Posts Tagged ‘Bonneville’
Buckeye Bullet sets electric-powered land speed world record
With more and more students and universities getting into the fight for establishing a new land speed record for battery electric powered vehicles, we are likely to receive more and more news like this one here.
For now however, a team of students from the Ohio State University leads this race, after their battery electric vehicle smashed the records on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.
The streamliner in question is called Buckeye Bullet and it managed to run at averages speeds of 495 km/h (307 mph), way faster than the previous record of 395 km/h (245 mph) set in 1990s by Pat Rummerfield in his White Lightning.
Although not yet certified by the International Automobile Federation, such an outcome is expected over the next few weeks. Pat Rummerfield already admitted his record has been broken and congratulated the team…
Buckeye Bullet is powered by a 600-kilowatt lithium-ion battery pack sourced from A123 Systems. The battery packs contains 1600 compact lithium-ion batteries just like the ones used in laptops.
They’re already preparing to break their own record. I expect they will.
I admit the possibility of getting an electric vehicle into the family gets more tempting every week. They get more affordable and my wife’s daily commute fits ideally into even minimal requirements for such a car. And she doesn’t need to go 300 mph.
Disclaimer: I own enough shares in A123 to power my iPad.
Flying kettle aims to break speed record set in 1906
Front on, the vehicle could be mistaken for a nifty sports car, and from the rear it looks like something out of a low-budget science fiction show, all jutting Thunderbirds fins. But the side view is the crucial one – a puzzling mishmash of tubes and wires and water tanks.
This is Inspiration, a steam-powered car built in the UK – in a wooden workshop in the New Forest, Hampshire, to be precise – believed by its designers to be capable of smashing the oldest land speed record.
In August, on the Bonneville salt flats of Utah in the US, superheated steam will rush through almost two miles of the car’s tubing and propel the vehicle at 175mph, a speed that would smash the steam car record of 128mph, established more than a century ago.
All in all, it is a very British kind of project, a mixture of eccentric dreams and clever, patient engineering: a combination of the hi-tech (it has taken brilliant technical knowhow to design tubing able to withstand the sort of heat and pressure that will be generated) and the homespun (an ordinary camping gas valve turns out to be a vital component in the ignition system).
You know, the crew at The Guardian are pretty lucky. They often get to write long, interesting pieces like this. And there really are a heckuva lot of folks like me out here – who really enjoy their writing and what they write about. Which is basically everything!
RTFA.
