Right now, I hope it will be my next car. For a small car, it’s quite spacious. This may surprise you. In general, electric drive trains are much more compact than ICE systems. Nissan spread the batteries out low in the unibody; all this leaves more room for you and me.

The Leaf is an all-electric car– no gas cap (no place to put gas). It’s got batteries instead. Keep in mind that electric cars cost much less per mile than gas powered ones. Electricity can be sent right to your house. There’s no need for tanker trucks plying our roads on the way to gas (petrol) stations. Electric motors are well over 90% efficient. An Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) is a heat engine. It depends on how hot the gas can burn and how cool it is outside the engine. They can get to around 30%– that’s it.

Electric cars are also very much quieter than cars most of us are used to. When you drive one, it’s magical.

To my eye and to the eyes of other people I test drove and rode with, it has the best instrument panel– what your car-people call the best “driver interface,” of any electric vehicle I’ve seen or driven. It’s easy to figure out. Your speed is presented on a heads-up display at the base of the windshield, visible even in bright sunlight.

It has marvelous features in its navigation system: O yes, it shows you where you are on a good-looking map. But, it also displays a circle on the map, like a target with you at the bull’s eye, indicating your range– how far you can drive from where you are right now given how much charge is left in your battery pack– very cool. When one is new to electric vehicle driving, it’s easy to get what they call “range anxiety.” You worry about your range– about whether or not you’ll be able to get home. After you’re used to running all your errands and completing your commute with plenty of charge in your pack (your battery pack), you don’t much notice the range. Once in while though, it’s important. It’s beautifully displayed and very clear how far you can keep going.

It has five seats. Really, five people can sit inside. My recently returned Mini E (Electric Mini Cooper) that I was able to drive for a year had no such feature: two seats, and just barely those. The trunk could hold a manila folder or so. And the battery cooling system of the Mini E, is like, so totally, 20^th Century. The cooling air flows right through the cockpit. Put a bag behind the passenger seat, the batteries overheat, and your car just stops. Not so with the Leaf. Its cooling system has been much more thought through. It’s a real production car. Oh, and the Leaf has a pretty good trunk (boot) for a small vehicle.

I can face it, though. The Leaf is just not as sporty as the Mini E but it’s sporty enough for me. By sporty, I mean the Mini E goes like a bat out of someplace dark and hot… fast. The Leaf is not quite like that, but it’s close enough for me.

This is the future, my friends. An electric car that is built so that it feels very much like a car– like a gas-powered ICE-style car that you might be used to. I hope to get one before 2011 gets underway. I’ll use it for almost all of my driving, and in Los Angeles, one can do a great deal of driving. Where I live it’s often no fun, and it’s only as safe as cars are. That’s about a 100,000^th as safe as flying. All things considered though, I drive. I do my best to enjoy it. I’m looking forward to the near silence of an all-electric machine. My commute will get quieter, cheaper, and just more fun.

This week, I was asked to comment on the big heat wave along the east coast of North America and the resolution of the scandal that came to be called “Climategate.” Along with these serious subjects, an egg got fried on a sidewalk.

As you may know, I strongly believe humans are making our world warm. The egg on the sidewalk provided me with a chance to talk about the fundamentals of heat transfer and about our changing climate.

I commented briefly that indeed Climategate was much ado about very little. The scientists were proven to not be hiding anything, and so on. Unfortunately it nearly derailed the real climate conference in Copenhagen. Several minutes later at the end of her show, journalist Campbell Brown showed some video of one of her CNN producers taking a shot at cooking an egg on a New York sidewalk.  He had a bit of trouble, but I think he got the idea across. It’s hot back east, very hot.

Using my radiant thermometer (pyrometer, such a word!), I satisfied myself that an egg on a griddle cooks well if the griddle is around 125 Celsius (260 Fahrenheit). Doing a bit more messing around, I found that an egg will cook on a surface that’s only 55 Celsius (130 Fahrenheit). It just takes time – almost 20 minutes. So indeed, it can be hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk.

The little hand-held radiant thermometer is upside down, but it shows around 53.8 Celsius. This took about 22 minutes to cook under ideal cast iron skillet sidewalk temperatures. Along with the temperature, we need the pavement to hold a lot of heat (high thermal capacity). Sometimes the sidewalk isn't hot enough through and through; it depends on the pavement. Sure; try it...

