Quote Originally Posted by bruce.desertrat View Post
Looking up Brown's Gas on wii leads to this amusing sentence: "This mixture may also be referred to as Knallgas (Scandinavian and German Knallgas: "bang-gas"),"

:-)

I do think this should be an obvious means to manage the 'no solar power at night' problem; use some of the electricity generated by a solar installation to crack water, then burn the O2 and H2 back into water at night. This does run into some issues namely that the places with the best potential for solar power..tend to be the places with the least water.

Another stray thought...why has no one ever made a diesel-electric truck? It works really well for ships and trains, is there some lower bound of efficiency or power that would make it not useful for small vehicles? Even conventional hybrid cars, afaik, alternately power the vehicle via the gas engine and batteries.
Actually A diesel electric truck would revolutionize the transportation industry. Since you could have electric motors located in every wheel of both the truck and the trailer .
I used to have conversations with some friends of mine about this. The way I saw it since an electric motor develops near instant torque can be controlled through the RPM range from zero to what ever. electric motors can be used as regenerative braking as well so having a 35 hp electric motor in every wheel of the truck and trailer would be more available power than a 600 hp diesel feeding a transmission.
Loose the entire gear train and you have a significant weight savings. design the generator with 12 or 24 poles or even 36 poles design the diesel engine to run at 400 to 600 RPM for its best output and Idles at 100, ( I have one that runs at 600 wide open.) add a battery module to the tractor and one to the trailer. Let the engine just idle while driving on the batteries or rev up and cut in when needed recharging the batteries and adding the additional energy to pull the long hills. going down hill the wheels are going to charge the batteries.
Back when I used to have these conversations the capacitor battery cells were unknown where as now the same battery pack to power my idea would weigh less than 1/3 of what it would have then. I can visualize an 80,000lb rig getting as much as 20 MPG at times and 10 MPG at its worst usage