The land speed record for steam-powered cars has been broken for the first time in more than 100 years, after a British-built car achieved an average speed of 225 kilometres per hour (140 miles per hour) on Tuesday.

Many of the earliest road vehicles were powered by steam, which were easier and safer to start than early gas-powered cars, which had to be cranked by hand. But by the 1920s, the convenience of the internal combustion engine had essentially made steam cars obsolete.

Now, Charles Burnett III has driven them back into the spotlight. He reached speeds of 219 km/hr (136 mph) and 243 km/hr (151 mph) during two drives at California’s Edwards Air Force Base on Tuesday.

That smashes the previous official record of 204 km/hr (127 mph) set in 1906 by Fred Marriott of the US in a modified version of the then-popular steam car known as the . Officials from motor sport’s governing body, the (FIA), are expected to ratify the new record shortly.

Superheated steam

Burnett drove a 7.6-metre-long, 3-tonne car called “Inspiration” that grew out of a 1997 student project at Southampton University.

The car’s engine burns liquid petroleum gas to heat water in 12 suitcase-sized boilers, creating steam heated to 400°C. The steam then drives a two-stage turbine that spins at 13,000 revolutions per minute to power its wheels.

The FIA requires two 1.6-km-long runs to be performed in opposite directions – to cancel out any effect from wind – within 60 minutes.

Ramp up

Inspiration made the first run at 0727 PDT (1427 GMT) and turned around for the return run with just eight minutes to spare. Before and after each timed run, it took 4 km to accelerate and another 4 km to slow down.

The record-setting drives came after several earlier attempts had been thwarted by electrical faults, valve problems, a storm and a tyre puncture the previous week. But the team is planning another run on Wednesday, to try to get even closer to the car’s theoretical top speed of 274 km/hr (170 mph).

Various groups are trying to develop new steam cars, but none have yet found an efficient way to convert the fuel’s energy into forward motion.

The average fuel efficiency of the US vehicle fleet has risen by just 3 miles per gallon since the days of the , and has barely shifted at all since 1991.

Those are the conclusions reached by and at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor. They analysed the fuel efficiency of the entire US vehicle fleet of cars, motorcycles, trucks and buses from 1923 to 2006.

They found that from 1923 to 1935 fuel efficiency hovered around 14 mpg (5.95 km/l), but then fell gradually to a nadir of only 11.9 mpg (5.08 km/l) in 1973. By 1991, however, the efficiency of the total fleet had risen by 42 per cent on 1973 levels to 16.9 mpg (7.18 km/l), a compound annual rate of 2 per cent.

The improvements made up to 1991 were in response to two international events – the by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and the of 1979.

‘No external prods’

Both events disrupted oil supplies to the west, says John DeCicco, former senior auto issues expert at the campaign group , who was not involved in the new study.

Progress has stalled since then, though, despite growing environmental concerns. From 1991 to 2006 the average efficiency improved by only 1.8 per cent to 17.2 mpg (7.31 km/l). “We were in a period of complacency [during the 1990s]. There were no external prods to improve fuel economy,” says DeCicco.

“By the mid-90s there was only us and the [a US grassroots environmental organisation] pressing for better standards,” DeCicco says. If manufacturers addressed energy concerns at all, it was in the pursuit of “technological fantasies” like the electric car, he says.

Electric vehicle research continues to advance and now has high-profile governmental backing, but it’s unlikely to have a short-term impact on average fuel efficiency in the US.

If the country’s transportation fuel consumption is to fall by 10 per cent, Sivak and Tsimhoni calculate that the average fuel efficiency across the entire fleet will have to rise to 19.1 mpg (8.12 km/l).

Financial incentives

President Obama that new cars should average 35.5 mpg (15.09 km/l) by 2016. But improvements to new cars could still leave the efficiency of the entire vehicle fleet largely unaffected without changes in policy, say Sivak and Tsimhoni.

They think there should be a financial incentive to promote owners of older vehicles to scrap them in favour of new cars, as happens already in some European countries. In addition, tax breaks should be given to encourage the development and introduction of fuel-saving technologies – particularly in the most fuel-hungry vehicles in each class.

