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Steam Hybrid Car from BMW
RMX writes "BMW is unveiling its turbosteamer hybrid engine, which uses the excess heat in the exhaust system and reclaims 80% of it by powering a steam engine that assists the gas engine. Overall, this gives a 15% more efficient engine; and significant additional performance (power and torque) with practically no downside. "This project resolves the apparent contradiction between consumption and emission reductions on one hand, and performance and agility on the other," commented Professor Burkhard Göschel. Are steam engines the future of environmental-friendly hybrid vehicles?"
...with practically no downside.
Additional moving parts, and servicability? How many modern garages know how to service a steam engine?
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Although the idea seems nice on the surface, how much more energy goes into refining the metal for the additional engine? How much weight is added? How much cost is added? Although many of these schemes seem beneficial, when evaluated over the lifespan of the product it may be a net zero or net loss from the existing technology. If people would stop buying new cars every two years, we would be better off than everyone buying the newest, latest greatest enviro-trendmobile constantly.
BMW has the ability to make Hydrogen-powered production cars, it is a shame that they have not caught on yet.
Current fuels will eventually go the way of the steam engine, or wait, maybe not the steam.
Interesting site: http://www.bmwworld.com/hydrogen/
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Let's just hope this isn't comming from their Cleveland factory.
Quote from the company's press release about BMW's philosophy towards efficiency:
"A reduction in consumption amounting to a few percentage points over the entire model range exerts higher overall effects on the general population than high percentage points for a niche model."
Now the company just has to make BMWs available to the "general population"!
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Combined cycle power plants aren't exactly revolutionary. They're more efficient, but more expensive to buy and maintain.
Here are a few downsides off hand:
* More parts == higher maintenance (pumps, special catalytic convertor, etc)
*at least 24 ft of piping that may be impacted by even minor collisions
*Steam systems extra sensitive to corrosion from impurities in coolant.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Steam engines need to carry lots of water or provide a large cooler/radiator to condense the exhaust steam back to water for recycling. Bill Lear's plan to put "modern" steam engines into trucks and busses failed because he couldn't solve this problem. The article doesn't address this issue.
...I thought that idea ran out of steam decades ago...ba-da-boom!
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If you're only getting a 15% boost in efficiency. Cars are only about 20% efficient and that's if you have a really efficient one. A 15% increase is like going from 15% overall efficient to 17%. This is just a kludge.
There's a much simpler and more effective solution... Go full electric drive hybrid. Decouple the engine from the drive.
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I wonder if they will offer a steam whistle as an option to replace the car's horn.
It certainly would get the attention of the person in front of you preening themselves in their rearview mirror!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
How many modern garages know how to service a steam engine?
I would think that BMW dealerships would be able to service BMW autos, no? Yes, I understand the rush to FP, but do you think maybe they'll have this covered by the time they go into production?
I am glad to see some innovation to the standard IC engine.
But I guess it's just easier to sit in your armchair and criticize real engineering...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
The trouble is when people buy new cars that are NOT environmentally friendly, those cars also continue to guzzle for as long as they're on the road. If the average vehicle coming off the assembly line were more efficient, then we'd be pushing out the older crap with newer, better stuff. But the average fuel economy of ALL manufactured vehicles has actually DROPPED since the 1990s: from Automobile and Light Truck Fuel Economy
What is the operating temperature of the engine compared to the environment? What pressure does the steam system operate at? Also, how much does this addition weigh? So I add 10 kW; how much of it is spent on hauling around a steam engine?
...for a Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor add-on for my Delor..er...Nissan.
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... a network of metal tracks to operate them on.
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Now all we need is to condense the output of the steam engine into water and give it to a horse who will help pull the car. That way you'll surely be 100% efficient!
I think you are confusing fuel and engine form. Diesel is just a fuel, it doesn't dictate the engine type.
;-). The downside is you have to carry around some other material (for the state change) which is typically voided rather than cooled and re-used.
The (only) difference between (1) internal and (2) external combustion is that the fuel energy is used to create an expansion due to (1) a chemical reaction and (2) a state change in some other material. The expansion is then used to drive a piston and after that it's all gears!
The biggest problem with internal combustion is that the heat of the reaction can't be avoided and is absolutely not wanted, so you have to carry around cooling systems. For external combustion the heat is exactly what you want, and it's pretty easy to obtain
So... there's no reason you couldn't make a highly efficient diesel external combustion (probably steam) engine.