I can tell you from experience in the airplane electronics industry that you can, for just a moment, put your hand on a metal surface that’s around 65 Celsius, about 150 Fahrenheit. Much above that, and you can’t leave your hand there for more than an instant. You may have found yourself walking on a hot sidewalk or on hot sand, and you can just barely stand it (pun intended). That’s the temperature we’re talking about.

If you want to try this, please do. Post a picture on my Facebook page. Some more advice: use a little olive oil or butter on the sidewalk or street. This allows more heat to flow into the egg. This is “conduction” of heat. Then, use an egg “ring” to keep things under control while the egg gets hot. You get your egg rings (if you don’t already have ‘em) in the gadget section of a grocery store or cooking specialty shop.

The science to discover or keep in mind is that the sidewalk can get hotter, much hotter, than the air. The air this week was around 40 C (a little over 100 F). But the egg cooking area was a bit hotter than that because it’s not only heated by the air, it’s heated by sunlight, or sun-heat. It was heated by convection with the air, and by radiation of the sun. Black surfaces do indeed get hotter than not-so-dark surfaces. Asphalt gets hotter than cement. Hot enough to fry an egg. Oil helps conduct heat into the egg.

For me, this has everything to do with climate change. Everyone should keep in mind that if we made every black street a pale color, like white, or close to white, the world would indeed cool off. If we did indeed embrace solar hotwater systems for our houses and buildings, we would pump out much smaller amounts of greenhouse gasses.

If you’re a young or young-at-heart engineer or entrepreneur, consider coming up with an economical pale pavement material and getting rich! Same with a standardized solar hot water system. Rich! I tell you!

Two more good ideas. Think about it over fried egg, your poached egg, your egg salad sandwich, and your soufflé.

Let’s change the world,

Bill

I have mentioned Professor Phelan often to my engineering colleagues, and well, to anyone who’ll listen. He specialized in a niche area of mechanical or electrical engineering generally called “control theory.”

Professor Phelan realized that the way most engineers and scientists go about controlling things like the temperature of an oven or a house– a thermostat, or the speed of a car– cruise control, is not nearly as good as it could be. And the reason is elegant and mathematically simple.

Thanks for reading this far, if you did. I will go on about Dick’s big idea in the next few paragraphs. I hope you get that he had an idea that could change the world and allow us to do so much more with less. Richard Phelan meant a lot to me.

****

Dick Phelan and Pseudo Derivative Feedback (PDF)

If you’re into this kind of thing, you know that most controllers work best with an integrator in the forward loop. For most of us, the classic example is sticking your hand in the shower to get a signal (hot, cold, cool, or warm) that your nerves, brain, and muscles use to set it just right. You adjust a faucet knob and wait. Your brain integrates the signal; you subtract what you feel from a suitable proportion or fraction of what you want, and eventually–  Ahh…

An old trick, and a seemingly reasonable one, is to put a differentiator in the feedback loop. That way, the feedback signal gets stronger (uh, bigger), with not just the change, but with the rate of change. All good.

The scheme I described above is Proportional+Integral+ Derivative (PID) control. It is everywhere. I mean everywhere. Even the most sophisticated satellite attitude controller systems are PID. Oh yes, one can analyze the Laplace Transform heck out of those things, what with their spindly struts and drilled-out, mass-saving, trusses, busses, and brackets. But, when it comes down to it, often, very often, our colleagues abandon all the extra analysis and just optimize a few PID variables.

Here’s what Dick Phelan realized, pointed out, and fixed. With PID, we’re integrating a signal we just differentiated. Any transducer noise or vibration often makes the feedback signal too big, or just wacky.

Instead of PID, try this: Feedback a signal in two places. On a control diagram, it’s two summing junctions. Feed the signal back upstream of the integrator, and then, with a separate proportionality constant, downstream of the integrator. The signal downstream of the integrator acts as though we differentiated. But, there is no, or much less, noise.

Dick called his scheme Pseudo Derivative Feedback, or PDF. I’ve seen others refer to the same thing with an I in front of the acronym to indicate integration. That’s not bad, but in tribute to Professor Phelan, I prefer PDF.

