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Friday, April 13, 2007

Saving the world step by step...

A lot of people are working on creating new technologies that will save the planet but they do it from their point of view. The problem with the new technology is that it takes time, to develop, time to mature, time to market and time to be adopted. Usually the better the technology is the longer it will take to develop and the higher are the costs to deploy, the higher will be the price and at the end run it will be adopted very slowly. So basically the development will kill the progress or an simpler alternative will be found.

I have read about several claims of modified car computer firmwares that save fuel consumption, lower exhaust gases, give more horsepower and some more tweaks. So far they were created by enthusiasts wanting to boost the power of their car and the high mileage and lowered fuel consumption was just a bonus. Well it seems they were partially right - a Dutch scientist has created crude way of saving the planet. The idea in it self is to switch off the generator when it is not needed. I would argue that it is not sufficient to save the planet, but it could compensate for some pollution. The original story is here. I would make a little alteration to this tweak - instead of switching the generator totally off I would just disconnect the battery charging circuit. Usually car generators utilize electrically enhanced magnets witch draw energy from the battery/generator it self. It wont be as effective as running the car electronics from battery, but in the log run it will save the battery itself. Constant charging/discharging the battery will kill it in around 2..6 months thanks to high cycle count. I would suggest starting to charge the battery 2 minutes after the engine has started, charge it to the full capacity and turn off the generator for the next 30..60 minutes and check the battery conditions after that if it need another recharging (this would have to integrate a temperature gradient tho - on cold weather the charging can take a lot more time). The voltage regulation could be replaced by a capacitor circuit to regulate voltage fluctuations.

There are around 1 billion cars out there and this technology could be applied to around 50..75% of them. When the current EU regulation is saying that the current norm is 160g/km CO2 - assuming that each car drives 10 000 km/year we get that each car produces 1600 kg/year and now all cars together we produce 1.6 billion tons of CO2. So what can the 1..5% CO2 cutoff give us? Well... we get at 50% implementation 8...40 million tons less and at 75% 12...60 million tons of less CO2 pollution. It wont save the planet but it helps a bit - progress is needed, but it will give few more years to develop better technology...


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