It's much more impressive to me seeing it be done on a basically Formula Student++ budget. I'm sure the same team could make a very fast ICE car, and that would be impressive too.
I've seen Ford make a similarly fast electric mustang-chassis dragster, and yeah, that's a bit... unsurprising, really? You know how much force you need, ergo how much torque, translating that into a motor is not hard, translating that into a current is not hard, translating that into cabling is not hard. It's much more a set of composable sub-problems, and unlike engines, most of those sub-problems can't explode.
Growing up watching top fuel I'm exactly the same. And until battery technology achieves the same energy density as fuel (and its a long way off) we won't see the same kind of speeds with electric vehicles.
Nit pick: battery technology only needs to equal about 25-30% the raw energy density of fuel to equal the density of fuel in terms of useful work output.
That’s because electric motors can be as high as 98-99% efficient at converting electric power into work while small internal combustion engines peak out at about 35% and that’s generous. 20% is more typical. Then for ICE you have additional losses in the transmission that don’t happen for electric.
The vast majority of the energy in liquid fuel heats the air around the car.
This is also why a normal sized EV powered entirely by coal fired electricity can emit less carbon per mile than an efficient ICE car or even a hybrid. A big supercritical steam turbine in a coal power plant is going to be well over twice as efficient at converting heat into useful work than a small ICE. (Few people get all their power from coal, which is the worst case for CO2 emission, so in practice EVs are pretty much always lower carbon.)
> battery technology only needs to equal about 25-30% the raw energy density of fuel
"only" is doing a lot of work here, current lithium batteries are under 1 MJ/kg while good ol car gasoline is at 40+ MJ/kg
top fuel dragsters run nitromethane which is 4 times less energy dense than regular gas yet the go much faster so clearly there is much more going on than just energy density, like the fact that they have to entirely rebuild their engine every other day. I don't even think energy density is a big deal, it's more about how fast you can convert it into movement, and explosions are very good at that type of large scale conversion
AFAIK the big problem with an electric drag racer is weight/mass. Batteries are heavier than fuel. Electric motors are fantastic at acceleration, but you have to feed them with enough amps to make that happen.
A drag racer doesn't need range, so storing a large volume of energy probably isn't the problem. But having enough batteries to supply enough amperage to get that kind of acceleration is probably adding too much weight to be competitive.
This is also the problem with battery powered aviation. The majority of the energy used in a flight is on takeoff and ascent, effectively lifting all that mass to cruising altitude.
> majority of the energy used in a flight is on takeoff and ascent
That's an exaggeration or a misstatement. Even flying the shortest possible flight (a single takeoff and climb, followed by a descent and landing at a very nearby airport) is overwhelmingly likely to use more total energy in the taxi, cruise, descent, landing, and taxi portions. I looked through some of my datalogs from flights where I flew circuits back to the same airport and the fuel (energy) used for a takeoff and climb to pattern altitude was only rarely more than the fuel used for the rest of the circuit, and that was only when practicing emergency turnbacks from a simulated loss of thrust on takeoff.
The peak power is used on takeoff, but the majority of energy is used in cruise.
superchargers (compressed air), huge sets of staged injectors, low compression ratios, stoichiometric ratio of nitromethane to air (1.7:1 instead of ~14.7:1 like normal petrol!) - as you say, it's about how fast you can convert the liquid to an explosion.
Nitromethane engines are less than 50% efficient and batteries are already about 10% as dense as nitromethane, so it's less than a factor of 5 difference.
For drag, the limit is more likely to be power density rather than energy density (same reason why more energy dense gasoline isn't used in top-fuel; the limiting power factor for a typical ICE is the amount of air you can get in the cylinder and you get about double the power with nitromethane vs gasoline for a fixed amount of oxygen).
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The power you can get with nitromethane is only double if you run stochiometric; since it is partially self-oxidizing, running richer lets you get even more power (sources seem to indicate 4x). Of course running rich lowers the efficiency even more.
Not at real time - i'm a hobbyist photographer so have snapped the tyres digging into the track, but they're far too fast to see with a pair of eyes! really the only thing you can see is a blur then a parachute being deployed. the noise goes through you like nothing else though. I have metal plates in my arm due to an injury and was worried the vibration was going to undo the hardware :-D
Seeing, hearing and smelling a nitro fuel car is a complete sensory overload. It's an amazing experience. I know that electric or some other thing is the future, but I seriously doubt that those things will ever be the visceral experience that is an 11,000HP nitro engine.
maybe for the average consumer. but how many professional photographers do you see using an iPhone?
sensor size matters for low-light stuff too. sure, an iPhone can do a pretty good job at taking several pictures over say a 2s. exposure, but there _will_ be artifacts in the shot as there isn't physically enough light to form a legible image regardless of post-processing.
this is just one of many reasons why digital cameras are NOT at the brink of collapse yet.
The folks working for your local news org are getting paid to take photos on phones. Almost all of the people you would probably consider “professional photographers” in that industry got laid off years ago.
Watching them take photos on their iPhones at high school sporting events is always painful.
