Future Transportation

Can NASA Launch a Rocket with a Laser?

Christopher Mims — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 05:00:00 PDT

Launching rockets into space takes a lot of fuel and costs a lot of money. Will a theoretical plan to use lasers to beam enough energy to launch things into space ever take off?

It's easy to forget that space is far away—low earth orbits don't even begin until you get about 100 miles from the surface of the earth, and a geostationary orbit is 22,000 miles straight up. Getting there is hard—to do it, the Space Shuttle's 37 million horsepower main engines accelerate it to 17,000 miles per hour. When it comes to satellites, the cheapest way to get them into space is to use the same towering rockets that were perfected for the Apollo missions. They combine liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen, and blammo: A sustained explosion carries your cargo skyward.

These traditional chemical rockets have hit a wall: Currently, it costs about $10,000 a pound to get something into orbit. For a large communications satellite on the order of 5 tons, that's more than a $100 million in launch costs alone. That amount hasn't changed in decades. Companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX claim they'll be able to launch satellites for $1,000 a pound just by streamlining operations—basically, replacing government red tape with ruthless entrepreneurial efficiency—but there are no near-term technological breakthroughs that promise to fundamentally change how we get things away from the pull of Earth's gravity.

One radical solution to the problem is to leave most of the energy-containing stuff required to get a rocket into space on the ground. Ninety percent of the weight of a rocket on a launch pad is fuel, after all, leaving only a tiny sliver of usable mass left over for cargo. The notion, first proposed in 1972 by inventor Arthur Kantrowitz, is called beamed energy. The idea is simple: A massive power plant on the surface of the Earth sends energy to a rocket via an improbably huge laser or "maser"—which operates on the same principle as a laser, but involves microwaves.

A ground-based energy beam of sufficient power aimed at a rocket of the right composition could allow it to heat a supply of onboard hydrogen to a temperature of 2,500 degrees kelvin, hot enough to shoot out its nozzles with sufficient power to boost the vehicle into space. Alternately, the bottom of the rocket could consists of a chunk of metal that would be vaporized by a pulsed laser, creating a cloud of gas that is then super-heated by a second laser pulse, thrusting the rocket skyward.

A series of small-scale experiments with models over the past 20 years have demonstrate what rocket scientists like Alexander Bruccoleri of MIT already know: "There's nothing in the laws of physics that prohibit this from working."

The only real barrier is motivation on the part of NASA or some other deep-pocketed patron, a situation that is unlikely to change in the near future, according to historian of technology Jonathan Coopersmith: "The basic problem that the beamed energy people have is that [traditional] rocketry works."

Proponents of beamed energy argue that, despite our entrenched dependence on traditional rockets and the high costs of developing alternatives—one paper estimated that it would take billions of dollars to develop a successful beamed energy platform—once we have them, these rockets could reduce the cost of getting things into orbit by a factor of 100. The world launches about 20 satellites a year into space, but that's spread across multiple space agencies. Let's say the Russians, who are responsible for about half of all space launches (many of them manned) decide to invest in this technology; they might be able to recoup their investment within 10 to 20 years.

Ignoring the rocket itself, it turns out that most of the technology required to build the system already exists: Raytheon just demonstrated a giant, plane-killing death laser, which happens to be exactly the size of laser you would need (plus a few dozen more) to get a small rocket into orbit. If you prefer microwaves, Dmitriy Tseliakhovich, a graduate student at CalTech, estimates that you would only need a ground-based station as large as the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, the world's largest radio telescope, which consists of huge dishes meant to listen to space but which could also be used to transmit microwaves. (ALMA consists of 66 radio dishes of either 40 or 23 feet in diameter clustered in the Atacama desert in northern Chile, and it cost $1 billion to build.)

Bruccoleri, who worked on beamed energy propulsion for a decade before giving up on the whole enterprise, isn't convinced that it's a good alternative to traditional rockets even if you had all the money in the world. Factor-of-100 reductions in launch costs assume that beamed-energy rockets are fully re-usable, but that isn't likely to be the case.

The problem, he says, is that the "fuel" that the rocket would have to carry—pure hydrogen—is so light that to lift something the size of the Space Shuttle, the fuel tank attached to it would have to be five times as large (by volume) as the shuttle's current tank. Bruccoleri's own calculations show that using existing technology, something with a tank that big is ultimately as costly as the Space Shuttle itself. The reason is simple: Fuel costs are a negligible portion of launch costs. When going to space, what's so expensive is building and maintaining the incredibly well-tuned machinery that can burn all that fuel without blowing up—and then refurbishing it after every flight, since a craft like the Space Shuttle isn't so much re-used as rebuilt after each journey. A giant fuel tank filled with hydrogen is neither reusable nor recoverable (the shuttle's current fuel tank is jettisoned late in flight and burns up on re-entry).

If beamed energy rockets aren't all that reusable because they require giant (albeit light) fuel tanks, they might be only marginally more cost-effective than traditional rockets, and that's ignoring all the money you spent building a ground-based laser array big enough to burn your name on the surface of the moon.

"For now, to be honest, I think we are stuck with chemical rockets," says Bruccoleri.

That doesn't mean beamed energy will never find its niche. For example, if we're ever going to make space-based solar arrays a reality, it will be a must, because the alternative is an extension cord hundreds of miles long. The military also has an unflagging interest in building devices that can get thermal energy from point A to point B in the most expedient way possible: One version of the microwave array required to get a rocket into space has been used on civilians in Iraq since 2005. Designed to disperse protesters and other unruly groups who aren't worth, or don't deserve, a bullet, it painfully but mostly harmlessly heats the skin just like a microwave ovens heats a TV dinner. It's called the Active Denial System.

Design the Gas Station of the Future: Winner Announced

GOOD — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:30:00 PDT

We're pleased to announce the winners of our contest to design the gas station of the future. After consultation with the good folks at Beyond the Edge, we have selected our three winners. Each one had an exciting approach to re-imagining the fueling process for the future. Below, you'll find our winners, with explanations from Beyond the Edge about why they were chosen. You can see all the submissions here.

Third place, and winner of $250, Matt McInerney:

Beyond the Edge: "While Matt McInerney's Park and Charge may be a less ambitious idea, the concept of building on existing infrastructure (in this case, parking meters) to create charging stations for electric cars is brilliant. Should we all be driving electric cars in the future, we are going to have to find new ways of getting electricity into them, and McInerney's solution could be a viable option."

Second place, and winner of $500, Dave Pinter:

Beyond the Edge: "Dave Pinter's E-Transportation Center is perhaps the most realistic of the three winners. The combination of solar-powered charging station, intermodal hub, and car-sharing location incorporates three innovations that will be key in the re-inventing of our transportation systems."

And, our grand prize winner of $1,000, Alex Dumler:

Beyond the Edge: "Alex Dumler's e-Capsule best captures the goal of totally re-imagining the very concept of a gas station. By using rechargeable capsules powered by the sun and by placing charging stations in tree-like devices, the system would blend into the environment. The e-Capsule would allow for an entirely new fueling infrastructure that was not based on gasoline."

Thanks to everyone who submitted, and to Beyond the Edge for providing us with the prize money. Keep checking GOOD for more projects.

Putting Hybrid Engines in Planes

George Bye — Mon, 5 Apr 2010 06:00:18 PDT

Now that hybrid cars are standard, an aviation expert argues that it's time to put hybrid engines in the air.

This is the eighth and final part in an eight-part series on the future of transportation. See all the articles here.

Alternative energy advances have been remarkable. However, new technology, processes and products must be evaluated against the expense of bringing them to market. With a difficult economy, limited budgets and engineering resources, airplane manufacturers find it much more difficult to invest in developing new technology during tough economic times. Unfortunately, this means innovation can be delayed, perhaps when we need it most.

