Nice thread, great summaries of the options and specific implementations! 👍
Use a smaller engine powered by on-demand electrolysis, and... well, get 2000 mpg (of water!)
So you put electrical energy (286 kJ/mol) in to split the water, then recover less than one third (thermal efficiency) of the heat of combustion (286 kJ/mol) in the internal combustion engine as work. Some of that work needs to be used to split the water, and the rest to power the car.
So there's a 2/3 energy deficit already before factoring in electrical losses and leakage etc. I'm always intrigued as to how people make those systems "work", and how they manage to record improvements in economy when they're only wasting electrical energy in splitting the water and so there should be a deterioration in economy at the point of use!
I'm looking forward to hemp diesel fuel most of all. I can't get down with electric or solar power. I need to burn SOMETHING. At least hemp is 100% biodegradable and sustainable, unlike petrol.
Oh and check this out...
In my opinion we should not be using arable land purely for producing fuel (to burn e.g. in cars and power stations etc.). There are plenty of waste streams we could be using instead - water treatment plants, for instance. Although, I haven't fully reckoned on where that organic matter actually comes from and where it goes afterwards, and then it all gets a bit circular when you factor in "carbon capture" at power stations, yielding a waste stream...
You're effectively relying on the photosynthetic power of plants, terrestrial or aquatic - that's your effective peak global power, because it's your only input (excluding weather). I.e., ignoring the residual warmth of the Earth's core, the only power we can rely on is the sun (ultimately), and conversions of that power - whatever sun energy our planet captures is the limit to our working potential. Argh, entropy!
Steam would be awesome just for the sounds. The whistles and the chugging of the engine.
It's actually really easy to get cool steam sounds.
A good fake is to just colour white / pink noise according to the Helmholtz resonant frequency of the cylinder / exhaust combination (it's not constant through a cycle).
Steam cars in GT would be awesome, and I suspect the new sound method would apply just as well to them.
I don't know how you'd assign the new controls for the stoker, boiler, steam chest etc. though, and presumably we won't have to wait for them to get up to pressure.