“Society has much more to gain from improving a car from 15 to 16 mpg (6.38 to 6.8 km/l) than from improving a car from 40 to 41 mpg (17 to 17.43 km/l),” they write in their paper. “Similarly, the benefits are greater from improving a truck from 4 to 4.5 mpg (1.7 to 1.92 km/l) than from improving a truck from 7 to 7.5 mpg (3.19 km/l).”

Journal reference:

Rugged consumer gadgets are sometimes described as bomb-proof. But UK engineers have developed a thermometer that really lives up to the name, peeking inside explosions and surviving the impact to give detailed results from within the blast. It can measure the changing temperate thousands of times a second.

“The hostile environment and the complex physics and chemistry of the explosion process are very challenging,” says Gavin Sutton, leading the project at the .

“An explosion generates a shock wave, significant amounts of heat, and particulate matter such as soot, all of which could degrade or damage a thermometer.”

Left behind

Conventional temperature sensors such as , which measure the voltage produced when a metal is subject to a temperature gradient, are too slow to react and are easily damaged, says Sutton.

Bouncing laser light off objects can reveal temperature, too, but it is an expensive approach that is hard to use. So the team set out to find a new design to make a bomb-proof thermometer that could be used time and again.

They embarked on a research programme dreamed of by many school children: setting off a series of explosions in the lab. These were used to test the strength and finesse of different designs.

One candidate was a pyrometer, which remotely measures the thermal radiation from a hot object. But it was unable to detect temperature gradients inside an explosion.

“We needed something right inside the fireball,” says Sutton. The answer was an optical fibre 400 microns (0.4 mm) across, protected from the blast by a sand-packed steel tube with one open end.

Light from heat

When the charge is detonated, thermal electromagnetic radiation enters the exposed end of the fibre and passes along it to a safe area beyond the reach of the explosion. There the fibre splits into four, with each branch piping its own specific set of wavelengths to devices that convert the radiation they receive into a voltage.

After performing calibration tests with bodies of known temperature, it is possible to transform those voltages into temperature readings, says Sutton. The thermometer can take 50,000 measurements per second, producing a detailed profile of temperature changes during a split-second detonation.

“The lab tests of our portable thermometer regularly measured fireball temperatures of 3000 kelvin and above without any damage,” he told ��è����Ƶ. “We had to wipe soot off the end of the fibre with a cotton bud and alcohol but otherwise there was no harm done.”

The researchers have also carried out simple field trials, and now plan to look inside much larger explosions. The findings should help refine computer models that predict how large explosions will be, and what effect they will have on their surroundings.

Handheld consoles and laptops made gaming portable, while the Nintendo Wii made gaming active. Now active, portable gaming is possible thanks to GPS and improved graphics becoming standard in cellphones.

By 2013, the world’s largest handset manufacturer, Nokia, expects half of its phones to be GPS capable, giving them the ability to fix their locations on the planet to within a few metres.

Apple’s iPhone, seen as a benchmark for other manufacturers, also has GPS and many handsets have motion-sensing accelerometers, just like a Wii controller. Games studios are racing to exploit a new world of what is called “pervasive gaming”, where everyone carries a powerful gaming machine in their pocket.

Hotter, colder

The first wave of games are largely based on treasure hunts, with a phone guiding users through a set of waypoints to a particular goal.

UK firm does it using photos of a neighbourhood. An onscreen thermometer lets a player know if they are “getting warmer” as they close in on the next waypoint, and users can create and share their own treasure hunts.

Richard Vahrman of LocoMatrix was inspired while using handheld GPS for walking routes, and says location-aware gaming could have health benefits. “If we could make a compelling game on a mobile, then youngsters might get out more,” he says.

Other treasure hunt games include , from in Karlsruhe, Germany. But games that blend real and virtual worlds can offer a richer gaming experience.

Real-world fun

have created .

Another example, , starts with users defining an arena using GPS, before chasing moles visible only on their mobile screens inside it.

, from Florida firm mixes the real world around a player into the world of an adventure game. Travelling to real-world locations can unlock or solve quests in the virtual world.

While some location-aware games can be played anywhere, others may be strongly connected to a particular area, says Constance Fleuriot of the in Bristol, UK, those strongly connected to a particular area, say, Manhattan, and those that can be played anywhere.

“The former could be linked to the history of an area and give you a different viewpoint of a place,” says Fleuriot. “The latter are portable.”