Innovation is sometimes inspired by incremental operational or cost benefits. It may also come as a result of a significant outside threat. Recently, several political, economic and industrial factors have combined in a manner that threatens aviation gasoline's long term viability. If innovation in aviation can progress, alternative energy may offer an answer to the potential halt of aviation gas production. Will these offerings be ready and broadly available in time? Are petroleum-based solutions going to share the stage with new biofuels? And, what about the high profile electric and hybrid technology that has swept through the automobile industry? Can aviation benefit from that learning curve and make a faster transition?

Electric motors are highly efficient, robust and do not lose power at higher density altitudes. They are also quiet and emission free. Perhaps most important for aviation, electric motors are relatively light weight. A 200-horsepower electric motor weighs only one-third that of an equivalent horsepower internal combustion engine. These features are certainly compelling. The critical question is how to efficiently get energy to the electric motor. For that, you need a battery.

The widely held perception is that batteries are heavy-very heavy-toxic, rupture easily, short circuit, catch fire, and are expensive. Research advances have eliminated many of these critical issues, at least in part. It is true that some battery configurations (and equivalent "fuel cell" technologies) are highly toxic. However, this is not universally the case. The baseline lithium ion battery chemistry is a recyclable salt, with low environmental impact. Recent advances in the internal configuration of the battery, particularly the layers, or separator, provides for a lighter, more efficient and sturdier battery. Together with new embedded battery management systems, concerns regarding energy spikes, thermal runaways and potential failure and fire have been greatly diminished. Still, are batteries ready for broad, mainstream airplane applications? Aren't weight and cost still a concern?

While new configurations and systems are often discussed, and eventually flown in the experimental category, many do not emerge to the larger certified marketplace. For many pilots, battery-powered flight remains merely a curiosity without practical application. A careful analysis of mission profiles and typical general aviation aircraft aerodynamics indicates the current battery energy density is about half of what it needs to be. Projections range from three to five years, perhaps more, before sufficient energy density is reached for a true battery-only propulsion system. Like energy density, battery cost is also a significant impediment to broad acceptance. Unit cost and operational cost effectiveness remain critical goals for mainstream market acceptance. But perhaps the largest barrier is the rigorous FAA certification process. Innovators with a goal of mainstream market acceptance view this process as the ultimate feasibility test.

Given the remarkable benefits and acknowledged limitations of electric propulsion, is there a way forward? The "first generation" answer may be provided with the energy balance of hybrid propulsion. As battery technology matures with energy density and cost improvements, the "second generation" propulsion technology may be all-electric.

To provide for the longer endurance mission requirements of the largest aviation market segments, a hybrid solution could include a small jet-fuel powered auxiliary power unit. Much like a hybrid automobile, this solution provides enhanced efficiency and reduced cost, while avoiding the expense and weight of an all-electric battery powered aircraft. The benefits of electric propulsion are not lost, but supplemented, with the high energy density of jet fuel.

Charlie Johnson, the former president of Cessna, "The time to accelerate incorporation of this new hybrid technology has arrived. Aviation is a vital market that will benefit from the environmentally friendly, lower cost, more efficient and higher performing aircraft."

Time is of the essence. A slow, pondering review has its risks. If actual flight tests prove out the theoretical projections, it appears that hybrid cost and performance features will be very attractive to the pilot-owner consumer. Much like the success of the Toyota Prius, the manufacturer that is first to offer a mainstream hybrid aircraft model may have an important market identity advantage.

Manufacturers are understandably cautious when it comes to adopting new technologies. Thorough, rigorous evaluation of each new innovation is an absolute necessity. New technology providers should work closely with major manufacturers and the FAA to ensure that the mandate of safety is never compromised. However, we must not hesitate to face the challenge before us. Too much is at stake. The development of electric hybrid technology will be expensive and time consuming. Hybrid technology has reached an inflection point where execution is now possible. All will benefit. Stakeholders from every corner will need to participate, collaborate, and invest-this innovation needs to make it through the gauntlet.

George E. Bye is a general aviation entrepreneur and an airline transport pilot with over 4,000 flying hours. Mr. Bye is also an engineer and a former Air Force pilot who served in Desert Storm. He is CEO of Bye Energy, Inc., based in Denver, Colorado. Bye Energy is a technology innovator currently collaborating with other alternative energy providers to bring new energy technologies to general aviation.

Illustration by Dylan Lathrop.

Faster than Light: Separating Fiction from Reality

Seth Shostak — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 06:59:39 PDT

Warp six, Mr. Scott.

This is the seventh part in an eight-part series on the future of transportation. New articles published every Monday.

Whether it's to colonize new worlds, cavort with the Klingons, or strip-mine unobtainium, many people blithely assume that our descendants will go to the stars.

The well-known problem with this promising scenario is that the stars are immensely far away. Consider this: The fastest vehicle ever piloted by humans was the Apollo 10 command module. In May, 1969, it returned from the moon in a mere three days, plummeting earthward at a blistering seven miles per second. But cosmically speaking, the moon is cheek-by-jowl with our planet. A jaunt to Proxima Centauri, the nearest other star, would take 110,000 years at seven miles per second. You should hope for decent onboard food.

That undoubtedly sounds discouraging for space travel, but you might expect that our space-faring progeny will engineer rockets faster than a Saturn V. However, what they can't do, at least according to Albert Einstein's physics, is break the universe's ultimate speed limit: the speed of light. So interstellar trips will inevitably take many years-at least as measured by the society that launches them. (The crew may age less rapidly thanks to special relativity, but what good is that if everything left behind becomes fossilized ?)

This is a long-standing problem for sci-fi authors who can't afford to slow their stories while protagonists play Sudoku (or just sleep) for decades or centuries between one alien encounter and the next. So writers have peppered their yarns with plausible-sounding schemes for quickly zipping around the galaxy.

Two ever-popular schemes from sci-fi are hyperdrive and warp drive. Both beat the speed of light by manipulating space.

When you shift your rocket into hyperdrive, it makes a lane change and travels through "hyperspace"-an imaginary alternative pathway that comprises a geometric shortcut to your destination. When Han Solo barrels around the empire in Star Wars, he's using technology that is presumably as conventional a transport medium for him as the wheel is for us. Stargate also invokes hyperdrive, as did Babylon 5. A slightly different flavor of hyperspace called jump drive was used in Battlestar Galactica and Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.

But is hyperspace just hype? Could there really be shortcuts through space that would mimic this sci-fi trope? There might be, and physicists call them wormholes. These possible pathways to other parts of the cosmos seem to work on blackboards. But actually constructing a wormhole and keeping it open long enough to slip a rocket through seems to require either enormous amounts of energy, or the use of something called "exotic matter," a hypothesized material that has negative energy, if you can picture that. To make exotic matter would take incredibly large quantities of ordinary energy, and so this is one material that makes even unobtainium seem prosaic. Given the difficulties with wormholes, both theoretical and practical, it's unclear whether a real-life version of hyperdrive can ever be achieved, so it remains problematic. For sci-fi authors, of course, "problematic" is still better than "forbidden by physics."

The most iconic FTL-travel scheme remains Star Trek's warp drive, which works by distorting space, compressing it in front of the ship, and expanding it behind, thereby bringing you more quickly to your destination without having to cross swords with Einstein. Think about it: As you read these lines, you're moving at tremendous velocity away from galaxies that are billions of light-years distant, but not because you're on a hi-tech rocket. Your apparent speed is actually the universe expanding the space between you and those distant nebulae.

Warp drive works similarly-by enlarging the space behind your spacecraft and collapsing it in front. You literally shrink the distance to your destination, thereby avoiding the inconvenience of building ultra-high-speed rockets.

When Captain Kirk is alerted to troubles in the Gamma Quadrant, he gets Scotty to crank up the Enterprise's cruise control to many times light speed. The Enterprise accomplishes this with matter-antimatter engines, mediated by dilithium crystals (whatever those are). How these manage to warp space is unclear, but then again, so is a lot of what goes on in Star Trek. But if you really want to distort space, you need to tow around either a black hole, or some incredibly massive, rotating objects able to drag space-time around like a teaspoon in a pot of syrup. Neither seems practical.

