Thursday, May 17, 2007

Just stick your cans in my car!

This is an interesting new way to run a car:

An EE professor at Purdue University has found a way to produce hydrogen that replaces the need for gasoline by mixing water with beads of an aluminum-gallium alloy. The discovery could lead to engines that essentially burn water, instead of gasoline, since the gallium is not consumed in the reaction and the aluminum can be recycled.


Hey Dewkid: you could fill your car up with water, and empty cans of Mountain Dew, and be totally gas free! Of course, you'd be passing up on the 5 cent refund value, but it's still probably be cheaper than gas at $4/gallon!

Seriously though, the inventor claims there are no toxic by-products, and can produce 2KWatts power / pound of aluminum.

For a 350-mile trip in an automobile, it would take about 350 pounds of aluminum at a cost of about $60, since the aluminum oxide left over after the reaction could be converted back into aluminum-gallium pellets for reuse.


Hmmm, 350 pounds is a lot of weight that your car would have to drag around everywhere. I'm not convinced this is a useful breakthrough, but I suppose time will tell.

4 comments:

DewKid said...

Oh, cool! Now I can create my super Dew car! I wonder how hard it would be to extract the water from urine... That would kill two birds with one stone: instead of stopping at a restroom, I'd simply "fuel the car"!!!

Corn Cob Bob said...

Thanks Dewkid. I knew I could count on you to turn this bit of news into something gross that serves only your needs.

I'm still waiting for a car that runs on Dewkids....

DewKid said...

Heeeyyyyy.

You know, your days are numbered, corn boy. We already got cars that run on corn!!

Don Snabulus said...

What about cars that run on humans?

MMMMbrrrrtttt!