huntedman wrote:
Omnicognic wrote:
I have a friend who I'm sure has AS too. He can get annoying (and I'm sure I get on his nerves too.) however, we both share an obsession with tinkering and invention.. when we put our heads together we have done some amazing things.. for example, his car is currently running on aluminum produced hydrogen... (if you want info on this shoot me a message)
I was thinking: imagine a room full of aspies with complimentary obsessions, I.e. mathmatics, physics, computers. If they were to work on different aspects of the same project, the results could be incredible!
The only problem I could see would be disputes where each party is convinced their way is the only way and any other method is flawed. (I'm guilty of this sometimes)
Just a thought....
Are you using a modification of the chemical reaction they use for the aluminum air battery? Can you use similar reclamation tanks, using grid power to recover the raw aluminum?
Anyway, whenever I have thought of think tanks or design houses it has been somewhat like this. Not people with AS in particular, but you can see the excitement in someone that draws the line between interest and obsession, a think tank should be way over that line.
When i went to the head campus for the National Research Council of Canada it was kind of like that. One woman was an excited 4 year old when describing the new equipment she just built.
It's nothing as exciting (or original) as that, basically, it's an aluminum drum with a wire feed arc welder and old typewriter parts to move the feed wire back and forth on the spinning drum, the whole being submerged in water. As the wire contacts the spinning drum and being powered by the arc welder transformer it creates an arc. The water being H20, the oxygen likes the aluminum better and forms aluminum oxide powder and releases the H2. The aluminum powder sinks to the bottom of the tank where there is a release valve actuated by a knob on the car's dash (fantastic for getting rid of tailgaters) the hydrogen goes through double flash arresters before entering a modified propane carburator. The whole system while it does work is not practical for several reasons:
1) hydrogen itself doesn't provide much power and the car is sluggish..
2) the result of burning hydrogen is water which rusts out the exhaust system in a hurry
3) the result of burning hydrogen is water which invariably ends up turning the engine oil to something resembling chocolate milk (it separates after the car sits for a bit, but it wears out the engine pretty fast.
4) the aluminum wire is getting expensive, but we built a maching that makes it from "aluminum" cans (the metal in beverage cans is actually an aluminum alloy of lots of metals including magnesium which still works well for this)
5) while the emissions of this are aluminum oxide which is almost totally harmless to people and the environment.and water. It takes MASSIVE amounts of electricity for companies to produce aluminum from ore in the first place. so it's not exactly green technology
in his case, we wear out one car and transfer the whole setup to the next clunker
we do have some projects we are working on which are original and very practical, but I discovered the old expression "Pride comes before a fall" to be too true and i have had too many ideas stolen by bragging about them..
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"He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot." -Douglas Adams