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This is easily the best animation of a Wankel rotary engine I've ever seen

The Wankel is an amazingly brilliant design concept that produces a very power dense propulsion system. Every full rotation of the eccentric shaft provides 3 complete ignition cycles per rotor. A four stroke piston engine generates one power cycle for every two rotations per piston.

The week link in the Wankel has always been the apex seals (at the corners of the rotors) and fuel consumption. However, the idea is making something of a come-back now as engineers investigate small rotaries as range extenders for electric vehicles like the Volt.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/news/industry/5-alternative-engine-architectures#slide5

Reshared post from +Colleen Kelly Henry

Wankel.

Not as clumsy or random as a piston engine.

A more elegant design, for a civilized age.

For over three decades they were the guardians of peace and justice in the old garage.

Before the dark times. Before apex seal failures.

They betrayed and murdered your father.

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The old Crown Vics have finally rolled off into the cop car sunset 2

This week my friend +Alex Nunez got a chance to drive its successors, the new 2013 Ford Police Interceptors in sedan and utility form and he was impressed.

#ford #fordpoliceinterceptor

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Drove the new Ford Police Interceptors for +ConsumerSearch this week. They are very, very good.

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Driving the 2013 Ford Police Interceptors
When it retired the venerated Panther rear-wheel drive platform last year, Ford lost more than the beloved Lincoln Town Car. Panther underpinned the Ford Crown Victoria, which, while discontinued for …

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Amazon data center architect James Hamilton has serious doubts about the wisdom of…

Amazon data center architect James Hamilton has serious doubts about the wisdom of building a solar power farm to provide electricity for Apple's North Carolina data center.

While solar is great for many applications, a data center needs a lot of power and solar is not particularly space efficient. Hamilton estimates that the 171 acre farm that Apple is installing will only provide about 4% of the power needs of the servers at best.

The work that companies like Facebook and Google are doing to design more efficient data centers will probably have a lot more impact than a solar farm that displaces hundreds of acres of forest.

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Perspectives – I Love Solar Power But…
I love solar power, but in reflecting carefully on a couple of high profile datacenter deployments of solar power, I'm really developing serious reservations that this is the path to reducing data…

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This shot really highlights how different +Highcroft Racing's new DeltaWing is… 1

This shot really highlights how different +Highcroft Racing's new DeltaWing is from more traditional prototypes like the Audi R18.

Audi and Highcroft both stuck around Sebring this week for more testing after the 12 Hour last Saturday.
#highcroftracing #sebring #lemans #deltawing #audir18

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In album Sebring Nissan DeltaWing testing

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Apparently quality assurance isn't part of the limited government platform of… 1

Apparently quality assurance isn't part of the limited government platform of the Wildrose party in Alberta Canada
#politics #canada

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Bus-ted: Danielle Smith campaign gone Wild…rose – Inside Politics
(John Archer/CBC) Alberta Premier Alison Redford is poised to call an election following tomorrow evening's expected passage of the provincial budget. As all parties rev up their campaign engines …

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Consumer Reports early impressions of the +Fisker Automotive Karma are up and it… 1

Consumer Reports early impressions of the +Fisker Automotive Karma are up and it doesn't seem to live up to its $100,000+ price tag.

In large part, the Karma comes across as more of an under-engineered design concept than a viable mass production machine. Not an auspicious start.

#fiskerkarmahybrid #fiskerautomotive

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I take it back 1

Reshared post from +Phil Nickinson

I take it back. It is possible to add something intelligent to the Mike Daisey thing, and this is how you do it..

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4 important truths about Mike Daisey’s lies & the way ‘This American Life’ told them | Poynter.
Standing for journalism, strengthening democracy | Journalism training, media news & how to's

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The years following the passage of the first automotive emissions standards in the… 1

The years following the passage of the first automotive emissions standards in the early 1970s until the mid-to-late 1980s is often referred to by car enthusiasts as the malaise-era.

The name comes from the fact that between smog standards and fuel economy requirements, engines lost much of the power they produced in the 1960s and driveability was often severely degraded. The problem was that sensors and electronic control systems such as they were at the time were expensive and generally crude at best. In order to modify the behavior of engines to clean them up, engineers came up with elaborate systems that used actuators powered by the vacuum produced inside an engine when the throttle is closed.

Lift the hood on any car from that era and you'll find a rat's nest of black rubber vacuum hoses running here, there and everywhere. Thankfully, by the late 1980s and early 1990s automotive engineers were able to start taking advantage of the increasingly powerful microprocessor technology that was at the heart of the personal computer revolution. With CPU's, sensors and electrically driven actuators a new golden age of motoring was born.

While it's true that fuel economy standards didn't increase from the late 1980s until just a few years ago, average power outputs doubled in that same period. That means the engineers were actually able to double specific fuel efficiency in that 20 year period by getting twice as much power from the same amount of fuel.

I'll leave the discussion of why they chose to double power instead of absolute fuel efficiency to a later post.

For those that don't recall those engines from the time when I was taking auto mechanics in high school, check out the Honda Civic vacuum hose routing diagram that Murilee Martin found to get an idea of what mechanics of that period had to deal with on a regular basis. It's no wonder that these engines often ran poorly. A leaking vacuum line could easily make an engine stall altogether.

#cars #malaise_era #vacuumhoses

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Quick, Why Won’t This Car Pass the Smog Check? | The Truth About Cars
I've had more Honda Civics than any other type of car (at least one example of each of the first five Civic generations), at one point owning two '85 hatches

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