Now, Dick Phelan was a bit of character. Although one of his earlier textbooks gives the reader a solid understanding of Laplace transforms, later in life, he didn’t think much of them. Consider these words from his textbook: Feedback and Control Systems, Cornell University Press, 1977:

“The apparent justifications for past use of Laplace transforms were (a) it was a good way to keep students occupied in an intellectually stimulating way for quite a period of time, and (b) it established a jargon for the fraternity while effectively sophisticating– in the true dictionary definition of the word– a basically simple field of study into one that was awe-inspiring to the unknowing…”

Well, control theory can get complicated, but it’s the key to our future. We have to find ways to not just use less, as traditional environmentalists wanted us to do. Instead we have to find ways to be more efficient, much more efficient. We need to find ways to do more with less. PDF will help us engineers and designers do that. Thanks Professor Phelan. Let’s change the world.

The last few days, I’ve appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News regarding the oil and gas gushing from the Gulf of Mexico’s seafloor. Watching and listening to spokesmen and reporters up close gives one a deep sense of how serious this whole business is. From the chairs in these various studios, it’s quite a ride.

When we drill into a deposit of oil, it often comes gushing out because the hollow spaces underground hold natural gas along with liquid oil. The gas acts like the propellant in a can of hairspray or paint. It was produced by ancient bacteria, and its pressure is still there. When we poke a hole in the underground cavity, sometimes we get a gusher; sometimes we get what petroleum workers often call, a “blowout.” The Deepwater Horizon rig was destroyed by a catastrophic blowout of natural gas and oil. It caught a spark, probably from one of the dozens, or hundreds, of electric motors on board, and the whole rig blew up killing 11 men.

With all this, oil workers look to avoid blowouts. Whenever we run pipes anywhere, we put valves in the lines. For a couple of centuries, we have been drilling for oil. So at the top of each well, we put a shutoff valve.  The bigger the well; the bigger the shutoff. This well is huge, 53 centimeters (21 inches) across. So, the shutoff valve is huge. It weighs more than a hundred tons. By long tradition, it’s called a Blow-Out Preventer (B.O.P.).

Here, the expression “preventer” is, at best, inappropriate. It didn’t prevent anything as far as we can tell.

The idea now is to pump a fluid that will block the flow. In the oil field this fluid is often a special mixture whose molecules lock together when it’s under pressure. Oil drillers call it “mud.” It looks like mud, but there’s more to it.

The molecular lock-together feature of a fluid is called “dilatancy.” The classic dilatant fluid in our everyday experience is cornstarch mixed with a small amount of water. It’s goopy, until you slap it or shake it. It locks up and does not splatter at all. So it is with drilling mud.

British Petroleum (BP) has been pumping drilling mud into the Preventer plumbing for almost two days. It seems to have slowed the oil flow a little, but not enough.

The engineers, or at least the spokesmen for the engineers, said they plan a “junk shot.” The idea is to add bits of hard  material to the mud. Traditionally, in the Texas oil field, drillers add cut-up car tires and old driving range golf balls. This “bridging” material sometimes helps the dilatant mud molecules lock up. The pipe is so big, and the flow so fast, that a golf ball isn’t really that big an object. It could easily jam against an edge or pipe joint– and that would be good. Looking at the BP executive’s faces, it doesn’t seem like this is going to work either.

Next, I expect engineers along with the Remotely Operated submarine Vehicle (ROV) drivers will cut some large portion of the top preventer off. The next pipe up the drill string is called the “riser,” and I imagine that’s what they’ll go after next. It’s big job because the material is a hard type of stainless steel. And, it’s a long way around the big pipe with a fancy saw and buffing grinder, especially when you’re doing it with a claw-fingered robot to work the material and grainy video to guide you.

After that, I hope the managers let go of the idea of trying to capture any more oil until the relief, or drilled-in-from-the-side, well is cut. I hope they put a cap or slug made from a few thousand tons of concrete on top. They could let it ooze very slowly for a few weeks, until they can get to the well casing or liner by coming in from the side. Drilling these relief wells will take a few months, because it’s, once again, miles down and hundreds of meters of solid rock.