Faster-than-light travel has been invented because we want to send ourselves into space, and being confined for all time to the solar system is about as satisfying as the idea that you'll never take your Maserati farther than the end of the driveway. But the universe isn't obliged to make all our whims feasible, and FTL travel may be-like the perfect martini-little more than a nice idea.

Boats: The Other Electric Vehicle

Christopher Mims — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 08:30:31 PDT

Cars may be the electric vehicle on everyone's mind, but boats already push the envelope of electric power, and are ready for even more revolutionary advances.

This is the sixth part in an eight-part series on the future of transportation. New articles published every Monday.

To naval engineers-who have been doing radical things with ship propulsion since the Egyptians first harnessed wind to sail up the Nile around 3500 B.C.-the latest innovations in automobile drivetrains are old hat. Diesel-electric hybrids? They've been standard issue on the U.S. Navy's battleships since their debut on the USS Tennessee in 1920. All-electric ships? The Duffy Electric Boat company has been building battery-powered pleasure crafts since 1970.

Unlike motor vehicles, ships are capable of carrying huge loads, and they are so good at it that even conventional waterborne shipping is more energy efficient than every other means of transit save rail. Because of its enormous load-bearing capacity, there is room in even a small or midsize boat to carry large banks of batteries, motors, and a panoply of other innovative electric drive and power systems to help power the ship. It's a good thing, too: Almost all the world's cargo ships run on the lowest grade of fuel an internal combustion engine can burn, a tarry sludge known as "bunker fuel" that has been estimated to cause upwards of 50,000 deaths a year worldwide from its effects on air quality alone (not to mention its impact on the climate).

Unfortunately, there are no charging stations in the middle of the Atlantic, so all-electric ships capable of replacing traditional cargo vessels on thousand-mile journeys are extremely rare. That's because electric power on ships is plagued by the same problems as in cars, namely that the power density of liquid fuels is so high when compared to batteries that carrying enough batteries to allow a vessel to complete a trans-oceanic journey currently isn't feasible.

One way to get around the issue of bulk of batteries and figuring out how to charge them on all-electric ships is to use something other than batteries to produce electric power. For the Norwegian shipping company Eidesvik's "Viking Lady," that something is liquefied natural gas. Rather than burning the stuff, the ship uses a 320-kilowatt molten carbonate hydrogen fuel cell, which is sort of like a giant, ultra-hot battery that combines hydrogen stripped from the natural gas with oxygen from the atmosphere to yield electricity and water. Its primary advantage over a traditional internal combustion engine is that it is potentially much more efficient-extracting as much as twice the energy from its fuel source. DNV Marine, the builder of the ship, estimates that if all the world's ships used hydrogen- fuel-cell technology, it would reduce CO2 emissions by 500 million metric tons per year by 2030.

More commonly, ships use a hybrid-electric propulsion system that is more versatile and efficient than similar systems in average hybrid cars; these electric motors can efficiently operate across a wide range of speeds, unlike internal combustion engines, which are most efficient only at a much more narrow range of speeds.

The world's largest cruise ship, Queen Mary 2, is driven by electric motors that draw power from diesel- and natural-gas-burning plants that are big enough to light up a small town. This allows the fossil-fuel-burning power plants to run constantly, at their most efficient speed, while the electric motors vary the amount of electricity they transform into forward motion. While fuel savings from diesel-electric power trains vary, they are compelling enough that they now represent 100 percent of the worldwide orders for new cruise ships, icebreakers, and drilling vessels. Even the U.S. Navy-which, as part of the U.S. military, contributes to the world's single largest consumer of liquid fuels-has ordered a dozen diesel-electric ships.

Some shipbuilders do away with the need for storage capacity all together by going solar. In 2007, Sun21, a 45-foot-long catamaran with a sheet of solar panels spanning its two hulls, became the first solar-powered vessel to cross the Atlantic. Sun21 averaged between five and six knots on its journey (a knot is one mile per hour), which is comparable to speeds achieved by traditional sailboats. In Germany, Rivendell Holding AG is funding the construction of what it hopes will be the first solar-powered ship to circumnavigate the globe. Ninety-eight feet long and shaped like an arrowhead, Planet Solar will be studded with 5,059 square feet of solar cells. Magellan's Basque navigator may have completed the same journey in 1519 using only sails, but the real goal of Planet Solar is to demonstrate that solar-powered shipping is possible. The group's double-hulled craft will complete the journey in 120 days, at an average speed of 10 knots-more than twice as fast as the sailing ships of yore, but only half as fast as a modern container ship.

Illustrations by Jennifer Daniel.

Design the Gas Station of the Future: Submissions

GOOD — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:30:45 PDT

We're happy to share the submissions to our Gas Stations of the Future project. They range from the technical to the satirical. Check them out below (click on any image to expand it). We're asking you, the GOOD community, to vote on which vision of the gas station of the future you think is best.

Once you have spoken, we'll take the top five submissions, and in concert with Beyond the Edge, make a selection of the top three. Remember, the winner will receive $1,000 from Beyond the Edge. The first runner-up will receive $500 and the third-place entry will receive $250.

You can cast your vote here through Tuesday, March 23. We'll announce the winners shortly thereafter. Best of luck to everyone.

From Alex Dumler:

E.capsule is a concept about transportation and energy consumption in our very near future. Energy is everywhere we have so many possibilities to use it and be independent from dirty, inefficient and conventional energy production, like burning fossil fuel and coal or using nuclear power. We have even to rethink the term "gas station" to something like "Energy Station." These stations are smaller and more flexible than conventional gas stations, by the greater number to provide better supply.

From Dave Pinter:

From Elina Muceniece:

The whole idea is that there's going to be mostly electrical cars in the future, since they're ecological, stable (not dangerous) and the technologies are already developing really fast.

The batteries will be located just under the roof, because during the daytime car can obtain Solar energy through the cells on the roof and store it in the batteries. When you ran out of power in one battery (there are at least two) and plan on driving a long way, it's time to fill up- change the battery.

You drive in the station. Insert your driver's licence in the machine. The station scans your car, how high it is and where are the batteries located, the lift adjusts the optimal height of your car for the exchanging mechanism. And then the exchange starts. You press a button to remove the empty battery, the machine obtains it, measures how much of a discount you get, because of the power left in the battery, and shows the total price for obtaining a new one on the screen. Then, if you press an OK button, the machine takes it out completely and replace it with a new fully loaded one. You can decide if you want to pay by credit card or send the bill to your driver's license account. The lift returns to the normal height and that's all- you're fully charged again.

There's no personnel involved, the stations are run automatically. If you're having problems there's a possibility to report for a bug in the main menu of the machine.

If all the batteries in the station are fully charged the charger turns off, so there's no waste of energy.

From Greg Lancaster:

This is what I think (hope) gas stations will look like in the near future. The reason the station looks beat up and run down is to get the point across that hopefully we won't be depending on them in the future and we can be using solar power more efficiently. I hope that something will be done with the gas station building, like a locally ran business, art gallery, what have yoi. The hover part is just because that would be totally rad.

From Kim Gyr:

I propose linear cities where everyone can walk from where they live into open fields, both to grow their own food, and to supply those who are still stuck in existing cities, and towers like those above.

The orange tunnel bordering the fields contains high-speed rail, along with medium and low-speed lines, which are the only form of transportation outside of bicycles, electric cars and ships that can be driven by wind. Everyone lives within a 10 minute walk of their own field, chickens and fruit trees, and all can very rapidly reach the existing cities using the high-speed rail link, which uses only about one-third of the energy/passenger mile that cars and aircraft use.

