It's sort of like a neighbor of mine who was complaining
about the price
of
gas - his SUV only gets 12MPG. I suggested he think
about pushing his
6000
pound truck 12 miles by hand. That would give him
the proper respect
for
the energy in a gallon of gasoline - and its value.

Liquid petroleum fuels are extremely energy dense.
It's going to be
really
hard to replace that with electricity. But maybe not
impossible.

Bill Daniels
For many applications a better 'alternative energy'
might be to squeeze
the maximum available power out of existing technology.
Below is an
engine which uses the heat from combustion to add another
power stroke
to an engine. Its not electrically powered but in
the future it may
compete with electric engines.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology/
c1609351d9092110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

Name: Steam-o-Lene Engine
Inventor: Bruce Crower
Cost to Develop: $1,000
Time: 1.5 years
Prototype | | | | | Product


Bruce Crower's Southern California auto-racing parts
shop is a temple for
racecar mechanics. Here's the flat eight-cylinder Indycar
engine that won
him the 1977 Louis Schwitzer Award for racecar design.
There's the
Mercedes five-cylinder engine he converted into a squealing

supercharged two-stroke, just 'to see what it would
sound like,' says the
now half-deaf 77-year-old self-taught engineer.

Crower has spent a lifetime eking more power out of
every drop of fuel
to make cars go faster. Now he's using the same approach
to make them
go farther, with a radical six-stroke engine that tops
off the familiar
four-stroke internal-combustion process with two extra
strokes of old-
fashioned steam power.

A typical engine wastes three quarters of its energy
as heat. Crower's
prototype, the single-cylinder diesel eight-horsepower
Steam-o-Lene
engine, uses that heat to make steam and recapture
some of the lost
energy. It runs like a conventional four-stroke combustion
engine
through each of the typical up-and-down movements of
the piston
(intake, compression, power or combustion, exhaust).
But just as the
engine finishes its fourth stroke, water squirts into
the cylinder, hitting
surfaces as hot as 1,500°F. The water immediately evaporates
into
steam, generating a 1,600-fold expansion in volume
and driving the
piston down to create an additional power stroke. The
upward sixth
stroke exhausts the steam to a condenser, where it
is recycled into
injection water.

Crower calculates that the Steam-o-Lene boosts the
work it gets from a
gallon of gas by 40 percent over conventional engines.
Diesels, which are
already more efficient, might get another 5 percent.
And his engine does
it with hardware that already exists, so there's no
waiting for
technologies to mature, as with electric cars or fuel
cells.

'Crower is an innovator who tries new ideas based on
his experience and
gut instincts,' says John Coletti, the retired head
of Ford's SVT high-
performance group. 'Most people won't try something
new for fear of
failure, but he is driven by a need to succeed.' And
he just might.
Crower has been keeping the details of his system quiet,
waiting for a
response to his patent application. When he gets it,
he'll pass off the
development process to a larger company that can run
with it, full-
steam.