About the rate of oil flow: there have been a great many questions about how much oil is flowing per day. At first, looking at satellite data, people thought it was about 5,000 barrels a day. A barrel is 42 gallons. So, it’s a great many gallons. (A “drum” is 55 gallons– another confusing feature of the old English system of units.) Well, it turns out most of the oil isn’t making it to the surface of the sea. It’s floating somewhere in between the sea floor and surface– a goopy mess for any living thing in the ocean.

I have some small experience in oil fields, or in the “oil patch.” I worked for a shipyard that built the world’s premier oil slick skimming boat. We had a machine derived from skimming technology that performed the seemingly trivial task of separating oil and water.

You might think it would be easy, but in nature, dust particles or plankton organisms (plankters) get covered with oil in such a way that they neither sink nor float. They’re neutrally buoyant. As small globs of oily goo, they clog up all kinds of plumbing– including the gills, fins, and wings of fish and birds.

This fundamental experience helped me explain to news anchors and viewers why there was such discrepancy between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations satellite assessment of size of the spill compared with the measurement of the pipe gusher’s oil leak.

I hope BP takes this business very seriously. Any information they are not disclosing will come out one day when various employees or friends of employees reveal the true decision process. I remain concerned that the traditions of oil spills on land are too strongly influencing the procedures being developed on the bottom of the Gulf, an ecosystem people all over the world depend on.

We use a lot of energy. This disaster helps us recognize how complex or oil technology is, and how much can go wrong. Let’s learn from this, wean ourselves from oil, and change the world.

This has come up on account of my involvement with Activeion, a company that sells a remarkable set of products: systems combining electronic and hydraulic devices to produce very, very small bubbles in water. Now when we say small, we are talking  especially small, on the order of 50 nanometers in diameter. That’s 50 billionths of a meter, which is somewhat less than a ten-thousandth of the thickness of a human hair, or a tenth of the wavelength of green light, for example.

I too was quite skeptical of the existence of what we now call nanobubbles. After all, one cannot easily photograph them with visible light. They are smaller than the lower limit of optical wavelengths.

Nevertheless, compelling calculations show that one in about 250 water molecules can be replaced with an oxygen molecule carrying an electric charge, and a nanobubble will persist for a substantial fraction of a minute.

That aside, I ran my own tests of the efficacy of what has come to be called “activated” water– nanobubble-bearing water. From my direct experiments, I conclude that electrically charged nano-bubbles disrupt the cell walls of bacteria. Rigorous lab test show that they also denature viruses. As you look into this, you may come across the expressions, “bactericidal” and “virucidal.”

In science educator fashion, I baked very clean cotton swabs in an oven at 75 Celsius (170 Fahrenheit) for about an hour. I prepared a bacterial growth medium using boiled bouillon and gelatin cooled in sterile-baked aluminum dishes. I swabbed a number of household surfaces before and after I sprayed them with nanobubble-bearing water. I prepared otherwise untainted control versions of the medium in dishes. I left the dishes covered for three days at room temperature. The treated surfaces produced substantially fewer bacterial colonies on my growth media. My results are consistent with the rigorous results from ATS Laboratories in Minnesota. This lab routinely checks the efficacy of antimicrobial products, the kinds of things used in restaurants, cafeterias, and the like.

While nanobubbles cannot be photographed in conventional fashion, consider these recent micrographs of bacteria. Visit Activeion.com. Use your judgment. See if we’re on to something.

Keep in mind also that the Tennant Company, which supplies floor and surface cleaning equipment to many institutions around the world, has incorporated nanobubble-generating cells in many of their floor washing systems for a few years. Skeptics like you and me have to consider that Tennant’s customers buy these products for some reason.

What I find so appealing about these products is that they are a way to accomplish more with less. As you may know, I strongly believe that this way of thinking is the key to our future. We have almost seven billion people living on what’s proving to be a pretty small planet. If we can find ways to do more with the less, it will help many of us live into the next century.

Here’s the idea: The big losses, the big wastes of energy in traditional automobiles, cars & trucks, is when they’re sitting at a stop sign or stop light. The engine is just whirring away, and the vehicle is not going anywhere. The other big waste is when a vehicle merges onto the freeway. To do that, it needs a big engine, with a big cooling system and a big fuel pump, and so on. Along with that is the roller-coaster style of lost energy. Combustion cars spend all this fuel to get the tops of hills, but once up there, all they can do is drag their way down. The energy of getting up hill is lost to heat– friction in the brakes and tires, and the very small drag force of the air going by. Hybrid cars store energy in batteries and they can get that energy back by running an electric motor.