The wind turbines (along the top) along the edge of the north to south linear city capture the energy of the prevailing westerly wind that has been accelerated as it passes over its three to five stories. Present day expressways can be used deliver building materials to build linear cities just alongside, as below, and we can start by installing conventional wind turbines first 1), followed by both high-speed rail and "high temperature" superconducting induction tracks in the roadway to drive electric vehicles, giving them unlimited range 2), followed by the construction of the linear cities themselves 3): The intermediate stage of elevated platforms a) for quick-change battery pit stops for autonomous electric vehicles. All residents are within walking and cycling distance of fields.

From Kinyali Muia:

The energy stations of the future will be unobtrusive and it will blend in with the surrounding environment. The mode of fuel and energy transportation will change drastically. Energy stations will be based on a system of anywhere and everywhere is a station and every renewable source and any renewable source is a fuel. The purchase of energy for transportation will be RFID based since energy stations will be decentralized and in abundance and operated locally.

From Matt McInerney:

What if the gas station of the future is no gas station at all? In my vision, as electric cars become more popular because fossil fuels have become more expensive, we'll need less places to pump and more places to plug in. While many people will just plug in their cars at home, there will certainly be those of us who need to plug in while we're at work or running errands. Instead of stopping to charge the car on our way to these activities, what if we could just plug in where we park? And instead of designing a new "gas pump," perhaps we could make use of a payment system we're already accustomed to: parking meters. By adding a touchscreen interface that allows the user to pay for both parking and charge time simultaneously, rarely would anyone ever have to rely on stopping at a station solely dedicated to providing fuel for vehicles.

From Haik Avanian:

My idea is simple: trains will replace the current car-based system of mass national transit, and commemorative coffee shops will be created at designated rest stops which are designed to look like gas stations from the past. These rest stops will now be selling delicious coffee, to fuel the passengers of the train and to give them enough energy to make it to their destination without tiring out.

From Hulland + Anderson:

By re-purposing the rusted broken down gas stations that have become a familiar sight in most inner cities or along the edges of our nation's suburban slums we believe that we can create a solution capable of addressing some of the most pressing societal woes. Through increasing access to much needed resources such as fresh healthy food, increased bicycling infrastructure, the tools and information needed to decrease energy usage on the road and in the home, and locally produced bio-fuels these re-imagined gas stations will not only address energy usage, but also our nation's energy consciousness and overall health.

From Matt McPeak:

Here's my idea for how we will fuel our cars in the future - it's called ECOBAND:

ecoband is a wearable device that absorbs energy.

Natural Energy

ecoband will capture energy from body movement.

As we walk around-the office, or mall, or grocery store, or gym-our bodies are releasing energy. This band will absorb and store this energy allowing us to use it to power our cars. The band is lined with ribbons on the interior which transfer energy produced by the body into the storage unit of the device.

Solar Energy

ecoband will also capture energy from the sun.

If we're outside working or playing this band will harness the sun's energy and store it for later use. If we find ourselves inside (and not creating much natural energy) we can place the band in sunlight to capture more energy throughout the day. The outside of the band is built to adsorb sunlight. It transfers this energy into the storage unit - the same way as it does with Natural Energy.

Energy Transfer

The energy stored in ecoband can be transferred to the car's battery through a two-way power outlet. The storage unit of the band disconnects from the strap and can be plugged into a USB adapter, releasing the energy into the vehicle.

Energy Storage

As advancements are made with energy storage, it will soon be possible to capture and store vast amounts of energy in a small device or battery. Currently there are experimental chips that can power mobile phones from a day's amount of natural energy. There's no reason why this technology can't translate into bigger applications such as transportation as we move forward.

From Forrest Smith:

The future of gas (or refueling) stations is that there won't be any. My proposal shows several options as a result of wirelessly charged vehicles (like new devices that wirelessly charge iPhones and other portable gadgets). For most instances, people will charge their vehicles at home, but this doesn't remove the need for recharging for longer trips. The likely result will be special driving lanes that charge vehicles as they drive, perhaps fed by large energy producing structures along the road, which could be used as recognizable architectural branding by energy companies.

From Paul Zullo:

The gas station of the future will alleviate the worst problem affecting the current gas station: having to stop. I have conceived a design for a no-stop gas station that will allow automobiles to be refueled while moving. Cars will pull off the highway or road and a battery of robot fuel pumps will communicate with the homing signal created by the gas tank opening combined with a laser guided system, allowing the fuel pump to insert itself into the fuel filling plug. Payment will be handled by a credit card authorized radio frequency communication device.

UPDATE: One piece has been removed due to its simmilarities to an already existing piece of art.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (of the Future)

Nikhil Swaminathan — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 06:00:37 PDT

How we'll be traveling in the next 100 years.

This is the fifth part in an eight-part series on the future of transportation. New articles published every Monday.

We have a good idea of what the near-term future of transportation will look like: hybrid vehicles, like the Chevy Volt; electric cars, such as the Tesla Roadster; the rickshaw-cum-Segway known as the General Motors P.U.M.A.; and high-speed train systems that operate using magnetic levitation.

But where are our flying cars, our hover boards, and our teleportation machines? According to Back to the Future II, we should have the first two by 2015, but that's obviously not going to happen. Furthermore, scientists tell us we should focus more on beaming little bits of information rather than whole humans.

So, can we expect any cool, borderline sci-fi vehicles in the future?

"Society and mobility is going to transform quite a bit over the next 50 to 100 years," predicts Mark Moore, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia. He adds that there are five practical considerations to take into account when designing the transport of the future: efficiency and environmental friendliness, community friendliness (meaning that it doesn't make a lot of noise), safety and reliability, ease of use (meaning that it should be semi-autonomous or as easy to use as a car), and, of course, affordability.

"In the 2030s, we will have personal flying vehicles that use nano-engineered microwings," the well-known futurist Ray Kurzweil told GOOD a year ago. We aren't sure about that, but here are some other seemingly bizarre concepts that could usher in paradigm shifts in how we get around.

Deus Ex Machina Wearable Motorcycle

Bumsuk Lim, a transportation design professor at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, demands that his students focus on how to move people and goods from point A to point B in an urban setting. One of the concepts borne out of that elegantly simple directive is Deus Ex Machina, designed by former student Jake Loniak. Part exoskeleton, part motorbike, the three-wheeled vehicle runs on lithium-ion batteries boosted by ultracapacitors (which offer better acceleration). Worn almost as a jacket, machine is steered via "muscles" mechanized by pressured air and activated by the driver's gestures. The Deus Ex Machina is projected to top out at 75 mph and is meant to be a sports model among wearable vehicles (note the lack of storage). The concept, Lim says, "solves some of the fundamental mobility issues, but is still the kind of exciting vehicle that people are like, 'I want to try that. I want to go to work in that.' You can't forget the emotional link between the buyer and the vehicle."

When we'll see something like Deus Ex Machina: Lim won't speculate on a time frame, but noted that when gas hits $10 per gallon, we're going to be looking for radically different ways to get around.

NASA Puffin Personal Air Vehicle

Did you know that the average person is willing to sit in a car for up to 1 hour and 15 minutes before he or she becomes frustrated? That's what NASA's Moore says, explaining a concept called "mobility reach." Since an automobile averages 33 miles per hour, that will allow you to travel just over 40 miles before you hit that threshold. In a personal air vehicle, however, which NASA engineers estimate will travel four times faster, you'll travel more than 160 miles. That could mean a future when people live more than 100 miles away from their offices. It's called "on-demand aviation," allowing you to travel door-to-door, rather than gate-to-gate, says NASA's Moore, noting that another important facet of future transport vehicles will be the ability to give their users the same personal space we have come to expect from a car. The one-seater Puffin stands at rest vertically, sitting on its tail. When in flight, its user lies in the prone position. Its two propellers are powered by electric motors, which are 94 percent efficient (roughly three times more than conventional mechanical engines). The Puffin is just a small step on the road to an idealized personal aerial vehicle. The next iteration, known as the Samarai, is a two-seater about the size of an SUV with eight rotating blades that make it look like a food processor.

When we'll see something like Puffin: "I think the next twenty to thirty years are going to be incredibly exciting for aviation," says Moore, adding that soon flying will "map into people's daily lives."

