Do any of you guys care about people lane splitting?
- Thread starter Duck Rodgers
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Joe Bagadonuts
Well-Known Member
I think you are vastly overestimating the strength of titanium. Titanium us useful because it is light and strong, but it is not as strong as heavier metals.
candrew
Well-Known Member
I don't have a problem with it. I'd rather not have a motorcycle in front of or behind me in stop-and-go traffic.
As far as the OP's comment about opening the door on them while driving by - that really happened to a friend of mine while splitting traffic through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (tunnel that connects Brooklyn to Manhattan) In that case I can definitely understand lane-splitting being you're stuck in a tunnel sucking on exhaust from about 1000 cars.
As far as the OP's comment about opening the door on them while driving by - that really happened to a friend of mine while splitting traffic through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (tunnel that connects Brooklyn to Manhattan) In that case I can definitely understand lane-splitting being you're stuck in a tunnel sucking on exhaust from about 1000 cars.
Depends on what you mean by "strong". Titanium has a very high tensile strength, and it is generally comparable to steel, depending on the alloy used. Steel is stiffer and harder.
Joe Bagadonuts
Well-Known Member
I'm guessing that if you got in an accident in a steel framed car you'd likely be safer than if you were in a titanium framed car. I don't have any data on that though. I ride a titanium bicycle and I love it, but I don't think it makes much sense to build cars out of titanium.
Miggs
Well-Known Member
Per the titanium/steel convo.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/strong-titanium-cheap-dirt-new-steel-alloy-shines-n301226
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/strong-titanium-cheap-dirt-new-steel-alloy-shines-n301226
The biggest problem with steel is its density. Not its strength.
J
JAZZGASM
Guest
Lane splitting by motorcycles at intersections does not bother me. When bicycles do it to leapfrong the line and then all the cars have to wait to pass the same bike at every intersection can get annoying.
I also hate when two lanes merge, and 95% of drivers get over and then a few cars have to drive to the very end of the ending lane to merge, which slows down the entire line tremendously. Happens on my commute every day without fail.
I also hate when two lanes merge, and 95% of drivers get over and then a few cars have to drive to the very end of the ending lane to merge, which slows down the entire line tremendously. Happens on my commute every day without fail.
getting pretty technical here, but there are some different aspects of "strength" properties, and various temperature effects to compare under application conditions. But the simple way to address this is to consider the strength/weight ratio.....
one of the possible achievements in material science is in the class of composites or structural modifications. The new steel is a product of such an effort. I wonder about what we can do with micro-engineering or casting technologies that produce structures like honeycomb with gains in the strength/weight ratio.
Mg, Al, Fe, and Ti are very abundant elements. Mg, Al, and Ti metal is expensive because of the electricity required to produce the metal from the oxides, or the salt in the case of Mg. If we had nuclear power plants co-located with these metal reduction plants..... and MSFE desalination plants as well, it would cut costs not only with cheaper electricity but synergistic efficiencies in utilizing waste heat and producing by-product industrial chemicals.
Lithium is going to be a by-product of any Magnesium operation. So here we have the potential to really make electric cars economical. . . . .
See, the real problem is the 95% of the cars are not waiting until the end of the merge to merge. That's where the merge should happen and it should happen at speed in a pretty orderly fashion. And that's not a Utah problem exclusively. In CA people get too timid to the point of complete stupidity and stop instead of moving over. In Utah people want to fight you to the death rather than let you merge.
Perhaps eventually we can use some of those superalloys used by NASA and other ultra-high tech organizations in very small quantities, where a very large atom is introduced into the lattice to increase energy required for dislocations. Of course, dislocations themselves can be utilized to strengthen a material, while reducing it's strength to weight ratio. Many interesting possibilities in this field.
As for lithium batteries, I prefer that beyond the immediate future we move past Li-ion to more energy dense battery tech. I know there have advancements like lithium-air that might make it to mass-production some time soon, but the limits of lithium batteries will be reached before too long. Even more interestingly, we can start seriously looking into deployment of wireless electricity to reduce the need for batteries in the first place.