Many of us don’t realize that an electric motor being driven backwards becomes a generator. An electric generator run backwards is an electric motor. Without too much trouble, engineers and craftsmen can make a motor-generator that works pretty well in both directions. This new BMW has its electric motor built into the drive shaft of the main transmission, or so the representatives told me.

It’s good to see BMW going down this road, pun intended. I am already a bit of a fan of their engineering. Even though I’ve never owned a BMW, I’ve leased and driven the all- electric, no-gas-nowhere-no-how MINI E Mini-Cooper for eight months now. It is fantastic. It’s an advanced electric vehicle– not a hybrid. I enjoyed my ride today, but compared with other hybrid cars, they haven’t gone very far. It does not store enough electric energy to run on its electric motor alone, even for a short distance. It has a feature to help the anxious driver not lose a moment as he or she pulls away from a stop, and this feature will lock in the gas motor and not allow the car to rest. But, the longest journey begins with a single wheel revolution… or something. If this gets luxury people on board, it’s great. So, thank you very much BMW. Let’s change the world.

Hybrid BMW 7

BMW V8 hybrid engine

When Earth Day started out, back in 1970 before even disco music came to be, it was all about pollution. Humans were trashing the planet, especially our water and air. We have made a little progress, in some parts of the world our water is a little cleaner, and there is less smog in the air. In other places though, human trash is bad as ever and getting worse. More important than all the trash is Climate Change, an even more important reason to be mindful of Earth Day. There are so many people living on what is turning out to be a pretty small planet, that we’re changing our climate faster than ever in history. This will cause trouble for billions of us if we don’t get busy. So let’s work together and make the world cleaner and cooler. Using science and the shared knowledge that we all live on our favorite planet, we can change the world. Happy Earth Day.

I’ve looked into this; we could keep bats from breaking with a new straight-forward rule. If your bat breaks, and pieces go into the infield, yer’ (you’re) out!  Infielders would then be able to dodge the flying shards of wood first and recover the ball at their leisure, or at least, a moment or two later, after the sawdust had settled. Base runners would then be, in rulebook parlance, at risk to be put out in the same way they are with any pop up or line drive.

When bats break, it’s not magic; it’s science. It’s not uncontrollable or especially random.   We could make players take responsibility– step up, and be batsmen.

Watching the World Series last October, I muttered out loud, “Jeter’s going to break his bat.” And sure enough, he did– on the very next pitch. Look these pictures over, and you might see why.

During this at-bat, Jeter did not “brand” his bat. He was not holding his bat so that its grains were oriented edge-on to the flight of the ball. Pick up a stack of papers (maybe a stack of emails that shouldn’t have been printed).  Now, flap the papers like you’re fanning a fire or a cooling your cheeks. The stack of papers bends with every wave of your hand. If you, on the other hand (pun intended) hack, or karate chop, the pages edge-on, they’re stiff. They can take a larger load without giving in.

Modern bats in the Major Leagues break often, more often than they ever used to. Oh yes, perhaps pitchers are throwing a little harder than they did when starting pitchers, expected to go all nine, paced themselves a bit more. Modern bats made from second-growth trees might be a little wimpier than centuries-old trees. But, it’s the batters who make the bats break.

Since Og the Cave Man was whacking pebbles with thick sticks, we have understood that when we use a material like wood to do a job, we take into account its weight, its toughness, and most especially, its shape.

Next time you’re hefting or playing with a wooden bat, “brand” it. Rotate the bat so that, when you hold it horizontally, straight in front of you– its brand is facing up, toward the sky. When you swing, the brand will pass through the strike zone with its wooden layers oriented the strong way.

Like so many things, it starts with momentum. The faster a player can get a baseball bat going, the harder and farther a bat can drive a ball. To this end, modern players have asked manufacturers to shape bats so that the bat’s mass is concentrated out on the end, or barrel. When that massive barrel hits a ball, its motion bends that thin handle.

Despite its strength, wood is a little bit brittle. When you bend a material like wood enough, it layers are stretched apart, and it breaks. The Kentucky craftsmen who shape bats pick each bat up and carefully examine its grains. They burn or print the company’s brand  so that if the brand is facing up, like the diamonds on an Ace of cards, the bat’s grains will encounter the ball with their maximum strength.