Tubular Rail

Robert Pulliam, the inventor of Tubular Rail, is fond of saying: "We're not changing fundamental technology; we're just reorganizing it." He's not kidding. In his new train concept, electrically motorized wheels are a "track," and the rails are notches on the train. Based on the principle of a cantilever beam-the very same tenet that keeps Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater from disappearing into a Pennsylvania waterfall-the train glides like a javelin through a series of rings that effectively hand the train from one to the other. According to Pulliam, for a train that's 400 feet long, the rings (each equipped with an electric motor that powers wheels that propel the train) need to be spaced 100 feet apart, so the train is always in contact with three rings and will stay perfectly level. The major cost benefit of Tubular Rail is that it obviates the need for tracks and the space requirements necessary to build them. Pulliam notes that cost for a mile-long Tubular Rail system would be one-quarter that of a comparable light-rail track and two-thirds that of high-speed rail. He sees applications for the trains, which he estimates can hit a speed of 150 mph, for either commuter purposes or as an alternative to high-speed rail. A team of engineering graduate students at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering has already vetted his designs, looking for a fatal flaw (which it didn't find). "Our design would be priced as a much lower-cost system, and the frosting on the cake was that it was easy to install, it didn't take up a lot of land, and it was safer-in that the train was separated from cars and trucks."

When we'll see something like Tubular Rail: Texas A&M donated Tubular Rail a parcel of land in east Texas to build a two-mile system. The company needs $30 million to build that proof of principle.

Space Elevator

We can thank the late Arthur C. Clarke for planting this idea in people's heads. As it turns out, there's some technical merit to it. Imagine the string that connects a tetherball to its pole. If the pole is rotating at a constant speed, the ball will essentially orbit it, and the string will be pulled taut. That's the theory behind the space elevator. A cable made constantly taut by the earth's rotation could connect an orbiting satellite to a launchpad in one of the Earth's oceans. A 13-ton payload of people or equipment could then use that cable to make the one-week journey into space. The ribbon would be made of carbon nanotubes, an electricity-conducting material that is stronger than steel. The process of making a cable out of these building blocks, which could accommodate an elevator, is still science fiction, but research into nanotubes is progressing at breakneck speed. The elevator could be powered with a laser shot from the surface at photovoltaic cells below the car, which would create electricity to power the device until the vessel leaves Earth's gravitational pull. (A counterweight could also be used to help the climber up the cable.) Physicist Bradley Edwards told the PBS program NOVA scienceNOW that a space elevator could reduce the cost of putting a payload into low Earth orbit to one-thousandth of what a rocket-based system would cost.

When we'll see a space elevator: While the physics make a space elevator a possibility, according to a recent CNN article, a contest held every year in Mojave Desert has yet to produce a winning prototype that can climb a one-kilometer cable. Regardless, a Washington State-based space elevator company called the LiftPort Group expects the first launch of its first model to take place in 2031.

Mars 500: Training Astronauts for a Manned Mission to Mars

Cliff Kuang — Mon, 8 Mar 2010 05:00:41 PST

What happens when you put five astronauts in a small ship for 500 days and fly them to Mars?

This is the fourth part in an eight-part series on the future of transportation. New articles published every Monday.

Ever since the dawn of the space age, we've been preparing for a red-planet mission. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s, Europeans and Russians locked themselves into tiny capsules for hundreds of days at a time to simulate a Martian mission. Locations were selected for remoteness and desolation, whether that meant the Atacama desert in Chile or the iciest reaches of Canada.

Yet those extremes pale against Mars 500, a test that will begin in the middle of this year in Moscow, inside a warehouse on the campus of the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems. There, a crew of seven men will lock themselves inside a series of rooms no bigger than a tiny house for 520 days-the approximate amount of time a return trip to Mars would take, with a 30-day layover on the planet. If they last, each crew member will get a bounty, possibly upwards of $100,000. What are we hoping to learn from this exercise? And, really, why would anyone want to do that?

Think of Mars 500 as something like the original Real World, minus the sexual tension and booze, with a few details changed:

"This is the true story of seven strangers (three Europeans, three Russian cosmonauts in training, and one Chinese)...

…picked to live in a house (that looks like the lovechild of a Quonset hut and the International Space Station)...

…work together and have their lives taped (constantly, from fixed cameras. With doctors, engineers, and psychologists watching at all times)...

…to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real ..."

From a technology standpoint, a manned Martian landing is not out of reach. It's just a matter of committing the resources and solving the inherent problems. Yet all that work would be useless if the crew can't accomplish the task, either mentally or physically. Proving they can is the main thrust of Mars 500.

We can point to examples that prove human beings can function in tight quarters for long periods-on submarines, in Antarctica at McMurdo Station, and for up to 438 days on the Mir space station. But the challenges of Mars 500 are unique.

To simulate the real-world experience of traveling to Mars, the crew won't see any natural light for the duration. They won't be able to shower. To communicate with loved ones or with mission control (in the next room) they'll have to wait 20 minutes for a reply, because that's how long, on average, a real-life telecom signal would take to travel to Earth and back.

"The risk of a serious incident is probably quite small," says Dr. David Dinges, a renowned experimental psychologist and the designer of two experiments that the crew will participate in.

The simulator itself has three main cabins: a medical bay with a dining room; living quarters with a common room, kitchen and six tiny bedrooms; and a utility module with a gym, greenhouse, and restroom. On the outside they all look like large, shiny metal storage tanks; on the inside, they look like Soviet-era mobile homes, covered in wood veneer and equipped with cheap folding furniture. Each module is connected to the next by a narrow crawl tunnel. The Mars landing will be simulated by moving half the crew into a tiny "lander module." They'll emerge on the Martian surface-a sealed-in section of the warehouse facility-and step across concrete floors to perform mock scientific experiments.

The scientists running Mars 500 have already run through a 105-day isolation experiment, which ended in April, 2009, to test the viability of the facility and the scores of experiments that will be performed in the final, full-length run. But perhaps the most important test was the selection process-finding the right people for the job. The Mars 500 crew members were selected after weeks of psychological testing, which included the crew being dropped into the Russian wilderness for a three-day survival course. The goal was not to teach survival skills, but to dissect crew interactions.

curious about space," says Oliver Knickel, one of the six volunteers who participated in the 105-day test mission. "But I wanted to see if I could complete this challenge. I wanted to see if I could cope. When I went in, I knew I wasn't going to stop." He and Cyrille Fournier beat out more than 5,600 applicants for the mission's two European slots. They both fit the astronaut criteria-Knickel is a former paratrooper and engineer in the German Army; Fournier is an Air France captain.

According to Knickel, the experience was also surreal by the end, causing a feeling of dislocation-a blessing in disguise, as it would be hard to endure the experience if one actually felt the days passing with any normal rhythm. As he wrote in his mission log:

I have absolutely lost the feeling for … the total length of time we have spent inside the module now. It seems like three to four weeks, but the calendar proves that it has been 105 days and we will leave the facility later today.

Most important was motivation. The crew shared a selflessness that can be hard to grasp. As Fournier wrote in his log:

You need to realize that the isolation you are in is more valuable (in all senses) than the life you could have had outside, with your family and friends, with all of the possible good moments or potential important achievements you could have accomplished.

And afterward, Knickel says, the strangest facet of the experience was how the experience shaped his everyday life. It felt, for the first time, infinitely rich. He gave up 105 days, and that made each one that followed much sweeter.

The Mars 500 test run was a flying success-the men aboard became a remarkably cohesive, jovial group, and remain friends to this day. And yet the secret, perhaps, wasn't in anything special to them-the sheer amount of work involved turned out to be a balm. "To be honest, the depression and isolation weren't a problem," says Knickel. "Being so busy made it impossible."

From 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., the crew was consumed with over 70 experiments, devised by scientists around the world. The final Mars 500 run, meanwhile, will feature 100. A few are technical-testing a chemical "nose" that looks like a minivac and sniffs out dangerous bacterial growths-but they are the exception.