I've never seen a wedding photographer using an iPhone, and the ratio of wedding photographers to news org photographers is probably 100:1 if not more.
If we’re including the journalists using iPhones then no, that’s not going to be the ratio.
For what it’s worth, I’m a professional sports photographer (side gig obviously), and I don’t get paid for iPhone photos. I’m not disagreeing with you that iPhones cannot replace dedicated cameras, but they are a lot closer to replacing them for weddings than they are for sports.
I think the only reason why wedding photographers won’t stop using their dedicated devices is the appearance of professionalism they give.
But yeah, there is only so much advanced computational photography can improve - you can probably do a fairly good job for a slow scene like a wedding, but fast movements are hard to capture with small sensors.
Yea, but wedding photogs are businesspeople, who respond to customer expectations. If they show up with “non professional” equipment, they tend not to get referrals, in spite of whatever photo quality they deliver.
It’s not the sensor size they matters (larger sensors actually have more noise: that’s why phone photos can look as good as they do). Stop and think for a second: where does the extra light captured by a larger sensor come from?
What actually matters is the physical aperture of the lens. What a large sensor forces you to do is use a larger physical aperture to get the same focal ratio (“f-stop”) and field of view. That’s how you get more light. (the larger physical aperture and constant focal ratio implies a longer focal length, so the math works out)
If you do the math, the larger physical aperture more than compensates for the extra noise of the larger sensor (signal to noise of the system scales as sqrt(sensor_dimension)), so camera systems with larger sensors and the same focal ratio have better noise figures. But it’s not directly due to the sensor.
You can compensate for a lot of that effect by simply installing a lens with a larger focal ratio on a small sensor. That’s because it turns out to be easier to have a high focal ratio when the lens is small: the shorter focal length (for a given field of view) requires a smaller radius of curvature, so controlling chromatic aberration and circle of confusion is easier at higher focal ratios.
I honestly see a heck of a lot of wedding photographers using them in some capacity now.
I also see a lot of outdoor photographers using them to save on weight (and pairing with some type of spotting scope when needed).
Digital cameras are definitely not on the brink of collapse, but I do see phones being used to either augment or replace specific scenarios more and more.
You don't necessarily need one for just developing the film - dark bag to load the film onto the spool which is lightfast and bob is your photographed uncle (source: me, having done this in very un-dark kitchen twice.)
I suppose if you want to make your own prints, that probably needs a darkroom but you can get a film scanner cheap and print them on a colour laser, inkjet, or even one of those Selphy dye subs in lieu of that.
This is what I have done. 35mm bw and color developed in a dark bag. Then scan the negatives. So much cheaper than actually having it developed professionally. You also get to mess with the development conditions for various effects.
I hear you. My process is cheapest, doesn’t require chemicals, can be done in sunlight, and with some glsl knowledge, essentially the same. Only digitally and for $0.000000001 an image.
Yeah, I do that too but since I'd never really owned a 35mm camera, I thought I'd give it a go ("how hard can it be?" "very if your spool is wet, you fool") and I've enjoyed the experience of taking my PEN-EE around and developing its weird little half-frame outputs.
B&W negatives are easy enough at home. Though you have to get them into a computer and, at that point, I'd sort of be "Why bother?" (other than a fun retro weekend project possibly). And, yes, printing requires an actual darkroom. After school, I quickly decided that setting something up in spare half-bathroom was for the birds.
Huge time sink for B&W, but sure nice to do, a major pain for color and close to impossible for slide film.
The latter was what I basically learned on, back the day, being allowed to sport my dad's back-up F4. Had to tie a knot in the sling for it to not bounce on the ground when I had it around my neck, me being too small.
Digital is so much easier, until you want to print. Upside of learbing on film, you are much more carefull at which pictures you take.
Maybe, one day, I'll get some B&W film and pull out said F4 again. Big maybe so, as I simply don't have the time to develop film on top of everything else...
Yeah, that's were becomes expensive again. Good foto printer either cost a fortune, a fortune for ink or both. Well, still cheaper than printing externally.
Printing well so seems to be a bit of an art so. Selecting the right paper for the printer and foto, doing some trails... A bit like developong and printing in a darkroom, from the looks of it. Not that I have a lot of experience, I need to save the money for the printer first...
Ink printers, where do I start, there’s only one style I can even recommend. Refillable. Forget HP, forget Canon, Brother, get yourself an Epson refillable. Obviously, laser is superior, but if you really want to keep costs down, Epson’s refillable inkjet printers are the only ones that don’t shutdown if you run out of black ink scent. It’s a racket and you should not participate in providing HP or any of those printer companies your money.
Top of my list is an Epson ET-8550, ticks all boxes except price. Followed by a Canon Pro-200, ticks all boxes except ink cost. The pigment printers are all too expensive, and the ink cost of the Epson cartridge models is prohibitive. Problem is that the break even for a ET-8550 is so far out that the Canon one is almost cheaper for the first 80-odd a3 prints. Well, maybe I find a deal for one or the other and the decision is met for me!
