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Urine powered car will get 90 mpg

marting

Illuminator
marting
Joined
Sep 18, 2003
Messages
4,280
Here's an interesting, and misleading article that is irritating because uninformed people reading it are more likely to jump to CT theories about supression of car engines running on water. After all, urine is almost entirely water.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/07/08/urine-power.html

Urine-powered cars, homes and personal electronic devices could be available in six months with new technology developed by scientists from Ohio University.
....
A fuel cell, urine-powered vehicle could theoretically travel 90 miles per gallon.
Click to expand...
 
Pshaw

marting said:
Here's an interesting, and misleading article that is irritating because uninformed people reading it are more likely to jump to CT theories about supression of car engines running on water. After all, urine is almost entirely water.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/07/08/urine-power.html
Click to expand...

That's nothing. My fart-powered car gets 55 miles to the cubic liter.

I just need to develop a more comfortable interface and I will be rich.
 
Damn you, man! Don't you care at all about AGS (Anthropogenic Global Stinking)?
 
If they could just repeal the laws restricting consuming alcohol while driving, I'd have an almost unlimited range with a couple of cases of beer and a few bags of pretzels.
 
If this were true, certain American breweries could control the world....
 
Oddly, 90 miles is just about how far I can usually drive before having to take a bathroom break.
 
marting said:
Here's an interesting, and misleading article that is irritating because uninformed people reading it are more likely to jump to CT theories about supression of car engines running on water. After all, urine is almost entirely water.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/07/08/urine-power.html
Click to expand...

I can't imagine how anyone could read that article and think that it lent credibility to claims about water-powered cars.
 
Yoink said:
I can't imagine how anyone could read that article and think that it lent credibility to claims about water-powered cars.
Click to expand...

The classic water power car story is that some inventor discovered an additive that let you fill up your gas tank with water then add a small amount of miracle juice. Voila! But then Pig Oil (or pick your villain) bought up the patents and supressed it. Since urine is 99+ percent water it's just a matter of the "miracle juice" part that needs to be added
 
I'm having a lot of trouble getting that 90 mpg to work for me. Assuming that they mean a car and not, say, a skateboard, then they're saying that urine has ~2X the available energy of gasoline.

Assuming a 60% end-to-end (well, hydrolysis-to-transmission) efficiency for the urine-powered car vs. 20% for a gasoline-powered car, and assuming that the urea is the only usable part of urine (<5%), this suggests that the urea+oxygen reaction puts out >13X the energy/gallon of gasoline+oxygen or, for that matter, Jet-A+oxygen.

Which would be (ahem) a little surprising . . .
 
marting said:
The classic water power car story is that some inventor discovered an additive that let you fill up your gas tank with water then add a small amount of miracle juice. Voila! But then Pig Oil (or pick your villain) bought up the patents and supressed it. Since urine is 99+ percent water it's just a matter of the "miracle juice" part that needs to be added
Click to expand...

Sure. My point is that I can't see how you could read this article and come away with the idea that it's the water part of the urine that's powering these vehicles. The article seems perfectly clear to me.
 
Yoink said:
Sure. My point is that I can't see how you could read this article and come away with the idea that it's the water part of the urine that's powering these vehicles. The article seems perfectly clear to me.
Click to expand...

It is clear to me too that they couldn't mean a gallon of urine would get you 90 miles of driving but that's because I know a bit of chemistry, thermodynamics, and common sense. I don't think that is the case with most non technical readers who will likely interpret it otherwise. It would be nice if they actually pointed out how much urine would be required to accumulate enough urea to power a car for 90 miles.
 
dasmiller said:
I'm having a lot of trouble getting that 90 mpg to work for me. Assuming that they mean a car and not, say, a skateboard, then they're saying that urine has ~2X the available energy of gasoline.

Assuming a 60% end-to-end (well, hydrolysis-to-transmission) efficiency for the urine-powered car vs. 20% for a gasoline-powered car, and assuming that the urea is the only usable part of urine (<5%), this suggests that the urea+oxygen reaction puts out >13X the energy/gallon of gasoline+oxygen or, for that matter, Jet-A+oxygen.

Which would be (ahem) a little surprising . . .
Click to expand...


Less than .1% of urine is actually urea. It wouldn't serve the purpose of the article to say that I suppose.
 
I saw a documentary in the sixties on a pill added to water water that could run your car. Unfortunately the inventor lost the formuna just as he was to demonstrate it to oil company executives. Boy was Grampa pissed at Herman.
 
marting said:
It is clear to me too that they couldn't mean a gallon of urine would get you 90 miles of driving but that's because I know a bit of chemistry, thermodynamics, and common sense. I don't think that is the case with most non technical readers who will likely interpret it otherwise. It would be nice if they actually pointed out how much urine would be required to accumulate enough urea to power a car for 90 miles.
Click to expand...

Yeah, fair enough. The "90 miles per gallon" bit is potentially misleading.
"Dad, pull over, I need to pee!"
"Great, we were running a little low. Now where's that funnel?"
 
Yoink said:
Yeah, fair enough. The "90 miles per gallon" bit is potentially misleading.
"Dad, pull over, I need to pee!"
"Great, we were running a little low. Now where's that funnel?"
Click to expand...

I imagine women going for an emergency fill-up.
That would be a hoot!

Especially with SUV's where the tank lid is quite high up.
 
Yoink said:
Yeah, fair enough. The "90 miles per gallon" bit is potentially misleading.
"Dad, pull over, I need to pee!"
"Great, we were running a little low. Now where's that funnel?"
Click to expand...

Well, if it results in more BEER!..... Ah, the pleasures of suspended disbelief.
 
Chemically binding hydrogen to other elements, like oxygen to create water, makes it easier to store and transport, but releasing the hydrogen when it's needed usually requires financially prohibitive amounts of electricity.

By attaching hydrogen to another element, nitrogen, Botte and her colleagues realized that they can store hydrogen without the exotic environmental conditions, and then release it with less electricity, 0.037 Volts instead of the 1.23 Volts needed for water.
Click to expand...


Wouldn't you first need to extract and concentrate the urea in order to make this practical? And looking up the chemical formula for urea -- (NH2)2CO -- well, I'm no chemist, but would I be correct in assuming that releasing the Hydrogen would produce Nitrogen and Carbon Monoxide as waste products?
 
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