Players today come of age playing with aluminum bats. They don’t have to deal with remarkable properties of wood… until they get to the Bigs. Apparently, many or most of them don’t ever get around to dealing with it. Modern batters routinely hold and swing their wooden bats the same way they would use aluminum one. The wooden bats break, because they’re being struck so that they bend too much.

Bending is not a bad thing. If a batter could use something like a super-strong tennis racquet, who’s strings and shaft could bend like a trampoline, baseballs would be so outta’ here. That sort of compliance or bend-ability would allow the ball to be in contact with the bat for much longer than the wooden bat’s 1/1000th of a second. Compare the distance a modern golf driver sends a golf ball compared to those of the 1930’s. Storing energy in a flexing shaft is one thing; bending wood so that it’s natural layered rings peel completely apart is another.

Just think if a Major Leaguer could get another, say, four clean hits a month. He’d want that wouldn’t he?  After all, millions of dollars are at stake. This no-broken-bat rule could help make that happen.

Another small, but not insignificant effect is held in the palms of their hands. Modern players almost universally wear batting gloves. So, they specify bats with slightly thinner handles to allow for the small, but not insignificant thickness of the gloves. What makes it matter is the remarkable nature of round objects subjected to bending. Their strength follows the square of the square of their diameter or thickness. If a bat handle goes from an inch and an eighth to 1 1/16th of an inch. Its ability to take the hard whip of a Major League swinger becomes (1  1/8th)4/(1 1/16th)4:  just 80% of what it once was. That’s a fifth less; that fraction becomes a big factor at Major League speeds.

Maple bats have been controversial. They break more often than ash bats. But, this may be due almost entirely to the machining of the billet or cylinder of wood that bat makers begin with. In maple, it’s easy to get the grain “sloped,” or not well aligned with the long axis of the bat. Angled grains get chipped apart more easily than straight grains. Ash may just be more flexible between the layers. It’s a subtle set-up. But one cannot help but wonder what would happen if the bats were just plain thicker, not so willowy.

You might think this added rule is unnecessary or is just an odd or misguided idea. The players’ union will probably fight it at first–until the argument is couched as “skilled infielder” versus “lazy slugger.”  The slugger might say bats break, when they break; we have no control. But, the infielder will say, “O, but we do.” Not only could players brand their bats and orient the grain in the strong direction. Players could also specify and play with the bats with thicker handles and thicker portions between the handle and the barrel– between the thin and thick parts. They might stop playing with gloves, toughening their hands instead. Would that be so bad?

Look at one of Babe Ruth’s bats; you’ll see them in the Hall of Fame. Or, look at bats of even 30 years ago. Those bats were thick and strong, probably because they weren’t cheap. Players literally could not afford to have them break. How ‘bout if we bring that style of equipment back?

Infielders would be safer; batters would probably end up with more hits. There’s a chance they’d hit fewer long balls– but, that’s a maybe. It’s not just a return to some sort of good old day, it’s playing by the rules… the rules of nature. Let’s see some batsmen beef up the bat and Play Ball!

I’ll be in Portland, Oregon this Thursday, March 11 to talk about volcanoes.

Set aside a little time and come on down (or up from the Columbia) to First Congregational Church, 1126 SW Park Avenue. My talk starts at 7:00 pm.

Like so many of you, I am a big fan of volcanoes, and in the Northwest, we have one in our backyard. Mt St. Helens is an extraordinary place. One that has expanded our understanding of volcanoes, the movement of the Earth’s tectonic plates, and the remarkable nature of how ecosystems develop on volcanic soils. It’s much faster than most scientists expected. There’s rain and a rain of insects. There are loose rocks that become places to fix nitrogen. Volcanoes change and shape our world. So do we, it turns out. The more we can understand volcanoes and our place among them, the better we will do in the coming decades. So come this Thursday. It’s all for you in… the Subduction Zone, where tectonic plates rock, da’ lava bombs, and it’s all magmalicious! Drag your friends kicking and steaming! We’ll see you there Thursday Night!

Bill

Mount St. Helens Institute Board of Directors

On the edge of the crater