Difference between revisions of "Talk:Automated transport systems"

Revision as of 23:59, 26 April 2011

• Trains
  • Light rail
  • [1][2] Trains could be a lot cheaper to build if high-tension cables are used instead of tracks
  • Gravity vacuum maglev (almost no energy required)
• Aircraft
  • Personal aircraft. Flying cars . VTOL would be best
  • Sub-orbital passenger craft
  • Autonomous helicopters already exist like this mini-helicopter designed at MIT. Impressive video of small, autonomous, quadrotor helicopters. Think of the possibilities of little helicopters to deliver packages; like an automated FedEx. Hummingbird Unmanned Rotorcraft is autonomous and has a much better fuel-efficiency than any other helicopter and also goes at a higher altitude, which would be better for solar power. Other unmanned helicopters include the RQ-7 Shadow. Bell Eagle Eye is an unmanned tilt-rotor vehicle.
  • Spacecraft etc.
  • "Free flight
  • Skycat - a hybrid airship/hovercraft
• Human powered - International Human-Powered Vehicle Association is a dynamic organization of hobbyists designing and testing human powered land, air and water vehicles and even submarines. Some of the stuff there is pretty amazing: somebody flew 74 miles in a pedal-powered plane, somebody else broke 82mph in a recumbent bicycle. What's more, the community of people doing this are very much in favour of free and open design. Human powered vehicles will probably remain something people do mostly for fun and for short commutes, rather than as part of an economic infrastructure.

Light vehicles for urban commutes

A huge percentage of car-travel is short urban commutes with only one passenger. If we can take these journeys in in small (one or two passenger), safe, quiet, quick, clean vehicles, we can make cities much more pleasant. Traffic congestion can probably be wholly eliminated, certainly if these vehicles are driven by sophisticated AI

• Bicycles with the possibility of hydraulic transmission 
• Velomobiles. The main factor against their adoption is the cost, but 3D printing could greatly reduce that. A car body has been 3D printed, so why not a velomobile?
• E-bikes [3]
• Electric scooters like RoboScooter
• Enclosed motorcycles/ tiny cars like the Audi Snook, MIT City Car, X-tracer etc

Ownership structures

Possibility of shared vehicles (similar to the bicycles sharing schemes that exist in many cities.) The winner of the 2009 Buckminster Fuller challenge was a system of small electric cars and scooters which would be docked at points around a city (where they could charge). You swipe a card and one of the vehicles unlocks and you drive it and drop it off at another dock. There are plans to bring this in for several cities [4].

Shared vehicles could solve the parking problem. Cars are parked 95% of the time, and that whole time they're doing nothing but wasting valuable urban space. We need a way of sharing vehicles that minimizes the time they spend sitting around. This could be arranged through smartphones.

Cars

According to Wikipedia, within the EU, 44% of goods are transported by roads and 85% of people. In other words, road vehicles are by far the dominant mode of transport and this is not likely to change overnight. A solution that improves road vehicles is more realistic than a switchover to PRT or VacMagLev, for instance.

• 28% of greenhouse gas emissions [5]
• Land use in cities. Roads cover a huge percentage of urban land (need to find figures, probably about a third). A more space-efficient transport network (like PRT) would allow for more greenery

Road traffic accidents caused 2.09% of all deaths in 2002 [6][7]. Severe injuries from road accidents = 36,000 jumbos crash landing — this is reality of road transport. Number one killer of young people [8] and by far the leading cause of accidental death [9].

Financial cost of road traffic accidents estimated at over $120 billion in the US and over $193 billion in the Europe Union. (Found in slideshow from Delphi Automotive Integrated Safety Systems - need to find source).

Traffic jams waste 4.2 billion man-hours a year in the US alone. [10]. Only 8% of the space on motorways at peak capacity is occupied by cars [11]. Cars are only in use 4% of the time [12]. Parking is a massive waster of time and space in cities.

We now have the technology to make self-driving, very light, electric cars that use a fifth the energy of conventional cars. These can be much safer than normal cars.