Socially mobile

Phones with GPS also allow players to discover each other’s locations and meet physically as well as virtually. That kind of camaraderie will appeal to many, says , principal lecturer in the Advanced Games Research Group at the University of Portsmouth, UK.

“If they are designed correctly, they will attract people who currently aren’t gamers simply because they are social and fun,” says Eyles.

Just as the sometimes madcap physicality of Wii gaming has loosened inhibitions, Fleuriot says social location-based gaming can do the same.

“We had a group of adults who played an activity game of outdoors and they said: ‘We look like prats, but at least we’re all prats together,'” says Fleuriot.

, a new media expert at Bristol University, says GPS gaming is likely to be the first application to introduce the masses to being connected digitally to their surroundings, something he calls “ambient connectivity”.

The 14-to-19 age group will lead the way, Dovey says, because their social lives depend heavily on cellphones.

“As soon as you get the link between texting, social networking and GPS-enabled devices, you are going to get something that takes off like wildfire among young people because their culture is already primed for it,” he told ��è����Ƶ.

Game over

But being able to discover the physical location of other people has downsides. Researchers at Portsmouth University have had to abandon GPS games projects because they cannot get approval from the ethics committee.

“Already there are social networking applications for the GPS iPhone which let you see where other iPhone users are,” says , lecturer at Portsmouth University’s School of Creative Technologies. “If I were a thief I’d abuse that knowledge right away to get myself more iPhones.”

Commercial games developers are not subject to the same ethical scrutiny as academics, he adds. It could be left to their customers to work out how to avoid anti-social gamers.

In fact, truly mobile gamers must learn to weigh up a range of new hazards. Bain worries that gamers may focus so hard on their mobile phone’s small screen that they lose awareness of real-life hazards, such as traffic on a busy road.

The developers of The Shroud have clearly thought of this already; its terms and conditions state baldly that “You will be responsible if you or anyone else is injured or killed while you are playing”. Game over.

The is a global competition offering $10 million in prizes to teams that can develop commercially viable cars able to travel 100 miles on one gallon of petrol, or the equivalent energy in another form.

However they are powered, the vehicles must also emit less than 200 grams of carbon dioxide per mile. That is around half that of a typical passenger vehicle, according to the .

The X Prize Foundation behind the competition aims to combine big-money prizes for tough technical challenges with a strong public appeal – an approach first tested by the Ansari X Prize aiming to kickstart commercial spaceflight. Other current prizes included a $30m purse for demonstrating a lunar rover.

John Shore, the Auto X Prize competition’s senior director and previously a US Navy research physicist and software entrepreneur told Max Glaskin about his hopes for the new contest and how the winners will be decided.

How will you judge the success of the Auto X Prize?

The criteria for our success will be how much investment is put into alternative, super-efficient vehicles and innovative drive trains and the like, and to what extent the market is changed in the next five to 10 years.

Did some of these X Prize vehicles reach the market, did some of the technology get acquired and get fielded in other people’s vehicles, did some of the companies get acquired?

You cite the Orteig Prize awarded for the first non-stop transatlantic flight in 1927 as an influence, saying it stimulated the aviation industry. But aviation was immature then, while today’s automotive industry is mature

You’re absolutely right. We’re not trying to create a new industry, but to change the biggest, most powerful and historical industry on the planet. If we’re successful, a lot of money will be spent on new ways of trying to meet our criteria and expose them to the world in our highly public events. It’s difficult because of the huge momentum in the industry.

The teams are not attracted by a $10 million prize. Any team with a realistic chance of winning would barely be attracted by $100 million if they’re developing a new vehicle. The value of the prize is not the purse, it’s the publicity.

The major manufacturers already have large publicity and advertising budgets. And only one, Tata Motors, has signalled its intent to enter. What will attract all the others to enter the competition?

We are not about criticising the existing industry. We’re about the future. The major manufacturers are a huge part of that future because they are the only ones that can produce millions of vehicles per year. We understand that these are risk-averse companies and it’s a much riskier proposition for them to compete than it is for a new company.

Why would they do it? To help develop market share for new products and to show the public that they are serious about changing in ways they have claimed for years. I think the public has grown somewhat cynical about the efforts of the big auto companies to green themselves. I think it’s changing very radically now, it’s clear that they have to do this to survive.

