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What if there was a hybrid vehicle technology that could at least double the gas mileage of passenger cars, SUVs and light trucks? What if it could slash emissions by 50 percent or more? And what if it could challenge our usual mileage expectations by offering better fuel consumption in the city than on the highway?

Even better from an engineering and manufacturing standpoint, what if this hybrid technology didn’t rely on expensive, heavy, bulky battery technologies that aren’t really ready for prime time and instead used a time-tested energy storage method?

Well, there is just such a hybrid-vehicle technology, and it’s one based entirely on hydraulic components rather than electric ones.

In many ways, these hydraulic hybrids conceptually resemble their electric hybrid cousins. Only in this case, energy storage takes place not in a battery but in high-pressure hydraulic accumulators usually charged in excess of 3,000 psi. The best of these accumulators have power densities of roughly 500 kW/kg, according to Jim O’Brien, founder and chief technology officer for Hybra Drive Systems, a start-up focusing on the development of hydraulic power trains.

Design concepts for hydraulic hybrids vary, but typically the car’s diesel or gas engine powers a hydraulic pump motor, which charges that high-pressure accumulator. The accumulator, in turn, drives one or more additional pump motors connected to the wheels. A second lower pressure accumulator typically completes the hydraulic circuit. Depending on the design, there may be one pump motor to drive a pair of wheels through a differential or one pump motor per wheel for an all-wheel-drive version with independent torque control. During braking, the pump motors on the wheels reverse themselves, re-charging the accumulator and capturing energy that would otherwise be lost to heat.

The hydraulic hybrids now under development can communicate with modern engines and do have some electronic controls. Yet in their purest form, they don’t really need any electronics to function. Hybra Drive, for example, has shoehorned a prototype hydraulic power train into a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle. “The only electric thing on that car is the spark plug,” says O’Brien.

This is an older article, but we are starting to get into this in some of my classes at school this semester.

One of my instructors is actually a pioneer in the technology. I will have to make some posts on the various vehicles he has built using hydraulic hybrid technology. It’s a very fascinating subject. 

Dennis Crowley, the co-founder of Foursquare, a location-based social network, has called Places, Facebook’s new check-in tool, “boring” and “unexciting”.

I don’t find Foursquare all that exciting either as of late. Sure I can check in somewhere, but who cares? Most of the incentives for using the service in Minneapolis are based on mayorship, which can be hard to obtain from a well established Mayor. I just don’t see the value in Foursquare anymore.

Now backed by $1.5 million from a legal settlement announced Monday, a planned memorial for the victims and survivors of the I-35W bridge collapse finds itself with more funding than expected. And after months of secrecy, final plans could be presented to the public in as few as three weeks.

The “Remembrance Garden,” honoring the 13 dead and 145 injured, would likely be the most expensive memorial in the state — costing more than any war memorial at the State Capitol — while commemorating what one attorney called “the greatest manmade catastrophe our state has ever seen.”

As envisioned, it also would be a significant feature of the redeveloping Minneapolis riverfront and a close companion to the sleek bridge that quickly replaced the 40-year-old crossing that collapsed into the Mississippi River during the afternoon rush hour on Aug. 1, 2007.

Judging by the two basic concept sketches on the StarTrib site, color me unimpressed.

The payout, approved by the City Council on Friday, settles a federal lawsuit the seven filed after they were arrested and jailed for two days for dressing up like zombies in downtown Minneapolis on July 22, 2006, to protest “mindless” consumerism.

When arrested at the intersection of Hennepin Avenue and 6th Street N., most of them had thick white powder and fake blood on their faces and dark makeup around their eyes. They were walking in a stiff, lurching fashion and carrying four bags of sound equipment to amplify music from an iPod when they were arrested by police who said they were carrying equipment that simulated “weapons of mass destruction.”

However, they were never charged with any crime.

A Minneapolis man was hit with acid while biking on Chicago Avenue. Abe Hotchkiss initially thought he had been hit with water from a balcony up above.

Several seconds later when he looked down, the bracelet he was wearing started disintegrating.

He ended up at the burn unit, where doctors told him he had been hit with sulfuric acid. Doctors warned him it can keep burning, so he has to go back to the burn unit every day as they monitor the injuries.

What the fuck? 

On Wednesday, Coleman stood across the street from that dusty dent and announced an initiative to jump-start the Lofts at Farmer’s Market and other stalled projects across the city. The spark will be $15 million in new local spending, which is expected to unlock more than $100 million in state, federal and private investments and create hundreds of jobs for seven projects.