?or use pig poop instead of diesel – With the lack of rail roads, most of the long-distance hauling that needs to be done in the US is done by trucks, and truckers are chafing at high gas prices. One problem is that big trucks, unlike cars, are not aerodynamic?there hasn’t been a major design change in years.

Researcher Robert Englar has some ideas about how to improve things. The real problem is the trailers (the big square boxes that are hitched to the cab, where the driver sits). Englar think that something as simple as rounding the edges and installing covers over the tops of the wheels could help.
read more

Run your car on cooking oil, add a plug to your Prius – In the quest to be “green” and save money on gas, people are trying all sorts of desperate measures. One man drives a Prius, but that’s not enough for him?he found a way to convert it into a plug-in hybrid! And next time your gas tank is on empty, maybe you should fill it up with cooking oil?even USED cooking oil.

Researcher Stephanie Farrell says, “We are using different oils in order to observe differences in processing behavior and in the final fuel products obtained from them.” Does olive oil get better mileage than canola? Her engineering students are studying canola, peanut, soybean, olive and corn oils in addition to waste vegetable oil obtained from local restaurants.
read more

Greenhouse gases are reaching dangerous levels and oil prices are at their highest, so we desperately need a new, non-polluting fuel. We may eventually need to mine Helium 3 from the moon, but until we can get there and start shoveling it up from the surface, we need to figure out how to transport it efficiently back to Earth. In the meantime, we can fill our gas tanks with metal. No, we don’t mean that are gas tanks are MADE of metal, we mean that we can use powdered metal as a fuel.
read more