastructure won't do it until there are cars to use it.