Most of the trials will study the crew members themselves, through questionnaires, fitness tests, detailed biometrics, and daily blood and urine tests. The scientists want to understand not just whether someone might go insane-but exactly how, why and when, so that mission control might plan for it and prevent it with exercises in meditation, conflict resolution, or stress management.

The science straddles sci-fi and shrink's chair. Many of the tests will plumb the mind-body connection, trying to determine, if, for example, detailed data about the crew's mood correlates with any decreased cardiovascular fitness; or whether specially formulated nutrient diets-including things like tryptophan and Omega 3s-might be used to bolster moods. Another set of experiments is trying to determine whether such extreme isolation affects the immune system and hormone levels.

Other teams are mining the fuzzier realms of the mind. There will be reams of questionnaires, probing how the crew members perceive each other and how they interact; and how varying personal values-ranging from benevolence to power to tradition to hedonism-affect how well each crew member adapts to the situation.

The most pernicious threat is simply that the first thing to ebb in long periods of isolation is self-awareness. To that end, Dinges is using video cameras and facial-recognition algorithms to gauge and catalouge crew member's emotions. His ultimate aim is to create robotic aides that will help people monitor and modulate their moods. In other words, a sensitive version of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey-without the murderous impulses. (Dinges actually rigged his own computer with HAL's voice, to get a taste of what that might be like.)

In a high-tech, 21^st-century way, such exhaustive analysis of the crew members' minds happens to parallel the motives of any other explorer. And, in a crucial way, Mars 500 is actually harder than a real expedition-precisely because once the destination is reached, the crew won't have had the satisfaction of touching Mars. When it's over, they'll simply have endured something no one else ever has, just to see if they could do it while everyone else watched. Call it science, or performance art. Call it exploration.

Large photographs by TrujilloPaumier. Smaller images courtesy of ESA and ESA - S. Corvaja.

Powering Planes with the Sun

Tobin Hack — Mon, 1 Mar 2010 05:00:54 PST

In Switzerland, two pioneers are coming closer and closer to a flight around the world powered only by solar energy.

This is the third part in an eight-part series on the future of transportation. New articles published every Monday.

It doesn't make good business sense, physics sense, or much of any kind of sense, to try to fly an airplane on solar power. Not yet. With the state of the technology, and how relatively young the solar sector still is, such an endeavor would be considered quixotic today-let alone in 2003, when Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, co-founders of Solar Impulse, announced they would design a solar-powered aircraft and fly it around the world. It would be a statement, they said, about our global dependence on fossil fuels and the untapped promise of burgeoning green technologies. The Swiss pilot-entrepreneurs were after "perpetual flight": a plane that could climb to 9,000 feet and fly on the sun's energy by day, then descend below cloud cover to lower altitudes, where it would cruise on stored battery power by night.

It was a long shot. And yet seven years of innovation later, the 70-person Solar Impulse team is nearing its goal. "We were intrigued by this notion of perpetual flight," said Borschberg when visited in September in Solar Impulse's massive hangar, situated smack in the middle of Düendorf Airfield, a Swiss military zone. "We wanted to be totally independent of any fuel." Forget hybrid planes, or the biofuels fixating most of the sustainable aviation sector today; Piccard and Borschberg are purists. "No fuel, no CO2, no pollution. It could fly almost forever, assuming good weather," Borschberg said of their invention.

By November of last year, test pilot Markus Scherdel-formerly of DLR German Aerospace, the NASA of Germany-was climbing into the cockpit of the completed prototype to taxi down the Dübendorf runway for the first time. Soon after that, Scherde was back in the cockpit, this time guiding the plane not just down the runway but up into the air for a series of successful "flea-hop" mini-flights over the tarmac. (You can watch a film of the event on YouTube.)

The Solar Impulse HB-SIA, as it is officially named, is a strange sight to behold. Resting under the sky-high ceiling of its hangar at Dubendorf, it looks fragile to the point of breakable. And no wonder: HB-SIA, comprised of a carbon skeleton covered in a flexible polycarbonate "skin," weighs only about 1.5 tons, about as much as a small car. Its wings are so light that a single person can carry them. And when I tested both the pilot's parachute and the detached nosepiece of a second prototype of the plane for weight, the parachute was heavier.

The HB-SIA carries a minuscule, one-person cockpit, and its generous 64-meter wingspan (which is comparable to that of an Airbus) makes it aerodynamically efficient and affords it a low sink rate, so that it needs very little energy to continue flying horizontally. This greater wingspan also creates maximum surface area for the aircraft's 650 square feet of crystalline solar cells-all of which provide a maximum of about 40 kilowatts, or the power of a small scooter or motorcycle, and should get HB-SIA up to speeds of 45 miles per hour on sunny days.

While 45 miles per hour is practically the speed of light for a vehicle powered exclusively by the sun, it's slow as molasses by today's aviation standards (the average commercial plane cruises about 12 times faster), so each leg of HB-SIA's transcontinental journey will take a full five days and five nights. Piccard and Borschberg still haven't quite figured out how they'll manage to take turns living in a one-man cockpit for such lengths; they've hired a yogi and a sleep specialist to help troubleshoot few human details like how not to fall asleep at the throttle, pass out from boredom, or die of thrombosis between takeoff and landing. As for energy storage, HB-SIA's lithium batteries, which make up one quarter of the plane's total weight, are two times lighter (but twice as efficient) as the batteries used in most computers, and have the storage capacity to power HB-SIA through eight hours of darkness each night.

Every last nut and bold in the plane, from its electric engines to it batteries to its solar cells, has been designed specifically for Solar Impulse, and that innovation has come at a price. Of Solar Impulse's $100 million budget, about $55 million has been spent so far, primarily on technology development and salaries. Most of that funding has come in via principle partnerships with three corporations: Solvay, an international chemical and pharmaceutical group; Swiss watchmaker Omega; and Deutsche Bank.

Currently, HB-SIA is being dismantled at Dübendorf Airfield and prepared for transport to Payerne, where it will be reassembled and readied to execute a 36-hour, day-and-night test flight sometime this summer. That flight will put Piccard and Borschberg one step closer to their ultimate goal, a round-the-world-flight, which they hope to complete by 2012.

It's an enormous undertaking, but Piccard and Borschberg are the right men for the job. Piccard grew up attending Apollo 7 launches and hanging out with NASA astronauts. It's nNo surprise that he went on to become a European champion in hang-glider aerobatics, be a part of the first- ever (two-man) team to balloon around the world, a lecturer at the Swiss Society for Medical Hypnosis, and ultimately decided to harness the power of the sun with Solar Impulse.

Borschberg, for his part, is an MIT graduate, an alumnus of the consulting firm McKinsey, and an entrepreneur. Biceps bulging from his company polo shirt, hair slicked back, he looks as though someone built him for maximum efficiency, just as he himself has built HB-SIA. "There is no space for doubt; there is just time in fact to be focused," he told me flatly when I asked if he ever thought their mission might be a little audacious.

Confident and tenacious though they might be, Borschberg and Piccard are in no rush to make solar aviation commercially feasible. For now, they say, Solar Impulse's flight around the world should be viewed like the Wright Brothers' or Lindbergh's first flights; the pioneers of aviation didn't set out to deliver 150 tourists and business travelers from New York to India, but merely to show that it was possible to fly. "The first step is to demonstrate that this is possible, then we can open up and develop applications," said Borschberg. "For us it's important to show what we can do with this technology, so it's more a first step. It's more a symbol than an end product."

The aviation industry seems to agree that the future of solar technology in commercial airplanes does not look bright, at least not in the near term. Not a single member of the General Aviation Manufacturers Association is currently researching or developing solar technology for planes. Boeing, highly active on the sustainable aviation scene, has several staffers in top positions at the Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative and is a driving force behind innovation in fuel cell technology for airplanes. But even they are leaving solar-powered flight alone, for now. "Solar isn't something we're actively pursuing for commercial air travel-the energy density we would need from the solar cells simply isn't there, and the trade-offs are too great," said Boeing press officer Terrance Scott.