How hard has it been to create a level playing field for all the different kinds of power sources, drive trains and energy storage systems?

It’s been hugely difficult. We have chosen two figures of merit. One is the miles per gallon (mpg) equivalent. So we ask, “How much energy goes into the vehicle in terms of ?” and “How far does the vehicle go?”

We just convert that into the number of gallons of gasoline that contain the same amount of energy and express that as mpg. If a vehicle travels 200 miles on a quantity of fuel that has contains the same amount of energy as one gallon of gasoline, we would say it has 200-mpg equivalence. The competition is looking for 100-mpg equivalence, because it is a lovely nice round number that is, in our view, an achievable but difficult goal.

The second figure of merit is about the greenhouse-gas emissions. So we’re using a “well-to-wheels” life-cycle assessment of the emissions created by obtaining, producing, distributing and using the fuel.

That’s much tougher to compute in a fair and impartial way because it depends on numerous assumptions about the production of the fuel and those assumptions are subject to great debate.

We’ve taken a model established by the US Department of Energy to calculate the well-to wheels emissions from the fuel in the contest vehicles. The acceptable limit for the contest is still under final review, but at the moment we’ve gone for a maximum of 200 grams per mile greenhouse-gas emissions and the teams will have to show evidence of a figure less than this limit.

Have the criteria for screening the entrants been decided?

Our over-riding meta-principle is that the vehicle needs to be production-capable. That means that, with a reasonable amount of additional engineering and investment, the design could be put into production, in volumes of 10,000 vehicles per year or more, at prices that are reasonable, and would be plausibly legal for sale in the US, meeting US safety and emissions regulations.

Those entrants that pass that test will then have to provide a detailed data submission about the vehicle design, safety, the production plan and the business plan.

Has the competition attracted interest from companies developing radical technologies?

The compressed-air car from MDI in France is roughly analogous to a plug-in hybrid – there’s a liquid fuel engine and energy storage on board in the form of compressed air.

, where the energy storage is in compressed cylinders of gas and liquid and you get regenerative braking where kinetic energy is recovered and used for increasing hydraulic pressure. Even the bumpers are supposedly designed so that if you bump into something, that energy gets recovered. I’m not sure the insurance companies are going to like that!

A British team is developing kinetic-energy storage in a flywheel. Formula One is already introducing kinetic energy storage in 2009.

The X Prize is said to be a “global” competition, is it being promoted in the developing world?

We had to focus on just one market to make things simple. In fact, as we seek media partners and sponsors in the US to support our operations it would be difficult if we weren’t US-focused.

That said, we are an international competition. We have some plans to do some international promotion, because one of the more recent partners of the X Prize Foundation is British Telecom and they are urging us to promote the competition in Europe and elsewhere.

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Video: Steam car attempts a new land speed record

A new challenger to a 102-year-old world land speed record has been unveiled – and it’s powered by steam.

A UK team hopes its 7.6 metre-long vehicle “Inspiration” will beat the 205.5 kilometres per hour record for a steam-powered car set in 1906 by the on Daytona Beach. That was the last time a steam-powered vehicle held the land speed record – in 1907 and ushered in the age of internal combustion. However, the Stanley Rocket Racer remains the fastest ever steam-powered land vehicle.

Inspiration’s record attempt is scheduled for August on the Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah, US. So far, only its control, air and water systems have been thoroughly tested, separately. The car itself is yet to be properly put through its paces.

If the car can be made to function correctly, then it should travel 10km during its record attempt – including acceleration and braking. The engine will drive Inspiration for just two minutes, reaching a top speed of up to 274kph.

Complex puzzle

The car’s engine burns liquid petroleum gas to heat 40 litres of distilled water in 12 suitcase-sized boilers, creating superheated steam at a pressure of 40 bars and a temperature of 400°C. The steam then drives a two-stage turbine that spins at 13,000 revolutions per minute to power its wheels.

What started life as a design exercise for postgraduate students at the in 1997 has evolved into a complex engineering jigsaw puzzle. The car is built from an unusual collection of bespoke and off-the-shelf components, from kettle elements to power station steam valves.

At the media launch not even a breath of steam was produced, as a crucial air valve failed during testing the day before. The team admits its still has work to do.

