"John Ewing" none@needed wrote in
u:


"Bernd Felsche" wrote in message
...
"John Ewing" none@needed wrote:
"Michael Henry" wrote:
Stealth Pilot wrote:

the other thing I like about high fuel prices is that the chinese
have to pay them as well. that'll slow the buggers down. maybe the
jobs will stop being exported over to them in the long run.

That's a pretty archaic view! It is Chinese demand for our natural
resources which is making the Australian dollar so strong! As Ben
Lee said
"We're all in this together"

I'm of the opinion that high fuel prices are good for another
reason: it makes alternative fuels more viable. I look forward to
the day when we're
all running aero-diesels burning biofuel. (The current perception
by consumers that biofuel is responsible for high food prices is
rubbish. Destruction of native forests for the planting of
feedstock is a bigger issue. We'll work it out eventually...)

Skip biofuel ... go straight to zero pollution hydrogen powered
vehicles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_vehicle
http://www.science.org.au/nova/063/063print.htm

Zero-pollution? How are you going to get the hydrogen?

From water probably using solar cells. Recent developments have
dramatically increased their efficiency, and there is likely to be
further improvements.

Safely? Onto the aircraft?

Safely? Innovative reckoning would suggest liquid hydrogen


Too heavy. Unless there's been some breakthrough in thermally lined
tanks it should be as a gas and that means a LOT of volume.

Hope we are not going to recount the old "hydrogen is too dangerous -
look what happened to the airships"
To be honest I was considering that we'd get surface vehicles
converted before we try aircraft.
I am not claiming it is a proven or fully researched option at the
present time, but it has greater potential than most other alternative
energy sources.

It's a good idea to try and deveop it. There are several vehicles for
ale that will run on hydrogen right now. Morgan has just built a new
fuel cell car to go along with it's already available H2 powered IC car
so it's making a small start anyway.

Hydrogen, unless it's been extracted directly from fossil sources,
is only a storage medium for the energy needed to produce it. And at
that, it's certainly not perfectly efficient.

Very few things in life are perfectly efficient.
Sorry - you've lost me. Not sure what your point is.

Well, it is pretty efficient on paper, but it's certainly not all that
practical for aircraft. You either need a massive amount in volume in
gas form or al the complexity of liquid H2. NASA flew a Musketeer on
lquid H2 in the 70s and it worked fine, but the tanks were quite heavy.
I think it was less an experiment in an H2 powered airplane than it was
some sort of research for space flight anyway.

Bertie