Today, almost everyone who is looking forward to the aviation fuel of tomorrow is looking not up at the sun, but down at the ground, to biofuels. Nate Brown, deputy director of CAAFI and policy analyst for the Federal Aviation Administration's office of Environment and Energy, says that fuels made from plants like jatropha (related to castor oil, it thrives even in tough, dry environments and may prove critical in places like India and Africa), camelina, salicornia, and algae look most promising from where he's standing today, but the jury is still out as to which biofuels will prove most feasible, energy-efficient, environmentally friendly and safest for airplanes.

Carl Burleson, acting deputy assistant administrator for the FAA's Department of Policy, Planning and Environment, goes further. He says that even within the biofuel sector, the industry is really only looking at "drop-in fuels," or fuels that could theoretically be poured straight into the engines of today's fleet, with no modifications required. "Early on we looked at the idea of hydrogen, the idea of ethanol, various things that would involve redesigning today's fleet, and just decided it wasn't a very viable approach because you have such a large embedded capital cost right now in today's fleet," said Burleson. "If you were going to design a hydrogen aircraft, if it were viable, they would be substantially different in design, so even if you get it right you're talking 30-40 years to change over the fleet."

Several airlines have already run test flights on biofuel; the advances have been minimal, but a great deal of manpower and funding are currently pouring into research and development. Meanwhile, as the aviation industry (which knows it will eventually need to graduate from fossil fuels, for both economic and environmental reasons) considers biofuels the first step, Borschberg and Piccard are already leaping headlong several steps past that. Borschberg says the biggest lesson that he and Piccard have learned from the pioneers of aviation-the Wright brothers and Lindbergh-is that "if you don't try, you'll never succeed."

"There were people in the U.S. who were able to demonstrate in 1903 that it was impossible to fly," Borschberg likes to point out. "We prefer to spend time to make it possible rather than spending time trying to demonstrate that it's not possible. It's more interesting."

Contest: Design the Gas Station of the Future

GOOD — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 07:30:00 PST

Gas stations-little areas off the highway that put dwindling supplies of polluting fossil fuels in our inneficient internal-combustion-engine powered cars-need to become outmoded quickly. So, we're asking you, GOOD readers, to imagine the fueling station of the future. We want you to use your best design skills and imagination to show us how we'll be fueling our cars once we have moved on from gasoline. Is it a hydrogen filling station for our fuel cells? Is it a place where we switch in dead batteries for pre-charged ones? Do we not even need fuel because all our cars are solar powered? Show us.

the OBJECTIVE
Show us your rendering of the gas station of the future.

the ASSIGNMENT
Using whatever design chops you want, draw or create what a typical fueling station will look like. Artistic mastery will help, but we're more excited about your ideas. A bad drawing of a great idea will be better than a beautiful rendering of something uninspiring.

the REQUIREMENTS
Make sure your image is annotated, so that people know what your station looks like. Once you're done, email your final design to projects[at]goodinc[dot]com. Each should be 2,500 pixels wide. Any image format works. Include in your email your name, and a description of your station and how the fueling of the future will work. The deadline for entries is March 10. We'll post the submissions then for everyone to take a look.

the PRIZE
The winner (selected by GOOD and transportation futurist Richard Schaden), will receive $1,000 from Beyond the Edge. The first runner-up will receive $500 and the third-place entry will receive $250.

INSPIRATION:

We write often about transportation innovations in our Transportation section, and there may be some inspiration in our Radical Future of Transportation series. You should also check out this Treehugger post, and, even this Google results page, which can get you started on your thinking. Consider the internet your oyster.

Illustration by Will Etling.

Eliminating the Wasted Energy in Your Car

Christopher Mims — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:30:09 PST

Your car only uses 15 percent of the energy from its gas, but engineers are working on sucking every last drop from your gasoline.

This is the second part in an eight-part series on the future of transportation. New articles published every Monday.

If you had to invent an efficient way to move a person from one place to another, you could hardly do worse than the modern automobile. After more than a century of refinement, even the most over-engineered slab of German perfection wastes 85 percent of the energy in the fuel we put into it.

Most of that energy is squandered by the car's beating heart, the internal combustion engine, which alone wastes 62 percent of the energy that enters the gas tank, according to the EPA. Where does that energy go? It's radiated away into the atmosphere as heat.

By comparison, the rest of the average car is relatively efficient. The stereo, air conditioner, and power windows combined eat up only 2.2 percent of the car's energy intake. Ditto air resistance (2.6 percent); friction between the wheels, their bearings and the road (4.2 percent); braking (5.8 percent); and the "driveline," which includes the transmission and all the other parts of the car that transmit the force of the crankshaft to the wheels. Idling uses up the remaining 17 percent of the energy in a car, which explains why hybrid vehicles turn themselves off at stoplights.

That means that of the 130 million joules of chemical energy in the average gallon of gasoline, only 19.5 million are converted into the kind of kinetic energy that matters-forward motion of the car. The rest are literally disappearing into thin air.

Only a century of cheap oil could keep all that low-hanging energy out of the hands of innovators who want to recover as much of that wastage as possible. Now that most of the developed world has finally jumped on the conservation bandwagon, their dreams are becoming a reality.

There are three basic ways to recover wasted energy in a car: regenerative shocks, regenerative braking, and recovery of waste heat from engine exhaust. Other options, like the "wind-energy-capturing device for moving vehicles" described as a tiny wind turbine attached to the top of a truck-are pipe dreams, despite having been issued patents by a U.S. Patent office that apparently doesn't care whether an invention will actually work. (If this did work, pinwheels on big rigs would be the perpetual motion machines that could end our dependence on Mideast oil immediately.)

Regenerative Shock Absorbers:

Zack Anderson, the co-founder of Levant Power, a company tackling regenerative shock absorbers. When a car rolls over a bump, its hydraulic shocks absorb kinetic energy, which is then dissipated as heat. This isn't a big deal if you're driving a Camry, but if you're the world's single largest consumer of liquid fuels and your fleet of Humvees is rolling across the unpaved badlands of Afghanistan, the savings start to add up.

"Depending on the vehicle type and terrain, we're increasing fuel efficiency in the [U.S. military's vehicles] by up to six percent," says Anderson. That's 60 percent of the energy lost through the vehicle's suspension. Theoretically, says Anderson, they could recover 100 percent of the energy wasted by shocks, which would increase fuel efficiency in heavy vehicles on bumpy roads by up to 10 percent.

Installing the same system on a passenger vehicle rolling on smooth terrain would increase its fuel efficiency by only about 2 percent, but if Levant can make its shocks cheaply enough, they could show up on a car near you soon. That's because Anderson and his team have created shocks that are exactly the same dimensions as regular automobile shocks and that function in nearly the same way. "A standard shock is a piston," says Anderson. "When the car's wheels move up and down, that piston forces a thick fluid through small hole, and that causes heat. What we're doing instead is, we're using that piston movement to turn a hydraulic motor that spins an electric generator and that produces electricity."

Regenerative Brakes:

Regenerative braking is the best-known method for recovering wasted energy from a vehicle. The same electric motors that convert electric energy into the motion of the car's wheels can operate in reverse-as generators that turn unwanted kinetic energy into electricity. It's the same principle as a wind turbine, only instead of harvesting the breeze, the car is harvesting the momentum of the wheels as you stomp on the brakes. But to maximize the regenerative brakes, you have to drive a little differently.

