Alternative Transport
Applauded

I enjoy every issue of Designfax, and I find something of value every month, but I especially appreciated the January 2000 issue for the articles on the drive mutations that may evolve into a dominant form of personal transport.

Please pass along to Mr. Mandel an idea that cannot be original with me but that I have not seen discussed: the large, uniform market for vehicles with battery or flywheel energy storage. What service involves the most stopping and starting? Not inner city public transit, not high-rise elevators, but rural and suburban mail delivery to roadside boxes. That duty eats up brakes, punishes transmissions, holds gasoline mileage below 12 mi/gal, and keeps engines in the most polluting operating range most of the time. Our rural letter carrier shows up with a different (used) car about every six months, even though she covers only 14 route miles a day.

Under the Honda Insight hood as seen in "New Milestones Along the Alternative Highway," January Designfax, p. 22.

Invaluable experience and cost savings from day one could be accumulated with hybrid microvans in postal service, but Washington responds to the prospect of looking bad, so you Dukes of the fourth estate, not fusty old engineers, must give officialdon a nudge.

-- Dick Wendt, Engineer-Instrumentation, ISA Fellow, St. Louis

[Editor's Note: I recall the discussion of flywheel-powered vehicles back to the pages of Popular Science in the early to mid-70s. And, if memory serves me correct, the target for such vehicles were local commuters and city buses. Like so many technologies that appeared on the pages of that magazine, though, flywheels disappeared back to labbenches and out of the public eye. However....

I was at a trade show last November, where a company by the name "Active Power," Austin, TX, was showing a flywheel-based energy storage system as a back-up power supply. So, flywheel devices do still drift back into view every so often -- perhaps there can be a resurgence of interest in them as applied to vehicles. RM]

Alternative Energy Skoffed

Regarding your January 2000 issue of Designfax, I suggest someone is seriously pulling your leg regarding alternative energy sources. In the article from BlackLight Power (from which I have requested "Reader Service" info just out of perverse curiosity), it seems they are describing a system that generates more energy than is put in.

CQFD Air Solution's Taxi O Pollution as seen in "Coming Down the Pipeline: Recent Alternative Fuel Research May Change Power Supplies," January Designfax, p. 46.

And the article about designing a vehicle running on compressed air -- I looked at this 40 years ago when I was in high school. You would have to haul around a tanker truck full of compressed air to get anywhere near the range talked about. Then fill that tanker truck from the air supply at a gas station using those dispensers that give you enough air to fill a tire for fifty cents. And bring your lunch. It is going to take awhile. Of course, heating the air to add additional energy will greatly reduce the amount of air needed, but that puts us back in the same energy hole we are already in.

-- Dick Bentley, via email

[Editor's Note: Readers can view the report and empirical calculations of Dr. Randell Mills (who presented the BlackLight Power findings at the 1999 Pacific Conference on Chemistry and Spectroscopy) at http://www.blacklightpower.com/newenergy.html. French company CQFD Air Solution reports its urban vehicles with air mono-fuel/compressed air engines are already in operation. KC]

Some Thoughts on Common Sense

I enjoyed reading your January "Common Sense 2000" editorial concerning the Y2K "crisis." I agree that it's time for another pamphlet; may I suggest that you've already started it? Keep up the good work and please retain your common sense approach to technology and other life issues.

-- John Hying, Danfoss Graham, Milwaukee

Relative size of the off-the-shelf 0.0004 in. Bird Precision orifice in "Breathing On Mars," January Designfax, p. 74.

I've been reading your editorials for the last few months and some of the other articles on how we should be focusing our energies on the future of our planet. But before we scientist and engineers dart off in these directions to solve our world problems, we need to have our thoughts in order. For example, the "Breathing on Mars" article in your January issue makes reference to "microscopic traces of life discovered on a small meteorite that traveled from Mars to Antarctica." The scientific community seems to have taken as a fact that a stone found in Antarctica came from a place 48 million miles away. It has internal markings that may resemble bacterial life. I am not picking at the writer for using it in the article, as all of my peers seem to accept it too.

However, are we thinking here or are we just accepting what we are told to accept? Let's use some common sense as we go into the future. -- Tim Pearce, PE

Just read your January "Common Sense" editorial. You are right. All America is hung up on money. Further, we need to remember all good technology is God-given.

-- Tom Morse, via email

Design Fact or Fiction?

Thanks for the interesting and fun Bruce Sterling story "User-Centric" in the December issue. It was a clever way to make some real points about product development.

-- Tom Kiovsky, EPC Graphics