“Perhaps it’s a folly and eccentric,” said chief engineer Matt Candy, “but to get this eclectic mix to work together will be a real challenge.”

RAF wing commander , who drove the to break the world land speed record in 1997, described Inspiration as a “home science” project.

“But home science was what Orville and Wilbur Wright were doing,” he added, before standing back so that a team of firemen could push the powerless steam car into a more photogenic position.

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The scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York, are testing blue LEDs that shine light at particular wavelengths that convince the brain it is morning, they say, resetting the body’s natural clock.

That could help reduce the number of accidents that occur when people drive through the night. Nearly 30% of all fatal accidents involving large trucks in the US happen during the hours of darkness, according to a recent report by the , while fatigue causes half of all truck accidents in the early hours on UK motorways.

Wakey wakey

“The concept of using light to boost alertness is well established [in other areas],” says , co-author of a new white paper published by the institute’s lighting research centre.

“Translating that understanding into a practical application is the next challenge.” Drivers could take 30-minute “light showers” in truck stops fitted with similar lights, or the lights could be fitted into truck cabs.

Figueiro is currently investigating how the blue light affects daytime alertness of sleep-deprived and non-sleep-deprived subjects. “These findings will also be applicable to transportation applications, since the accident rates during the afternoon hours are still higher than in the morning hours,” says Figueiro.

Results so far show a clear effect on the brain activity of test subjects of both kinds, she adds. “After 45 minutes there is a clear effect,” says Figueiro. “You start to see a beautiful increase in brain activity in the 300 milliseconds response, which is a measure of alertness.” The current test box emits diffuse light at 470 nanometres, with an intensity of 40 lux when measured at the eye.

Light work

Figueiro plans experiments on a driving simulator using different light spectra, of 450 and 470nm, and intensities of 2.5, 5 and 7.5 lux, to see which combination works best without obscuring the driver’s view of the road.

An alternative is to build goggles with blue LEDs for the driver to wear before setting off. Figueiro is already designing such equipment for people with Alzheimer’s that will change their circadian rhythms to reduce their nocturnal alertness and help them to sleep at night.

Car manufacturers already market systems to warn or wake drowsy drivers. They use measures of eye movements, blink rates or small steering-wheel movements to tell if a driver is losing alertness. But preventing drowsiness in the first place would be more effective.

Jim Horne, director of the at Loughborough University, UK, says changing the body’s clock is possible, but difficult in short periods. “Shifting it by eight hours takes at least 10 days, and very few people are capable of doing that,” he says.

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Video: Infuriating traffic jams that appear for no reason can be replicated on the test track (Footage courtesy Mathematical Society of traffic flow in Japan)

Traffic that grinds to a halt and then restarts for no apparent reason is one of the biggest causes of frustration for drivers. Now a team of Japanese researchers has recreated the phenomenon on a test-track for the first time.

The mathematical theory behind these so-called “shockwave” jams was developed more than 15 years ago using models that show jams appear from nowhere on roads carrying their maximum capacity of free-flowing traffic – typically triggered by a single driver slowing down.

After that first vehicle brakes, the driver behind must also slow, and a shockwave jam of bunching cars appears, travelling backwards through the traffic.

The theory has frequently been modelled in computer simulations, and seems to fit with observations of real traffic, but has never been recreated experimentally until now.

Creating congestion

Researchers from several Japanese universities managed the feat by putting 22 vehicles on a 230-metre single-lane circuit (see video).

They asked drivers to cruise steadily at 30 kilometres per hour, and at first the traffic moved freely. But small fluctuations soon appeared in distances between cars, breaking down the free flow, until finally a cluster of several vehicles was forced to stop completely for a moment.

That cluster spread backwards through the traffic like a shockwave. Every time a vehicle at the front of the cluster was able to escape at up to 40 km/h, another vehicle joined the back of the jam.

The shockwave jam travelled backwards through the ring of vehicles at roughly 20 km/h, which is the same as the speed of the shockwave jams observed on roads in real life, says lead researcher , a physicist in the department of complex systems at Nagoya University.

“Although the emerging jam in our experiment is small, its behaviour is not different from large ones on highways,” he told ��è����Ƶ.

Showing it is possible to recreate shockwave jams is important if researchers are to find ways to prevent or control the phenomena, says Sugiyama.

