Cyclone Steam Engine Pushes Closer To Land Speed Record
Steam engines. For most of us, they conjure images of horseless buggies, paddle ships and classic locomotives, but soon they may be setting new speed records and hitting new benchmarks for efficiency--potentially in passenger cars.
Speak for yourself, fellow.
A car dealer in Portland, OR, years ago had a Stanley Steamer crash through those huge plate glass windows new car dealers have for their showrooms. They had taken the car out for a spin and somehow it still had a head of steam when it was parked in the showroom. Big OOPS.
Always seemed kinda nice to me to think of carrying a hatchet and bucket in the car in case a car ran out of "gas." Might have to hike some if the Steamer was thirsty but there aren't too many places on the planet where there isn't at least a bit of brush if needed.
A snootier version of a biomass-powered car with the Cyclone steam engine was designed to run on orange peelings only in a city in Florida. Unfortunately they didn't grow oranges in the city as far as anyone knew and the dang contraption would even have had to have the orange peelings squeezed for orange oil.
Back to the old drawing board.
Now this is a real muscle car and the engine actually exists - at least in prototype form. The engine was built for DARPA's EATR (Energetic Autonomous Tactical Robot) but yet needed a brain last I heard.
Not easy building brains. FoxNews worried mightily that EATR would be eating people - at least dead people, like the mummy-powered locomotive reported in Egypt by Mark Twain. DARPA was horrified and tried to do something about the reputed brains at FoxNews. Cyclone declared its engine was strictly vegetarian. They lied. The engine could eat most anything, including swamp gas, waste heat, solar, used oil and bunny rabbits like the Vikings in Sweden are using for heating despite attacks from the ferocious PETA people. EATR's brain may take a while.
Cyclone won a best of show award at an algae convention devoted to that glamorous fuel:
Kind of silly actually. The show was devoted to specialized algae growers and refiners.
The Cyclone engine don't need fancy foods like the orange peeling car. This would be my favorite alge food for the purported people EATR:
Can't do any of these things with hydro, geothermal, wind or the other usual suspects until there is one of those new-fangled batteries that can safely store thunderbolts in a thimble. Might be some time yet for that.
We Swedes did invent the solar-powered airplane ("Watch out for those *&^% clouds, Ollie"). Might not be overly practical even though EATR likes sunshine too.
Best, Terry