Efficiency

Most cars get less than 40 miles per gallon. Range about 400 miles

• Volkswagen 1-liter car gets well over 200mpg
• Urbee has a 3D printed body and gets over 100mpge
• X-tracer. 205.3 MPGe. Battery-powered. Weighs 1436lb. Over 100 mile range (depending on battery size). Carries two people. Top speed over 120mph
• Edison2 Very Light Car. 102.5 MPGe. Runs on 85% ethanol, 15% petrol. Weighs 830lb. Seats 4 people.
• Li-ion Wave II. 187 MPGe. Battery-powered. Seats two people with large boot.
• Aptera gets 164.3 MPGe. Lithium ion battery. Seats 2, with a four-seater version planned. 100 mile range. 90mph top speed.
• Trev is a battery-powered car. Two seats and a boot. Weighs just 300kg. 150km range, 120km/h top speed, 1/5th the energy of a conventional car. They are working on open-sourcing it [13]
• Tesla Roadster is powered by lithium ion batteries, cheaper to run than an ordinary car, 125mph top speed, 0-60mph in 4 seconds, 3.5 hours to charge. Official range is 244 miles, record is 347.2 [14]. Model S seats five, comes in 160, 230 and 300 mile range versions and charges in 45 minutes from an ordinary electric socket.
• Most electric cars still have inferior ranges to petrol cars, but some (like the Tesla Roadster) seem to have overcome the problem.

Regenerative braking technology can reduce energy needs 10%.

Carbon fiber is 4 times lighter than steel and 5 times stronger. It is 14 times more expensive, but you would make that back in fuel costs coz it's lighter. Carbon fiber is progressively getting cheaper and being used more and more in cars. Other similar composites, fiberglass etc. may be cheaper. Aptera's body is made from a proprietary lightweight composite that is 3 times stronger than steel and can't be dented with a hammer.

Third generation photovoltaics in windows and paint will allow cars to produce their own energy on-the-move. The roof of a car can hold about 1m² of solar cells, which might receive a thousand watts a day.

Energy storage

Three sustainable energy stores have been used to power cars: batteries, hydrogen and ethanol.

Batteries

Current batteries have three problems: range, charging time and price. These will probably be buried within the next five years by improving technology:

• Nanowire batteries  expected to be commercialized in 2012, are likely to have 8-10 times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries [15] and much faster charge times. [16][17]
• "Kolibri Alphapolymer" (lithium metal polymer) batteries recharge in six minutes and have been government-tested to give a 443.7 mile range^[18][19][20]. This battery is also about 30 times cheaper than existing lithium-ion batteries^[21][22] and charges 2500 times (1.1 million miles) without degradation ^[23]. Weight is 350kg for 98kWh ^[24], which is a density of 280 watt hours per kg. For comparison, the Tesla Model S battery weighs 540kg and stores 85kWh^[25], so a density of 157Wh/kg. This does have the smell of a scam, but time will soon tell.

Batteries have the advantage of working on a pre-existing infrastructure. Charging at home is more convenient than going to petrol stations (or hydrogen stations).

Hydrogen and ultracapacitors

Hydrogen fuel cell cars have comparable range and refill times to petrol cars. Infrastructure is the basic problem. There have been some proposals for systems that would turn garages into hydrogen-charging stations e.g. [26]

Hydrogen has high energy density; ultracapacitors have high power density, so a hybrid that stores energy as hydrogen and transfers it to ultracapacitors at in-wheel motors gives the best of both worlds. "c,mm,n" and Riversimple's Hyrban both work on this principle. As we learn to build on the atomic scale, we can improve ultracapacitors, but they still have nowhere near the energy density of petrol.

Ethanol

Can be grown from algae, which grow much quicker than plants and don't compete for farmland.

Urban air pollution issues.

Open-source cars

• OScar
• "c,mm,n"
• Riversimple's open-source, carbon fiber, fuel cell Urban car (plans here)and their much sexier LifeCar.
• List of open-source cars

Self-driving cars

A lot of progress was made on autonomous cars in 2010. The technology exists and is fully tested; it just needs to be introduced on the ground. 4 unmanned cars drove from Italy to China delivering goods [27]. Google has a fleet of modified Prius cars that have driven 140,000 miles without incident, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car#Fully_autonomous

Center for Automotive Research Stanford (CARS) doing a lot of work in this area, including cars that are driven by humans, but have smart systems so they "cannot crash"

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80MlnZcXCwo
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exdUD02JryI
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YUjlKA6tVU

Impressive video of an autonomous car doing controlled high-speed parking

Safety

Computer-controlled cars will have far less accidents.

Stronger materials will make cars safer. Some progressive cars (like the Spira) are designed with bumpers made of foam or rubber or something soft like that, to soften blows to pedestrians/cyclists.

The huge reductions we can achieve in the mass of the vehicles will make a collision a much less serious event.

Vehicles that tilt like the Audi Snook concept or the X-Tracer can take corners much tighter