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Air Car - "Running on Hot Air"
     The topic for this month's column percolated out of a message about the air car from a Tech Directions subscriber. Before you read the rest of the column you might want to view the video he referred to at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmqpGZvOYT4.
     After watching the video, my initial impression was that the two technologies it shows were interesting and might be environmentally friendly. When 1 Googled "Blogosphere Air Car," I found so many people with so many opinions that I concluded that the topic is the perfect opener to a good classroom discussion on the future of the automobile.

Drive by Wire
The Dream Becomes an Incremental Reality

     The drive-by-wire concept calls for the transfer of the control of a vehicle from the driver to an automated system that controls the vehicle’s steering, engine throttle, and brakes.
     Today’s automotive engineers are now taking an incremental approach to turn new car safety technologies, over time, into an autonomous vehicle navigation drive-by-wire system.
How close are we now to the dream?



Running in Place Against the Wind

      Wind tunnels vary in size and the amount of wind velocity they can generate. The most powerful one at NASA can actually produce Mach 3.5 supersonic wind speeds. A wind tunnel’s wind velocity and size has a lot to do with what it is designed to test.
      The newest type of wind tunnel combines wind velocity with a rolling road bed. (See Photo 1.) This new dynamic design allows for wind tunnel testing of a motor vehicle’s aerodynamic shape, while at the same time examining the interaction of the separate wind currents created by the vehicle’s rolling tires.






Seeing Beyond
Gasoline-Powered Vehicles
The All Electric Tesla Roadster

The Tesla Roadster is 100 percent electric and still capable of going from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.9 seconds. However, the early production vehicles will have a transmission that will limit their 0 to 60 acceleration to 5.7 seconds. Tesla Motors is building the car from the ground up with an all-aluminum chassis and 100 percent carbon fiber body panels.






MIT Develops New Spacesuit

     A NASA-funded project at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) will soon produce an astronaut fashion makeover that will let modern astronauts do their thing in a spacesuit as fashionable as any ever worn by a movie star.
       The new MIT BioSuit wraps very tight layers of material around the human body to create a physical and flexible counter-pressure suit that protects the astronaut from the vacuum of space. If the new suit receives a small puncture, astronauts can temporarily repair it, on the spot, using a special bandaging tourniquet-style repair.


DepthX

   A NASA-funded robotic vehicle designed initially to explore deep underwater alien environments here on Earth. During dives it now makes,
the robot tests systems that it may someday use to explore the icecovered oceans of Jupiter's moon
Europa.
     The photo on this month's cover shows DepthX exploring our planet's deepest flooded sink hole, the 1,099-foot-deep Zacaton Cenote, located near Tamaulipas, Mexico. The dives that the robot makes are all critical tests of the autonomous systems that give it the ability to operate without any human intervention.





"Fuel Cell Vehicles"

     The fuel cell vehicle has long been viewed as the Holy Grail in automobile research. These cars would be powered by the chemical reaction of hydrogen and air. They wouldn’t produce any of the environmentally dangerous bi-products produced by today’s fossil-fueled vehicles. Only clean water vapor would spew from their tailpipes.




"Hydrogen Refueling Stations"

     My January column focused on fuel cell vehicles as the ultimate hybrid for the 21st century and beyond. But hydrogen powered vehicles can only usher in a future hydrogen economy if roadside hydrogen refilling stations become as plentiful as your neighborhood gas station. This column will look at the production and future distribution of hydrogen.
     To place all readers on equal footing, let’s start with some basic facts about hydrogen...



"A One-Wheeled Motorcycle"

     The one-wheeled motorcycle that is shown recently won the 2003 prestigious Gold Award from the Industrial Design Society of America & Business Week Magazine.




"A Metamorphosing Ship"

     This ship is capable of going down a river to load its cargo at a shallow inland port. Once loaded and back in deep water, the ship transforms itself into its ocean configuration to deliver its cargo to deep or shallow ports that are oceans apart.





"The Tweel Tire/Wheel"

     Michelin, the company that produced the first automobile pneumatic tire in1895, has recently introduced a totally new wheel/tire combination called the Tweel ™








"The Ekranoplan"

Is a transportation vehicle that has the fuel efficiency and carrying capacity of a ship coupled with the speed and maneuverability of an airplane. It has 10 huge jet engines, a three hundred foot fuselage, and a 120-foot wingspan. Can you imagine an airplane that has the length and width of a football field?





"Hypersonic Flight - Traveling Faster than a Speeding Bullet"

Since the invention of the jet engine, the holy grail of aviation has been to build an aircraft that can fly passengers faster than a speeding bullet. On dateYear2004Day27Month3March 27, 2004, NASA proved that scramjet powered hypersonic flight is possible.





"Robotic  Personal Assistant"

You can purchase a robot to clean your pool, mow your lawn, vacuum your home, or even serve as your family pet.










"The Jet Train"

In 1997 the Thrust SSC jet car set a new world land speed record in the placePlaceNameNevada PlaceTypeDesert when it traveled faster than the speed of sound. This jet car actually attained Mach 1.020 on a run that averaged 763.035 miles per hour.







"Speed up for the 21st Century -Maglev"

The Japanese Railway Technical Research Institute's Maglev vehicles (illustration) are designed to travel in a U shaped guideway  with no physical contact with the guideway walls.






"The Yamato 1"

The Yamato 1 was  the world's first (publicly announced) superconduction electromagneto-hydrodynamic propulsion ship. One of the most significant advantages of this drive system is the fact that it contains no moving parts.






"Digital Money"

The truth is that 90 percent of our American money supply already exists in a digital form. Every business day two trillion dollars moves between banks and other financial institutions as electronic currency.