OUR VIEW: Aggies deserve salute for speed record
Recently, scientists and engineers at USU broke a land speed record in a missile-shaped vehicle running on biofuel made from bread and cheese. Since news headlines often omit the words “a” and “the”, unwary readers might believe the student-built streamliner approached the absolute land speed record of 764 miles per hour.
The USU streamliner, alas, went a bit slower than your typical rocket-propelled dragster. The “Aggie A-Salt” streamliner was clocked at 64.4 miles per hour at the World of Speed 2012 event.
It went 64 miles per hour? That can’t be right. We have cars that can drive 64 miles per hour, and we’re only poor college students. The USU vehicle broke the record for the small-engine class petroleum-fuel diesel streamliner division. That makes more sense. The streamliner had an 870-cubic-centimeter engine, much smaller than most consumer autos.
A few miles less than the speed limit on most freeways may not sound thrilling, but relatively few people can say they’ve gone that fast in a vehicle they built themselves. The fuel is perhaps even more impressive. The streamliner, running on leftovers from human meals, can beat Usain Bolt’s top speed by more than 30 miles per hour. That’s a lot faster than any of us can run on bread and cheese.
USU’s team is on the right track. Too many alternative-fuel innovations don’t perform well enough to compete with gasoline. Other methods produce fuel from food crops – and when current agricultural practices come under fire for being unsustainable, does it make sense to convert any portion of our food supply into vehicle fuel? The Aggie A-Salt developers are staking out their territory in the middle ground where performance and sustainability overlap.
Future versions of the team’s biofuel may be formulated from algae. Algae is similar to food waste in that we have too much of it. Rain washes fertilizer out of the soil in our yards and farmland and into our rivers. Algae consumes the nutrients in the fertilizer, but it also consumes the oxygen necessary for fish and other aquatic wildlife. For years, USU researchers have been working on a way to turn the algae in our wastewater into fuel for our vehicles – not a bad proposition for Logan City, which is home to some of the nation’s largest wastewater treatment lagoons.
What our school did on the salt flats with a tiny engine and a tiny budget is something to be proud of. We applaud the accomplishments of our fellow students, and we look forward to an Aggie A-Salt streamliner with a top speed that wouldn’t draw the ire of freeway motorists.