"Folks tend to be on the throttle, then brake late and hard," says Dave Lee, a product communications specialist at Toyota whose job description unofficially includes coaching obsessives on how to squeeze every last mile out of their hybrids. Typical braking overwhelms the batteries of a hybrid, which are limited in terms of how much voltage they can handle without being damaged. That's why the average hybrid vehicle driver is only getting 10 miles per gallon better than drivers in comparable non-hybrid cars. By driving 50 or 60 yards ahead of yourself and coasting as much as possible, Lee says, a Prius owner can approach the theoretical maximum Toyota's engineers estimate you can get out of a hybrid's regenerative brakes, which translates to about 30 percent better fuel economy than a non-hybrid vehicle.

Heat Recovery:

The white whale of automobile waste recovery is the embarrassing inefficiency of the internal combustion engine, which reached its current form at the turn of the last century and has seen only incremental improvement since. The exhaust gases flying out of the back of your car are hot enough to melt lead, so it shouldn't be too hard to use them to produce energy. Engineers have been attempting it for 50 years. The trick is doing it simply and consistently.

Dan Coker, CEO of Amerigon, figures his engineers have it just about right. Their "thermoelectric" system uses solid-state electronics to convert heat directly into electricity. Amerigon's system, which is being tested by BMW and Ford, achieves more than 10 percent efficiency in converting heat into electricity, but the exact value is a trade secret.

"If we can get it to one thousand watts, we might even be at a level where you could consider eliminating the alternator," says Coker. The alternator provides all the electricity required by a conventional vehicle, and excommunicating it from a car would take a significant drag off the average automobile's engine. According to BMW, a 1000-watt thermoelectric converter could reduce fuel consumption by up to 10 percent. But getting 1,000 watts would require either a lot of very hot exhaust or close to 20 percent efficiency of conversion of heat to electricity, which is unheard of.

In a different approach, Honda's engineers have proposed a system that uses a system in water is vaporized by exhaust gases, and that steam is run through a tiny turbine that produces electricity They report that it could reduce fuel consumption by up to 32 percent. To date, published results put the actual fuel savings at 3.8 percent.

Taken together, simple addition suggests that an enterprising home mechanic with access to state-of-the-art technology could increase the fuel efficiency of his or her car by between 30 and 40 percent. It's hardly a revolutionary number, until you consider that the world consumes 85 billion barrels of oil a day, and auto manufacturers are already bumping up against the limits of what they shave off of a car in order to make it use less gas.

"Weight is huge," says Anderson, "and you have car companies that are desperate to take just one, two, maybe three pounds of weight off a vehicle." Making cars sleeker and lighter can only take us so far, and until we rid ourselves of the internal combustion engine, poor roads, and rush hour traffic, the 85 percent of the energy in a vehicle that's wasted remains a big, fat target for auto manufacturers the world over.

Illustrations by Keith Scharwath.

Building a Better Battery

Nikhil Swaminathan — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 06:00:00 PST

The future of powering electric vehicles.

This is the first part in an eight-part series on the future of transportation. New articles published every Monday.

Futurists have often said technology obeys Moore's Law, which maintains the amount of transistors that can cheaply fit on a microchip doubles every two years. Thus, we end up with more processing power in progressively tinier packages.

But this exponential paradigm doesn't apply to the development of hybrid electric vehicles and electric vehicles. In this arena, technology advancements are limited by the battery—a product of chemistry, not electronics. As a BMW exec tasked with developing fuel-efficient technology told the Financial Times, what we don't know now about certain reactions, we may not know decades from now. Thus, it's hard to predict what the car battery of the future will be.

For those who didn’t pay attention in class: Batteries are typically comprised of three main parts: a cathode (positive electrode), an anode (negative electrode), and an electrolyte (an ion-rich liquid that separates the electrodes). The movement of metal ions between the cathode and the anode through the electrolyte (and back) releases electrons, generating electricity.

Lead-acid batteries, found in conventional automobiles, have a low ratio of energy to weight, which means it takes a lot of battery to provide just a little juice. Nickel-metal hydride batteries, the ones powering today's hybrids like the Toyota Prius, are significantly lighter, but offer only a slight improvement in efficiency. Neither can compete with gasoline-fueled internal combustion.

Several technologies are competing to fuel the next generation of EVs. All of them, however, have serious weaknesses that researchers are still attempting to address. "People are betting on different horses at this point in time," says Matt Keyser, a senior engineer in energy storage systems at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. "Which one is going to come out and win is anyone's guess."

Here's a look at some of the technologies vying to corner the EV market:

Lithium-Ion

These batteries use lithium ions as the electrolyte. A battery pack made of these cells, while more powerful than lead-acid and nickel-metal hydride batteries, is still 10 times weaker than an internal combustion engine of the same weight. Versions of these batteries are already used in in both the Tesla Roadster and Chevy Volt, as well as many electronic devices, such as laptops and cell phones. The knock on current lithium ion technology: It dispenses its stored energy slowly, so acceleration may be slow, and the batteries take several hours to charge. Also, while lithium is plentiful, it's not extensively mined, so it’s expensive to obtain. It may take up to 10 years for supply to catch up to projected demand.

Ultracapacitors

Ultracapacitors charge quickly and dispense their charge speedily (curing the slow acceleration problem that plagues some electric cars). They also last much longer than batteries—they can be recharged over and over again, whereas batteries eventually will not recharge. That's because ultracapacitors use electric fields, instead of slowly depleting chemicals, to get charges. They are already in use in short-run electric buses in Russia and garbage trucks in the United States. The downside: They only hold their charge for a limited time, so it's unlikely that ultracapacitors will become a viable option for powering a car alone. "I think ultracapacitors are a technology that's going to work with [battery] systems," says Savinell. However, one Texas-based company called EEStor says it has solved the storage problem, claiming its ultracapacitors will enable a small car to travel 250 miles on a single charge that only takes five minutes to complete.

Fuel Cells

Like batteries, fuel cells have cathodes and anodes and involve a chemical reaction, specifically making water and electrons (and thus electricity) by combining hydrogen with oxygen. The technology is simple enough, but the safety issues are the drag: The transport and onboard storage of highly explosive (remember the Hindenburg?) hydrogen gas could keep fuel cells from catching on. In addition, the catalysts needed to split hydrogen atoms into protons and electrons (like platinum, palladium, rhodium, nickel) are very expensive. "Fuel cells from a mobile standpoint are difficult," says NREL's Keyser. "Maybe in twenty five or thirty years down the road, we may be able to deal with all the storage issues, the transport issues, the infrastructure issues, the catalyst itself." Seemingly agreeing with Keyser's skepticism is the Obama administration, which cut $100 million from the federal hydrogen fuel cell program in 2009.

Redox Flow

Similar to fuel cells, redox flow batteries would require filling stations rather than plug-in capability. In this case, a charged electrolyte flows through the battery, producing electrons. After a while, the electrolyte loses its charge and needs to be pumped out and replaced. The electrolyte is typically made with vanadium, which is the 22nd most abundant element in the world. It's also very safe. "If you were to spill this on the road and light a cigarette near it, it's not going to go off like hydrogen," says Keyser. "The big thing with [redox flow batteries] is: Are you going to get the energy density or power density that you need for the car itself?" Right now, even lithium ion cells are several times more powerful than redox flow cells. German researchers, however, claim they have a method to increase the distance redox flow batteries can power a car by four to five times, rendering them roughly equal to lithium ion batteries.

Metal Air

Savinell and Keyser both point to metal air batteries as the technology of the future. This battery uses the oxygen in the air as its cathode, which means it doesn't need as much material and gets more energy for its weight. Depending on what material is used for the anode, metal air batteries could be anywhere from three times more powerful than lithium ion batteries of the same weight to as powerful as an internal combustion engine. IBM intends to bring these to market in five years for smaller electronics. "For lithium air, I think that's more ten to fifteen years down the road [to power a car]," says Keyser. "We're just starting to really look at that and understand all the benefits and the costs associated with lithium air batteries." One major barrier remains: When the oxygen reacts with the electrolyte to form ions, it also creates a solid that can gunk up the air intake, blocking the battery's function. Researchers are searching for an electrolyte that will produce the necessary ions but avoid the formation of this solid.

Illustrations by Will Etling.