Jalopnik just posted this pretty comprehensive article on the viability and future of the use of Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) to fuel America’s fleet. While it is true that we have a lot natural gas here in America, most of it is being accessed through a method called fracking. In fact, fracking has been a hot topic of debate in the natural gas arena for much longer than it has been for oil. Check out Part 1 about why we should consider building electric cars to find out more about fracking and the other new environmentally destructive methods that are giving us access to new stores of fossil fuels.
The Jade Warrior was built by British motorcycle racer Angus MacPhail in his garage. It’s powered by a 4 cylinder Ford Cosworth engine that has a roots type supercharger that produced an estimated 400-500 horsepower. The center of the custom frame is riveted and bonded aluminum and the front end has specially designed ground effects to keep the bike stable at 200+ mph speeds.
Head over to Dragzine.com for all the details and history of the Jade Warrior.
The EDWARD Electric Diwheel is a project built by mechanical engineering students at the University of Adelaide. It’s a great demonstration of what you can do with mechatronics (electric motor control). They first got the rig up and running so that it would give you basic movement in response to throttle inputs. However, there was some instability issues under power due to the balance of the vehicle. They fixed it by modelling the motion of the Diwheel and programming a motor controller that would automatically maintain stability based on feedback from position tracking sensors.
The inversion control is a model of what’s commonly known as the inverted pendulum. It sounds more complicated than it is. If you’ve ever tried to balance the end of a stick on your hand, then you are familiar with how it works. If the stick starts to fall to the right, you have to move your hand to the right to keep the stick vertical on your hand. Mechatronics allows an electric motor to act like your hand to balance a weight based on lean angle feedback. That’s what make things like these one wheel motorcycles possible:
Mechatronics is a currently a hot area of study as many automakers are developing hybrids and electric cars. It takes a specific set of skills that blends mechanical and electrical engineering. You basically have to translate mechanical motion into a language understood by the computer controlling the electric motor. Here’s another basic demonstration of inverted pendulum stabilization. This one is interesting because he starts using a jointed pendulum.
Adam Carolla’s Car Cast got a behind the scenes look at Mike Ryan’s Freightliner rally/drifting truck. Mike Ryan has been the powerhouse in big rig racing up Pikes Peak and the Mt. Washington hill climb for the past several years. He also does most of big rig stunt driving you see in movies including the chase scene in Terminator 2. Some of Carolla’s commentary is kind of stupid and he goes off with a completely irrelevant and inappropriate story at the end, but they do get some good shots of the truck. It’s got a Detroit Diesel 60 series engine with a custom Borg-Warner compound turbo setup making 1950hp and 3400+ ft-lbs of torque. It weighs almost 10,000 pounds despite of the aluminum frame rails. The rear axle is a 3-link with a Watts link and the brakes have liquid cooling.
This is the big rig Gymkhana video that Mike released a while back if you want to see the truck in action:
He also competed in the Mt. Washington hill climb rally last year in the Freightliner. It’s a similar event to Pikes Peak in that part of the course is tarmac and part of it is dirt. The footage is pretty jaw-dropping.