Human error

“It would be interesting to know whether the Japanese experiment had a consistent trigger for the flow breakdown,” says Tim Rees of , a UK transport research firm.

“I suspect that the trigger would either be a particular driver who was more nervous than the rest, or a particular location on the circle where the capacity was slightly lower,” he says.

Pinpointing the causes of shockwave jams is an exercise in psychology more than anything else. “If they had set up an experiment with robots driving in a perfect circle, flow breakdown would not have occurred. Human error is needed to cause the fluctuations in behaviour,” says Rees.

Rees’s team at TRL is calibrating detailed models of traffic flow through different road designs to minimise the probability of shockwave jams. One strategy already in use to reduce shockwaves is imposing temporary speed limits, a method TRL introduced on London’s M25 orbital motorway.

Journal reference: (DOI: )

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Some 100 national standard kilograms are dotted around the world and are verified against the international prototype every 50 years or so. But, no matter how well these platinum-iridium alloy cylinders are stored, they typically gather about five micrograms of dirt each year.

Cleaning the weights is problematic. Currently they are rubbed with chamois leather impregnated with alcohol, then washed with a steam jet, a method known as nettoyage-lavage. The process is so tricky that just one person does it: Richard Davis, head of mass at BIPM, who learned the technique from his predecessor. After cleaning it can take up to a year for a kilogram to become stable again.

Ozone chamber

Now Stuart Davidson of the (NPL), UK, has adapted a process for cleaning semiconductor wafers as a non-contact method for scrubbing the kilogram.

A platinum-iridium weight is placed in a chamber containing an ozone-enriched atmosphere and then illuminated with UV light. This breaks the ozone down into atomic oxygen and O₂. Dirt on the surface of the weight – mostly long-chain hydrocarbon molecules – reacts with the oxygen to produce carbon dioxide and water molecules that are readily taken up by the atmosphere, leaving the weight clean.

“The main benefit is that the method is repeatable and not user-dependent like the nettoyage-lavage process,” says Davidson. “Potentially any of the national standard laboratories can return their kilograms to the same clean state using this technique.”

Experiments at BIPM will begin in March 2008 when NPL and BIPM scientists will compare the two cleaning techniques for the first time.

Traffic lights that wirelessly keep track of vehicles could speed up journeys, reduce fuel consumption and improve urban air quality. So say Romanian and US researchers who show that “smart” traffic lights might reduce the time drivers spend waiting at intersections by more than 28% during rush hours.

The researchers recorded peak traffic flow at a major junction in Bucharest, Romania, and then used the distributed computing lab at , New Jersey, US, to model traffic flow.

In the simulations, traffic lights were fed the position and speed of all vehicles on nearby roads and programmed to calculate how to phase colour changes in order to optimise traffic flow. As well as reducing intersection waiting times, the team calculates that CO₂ emissions could fall by 6.5%.

from Rutgers University and colleagues point out that journey times, fuel consumption and emissions could all be improved further if traffic lights were to transmit information back to vehicles.

Speed warnings

If a set of lights told drivers when they were about to change, “drivers [could] adapt their speed accordingly to avoid useless accelerations or react faster on green,” the team writes in a paper presented at the held in Dublin, Ireland, in April 2007.

“Moreover, in-vehicle software could recommend appropriate speeds based on when the current phase will end, and how many cars are already queued,” they write.

For this to work, vehicles must transmit data to the computer system that controls a city’s lights. This is not currently possible, but companies and research groups worldwide are already developing vehicle communications systems that might be adapted for this purpose.

is one such car-to-car communication system expected to ship commercially in the US in February 2008. It provides drivers with real-time traffic information using data automatically gathered from other vehicles with Dash Express units, including their current speed and location, via a centralised computer.

Car networks

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, US, are testing another vehicle-to-vehicle platform called that uses Wi-Fi hotspots to send and receive information during a journey.

Another vehicle communication network called developed by a team at University of California in Los Angeles, US, lets drivers within 300 metres of each other exchange data from a range of vehicle sensors.

A European consortium of industrial and academic groups, called , has even demonstrated a “peer-to-peer” wireless car network that works without any centralised control system.

In theory, each of these systems could be used to relay information to a computer that controls traffic lights.

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