Pollution by rc vehicles question

[HopePressler1]

My daughter is completing an engineering design project where she is converting a glow fuel rc plane into an electric plane that hopefully will be powered by solar cells. She is working on her research right now and trying to find some data about the impact of gasoline and glow fuel planes, cars, and boats on the environment, but she has not been able to find an article that discusses this type of pollution. Does anyone have a suggestion about an article they have read about this subject?

[bfinio]

Hi Hope,

You should be able to find data on greenhouse gas emissions for different types of fuel. Here's a big page from the EPA - I don't think it contains glow fuel, but it contains a bunch of fossil fuels, and some other examples like switching to LED light bulbs: https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-g ... references.

Your daughter will also have to figure out exactly what she means by environmental impact. Global warming is just one aspect, but you also have water quality, air quality and the impact on human health, etc. For global warming, you should be able to compare fuels using "CO2E," or equivalent CO2 emissions. I believe this takes *all* emissions (which can include other gases) and converts them to an equivalent amount of CO2, so you can compare with a single number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential.

Even beyond that (and this gets more advanced) is the entire life cycle analysis - not just how much is emitted when a fuel is burned, but what's the impact of mining, refining, and transporting the fuel. On the electric side, you have getting the raw materials and manufacturing the batteries, then eventually disposing of them; also what type of power source is used to charge the batteries (e.g. if your electric vehicle is charging with power from a coal power plant, it isn't exactly "zero emissions"), etc. That's not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea. Depending on your daughter's age, doing life cycle analysis might be too much.

This data may be harder to find for glow fuel. I'm not a chemist and not sure how similar glow fuel is to regular gasoline, but you may be able to make some assumptions about emissions by comparing other small gas-powered two-stroke engines. I think small two-stroke engines on outdoor power equipment (chainsaws, weed whackers, etc) are generally "dirtier" than the larger engines in cars, but again this is not my area of expertise.

Hope that helps!

Ben

[HopePressler1]

Ben,

Thank you for your response. I will have my daughter look at those sites. She had found multiple sources about greenhouse gasses in general, but I was hoping she could find some research specifically about rc vehicles impact environmentally when using gas and glow fuel. Perhaps there is no research on that specific topic.

She is 12 so there is a limit to the amount of research she will do on the impact. She is focusing more on creating the solar plane. Her reasoning was that the rc gas and glow fuel vehicles certainly contribute to pollution and by using solar cells to charge batteries for rc planes that are converted to electric then that will reduce the gas and glow fuel impact over time. Her thinking is that every little thing helps. Also she is excited about taking old rc planes and working on them.

Hope

[bfinio]

Hi Hope,

My guess is that this might be such a niche area that there might not be a lot of specific research on the impact of RC vehicles and glow fuel. But again, I think she should be able to do some research on larger gas engines and if needed, extrapolate that data down to the smaller engines (even if she needs to assume they're burning regular gas instead of glow fuel). She could also try to estimate total impact, instead of just one vehicle, by doing research about how many people use RC vehicles as a hobby.

Sounds like a fun project - please write back if you have more questions!

[MadelineB]

Hi Hope and Expert Ben,

I've just merged the post about solar cells with this thread on rc vehicles so Ben can see that question too.

Best of luck on this fascinating project!

Madeline
Moderator

[HopePressler1]

Is there a way to unmerge the topics? The question about research articles about pollution is very different than the question about electricity. I worry that the second question won’t be answered since it isn’t seen as a question. It’s only at the bottom of an entirely different question.

Thank you,
Hope

[MadelineB]

Sure. You might want to edit the subject line!
Thanks!