In fact this hybrid is arguably pretty clever, as it uses the waste heat in one of the most efficient ways possible, as input to a steam engine! If the water runs out, the car continues on its merry way as a POICE (plain old internal combustion engine) - and a lot of gears!
Justin.
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I'm a bit skeptical that really make this practical, but it's an impressive idea; a combined cycle automobile-sized piston engine.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I've been wondering how long it will be before we give up on gasoline/diesel engines and go with fuel cells. Granted, that may be many years away. Anyway, fuel cells generate a lot of excess heat during operation which could be used for generating steam as the BMW does. I think this is a step in the right direction. Despite advances made in recent years, automobile engines are still very inefficient and the focus should be on improving overall efficiency.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
Coming from BMW, this sounds suspiciously like "how to be green when you are super rich". New forms of ultra-frugal but still capable engines are more likely to be perfected by the Japanese even if someone else comes up with the initial idea. The core problem is the notion that you need an SUV the size of a tank to take a couple of kids three miles to school, or that you'll be considered a loser unless you drive an executive-class limo with a huge engine and all the trimmings. It's not very likely the car companies will start back-pedalling on either of those.
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You hydrogen people bother me. Hydrogen is not at all a solution to either the fossil supply or pollution problems. Producing and compressing the hydrogen takes a TREMENDOUS amount of energy that makes the overall scheme much less efficient than burning oil derivatives on-site. The issue isn't getting hydro fuel stations, it's getting the hydrogen without using tons of electricity.
The only thing hydrogen is good for is to reduce emissions from the vehicles themselves, but you only end up pushing the pollution to power generating stations, which we'll need a lot more of if the 'hydrogen economy' takes off.
The short-to-mid-term solution to the issues at hand is to produce engines that get much better mileage, like this hybrid, and to get Americans to give up their lust for uber-powerful cars. The long-term solution is effective mass-transportation, alternative energy sources (which hydrogen is not one of), and making dense walkable urban communities close to centers of commerce and industry part of western culture.
I think a good start would be to tax the crap out vehicles based on a pollution coefficient, banning light trucks (SUVs) from the high-speed lanes of highways, legislating a portion of the gas tax to fund mass-transit R&D and construction, leveraging heavy parking fees, raising the gas tax so gas costs $4/gallon, and legislation allowing for small diesel vehicles in the US (currently they are diffucult to produce, they get treated differently than gas vehicles).
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Geez.
To complex? Compared to what? This is a BMW not some american car. Germans may suck as human beings but they know how to make cars. Cars that actually just bloody work instead of needing to be fixed every ten miles.
To heavy? Compared to what? A giant hydrogen fuel cell? Me thinks BWM engineers would have figured out that adding an old style steam engine as found on trains would not be very effective. Perhaps these engineers already thought of the fact that adding a few hundred kilograms would not make sense so the thing does not weigh a significant amount?
Same with expense. Anyway this is BMW, anything that adds performance (wich it does power performance) is good and they just sell it on their premium models first.
As for hydrogen. Well part of the hydrogen engines are still internal combustion engines and will therefore still produce heat. Same with every fuel source that is burned. This steam engine idea could be used whereever you have waste heat.
It is in itself nothing new, in fact it is extremely old. Steam engines themselves didn't just create some steam put it in a cylinder and then vent the steam. Big engines had up to 3 cylinders. 1st high presure, then a middle pressure to take the waste steam from number 1 and then a low pressure one to take the last bit of energy from the steam.
/. engineers. Pah.
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Of course at this point this is just a concept system, it remains to see if it ever makes it into production.
My hope would be to see the steam engine addition connect to an electrical hybrid system, and that the main power source be a low-rev/high torque diesel engine. Do that with dynamic braking, etc. and you might just get an automobile engine that is say, 70% as efficient as the big diesel locomotive engines have been for what, 30 years?
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Just look at this new-fangled horseless quadricycle, Smithers. Steam-powered! Oh, I've seen the seductress of steam come and go over the years, but no one yet has been able to tame her. When will they learn that these faddish larks are nothing to get their knickers in a bind over. Reminds me of that one young fool. What was his name again? Edison, I believe. Lazy good-for-nothing. Always contriving gadgets to avoid an honest day's labor. Now let's take this contraption for a test drive. Which lever do you suppose is the velocitator and which is the decceleratrix?
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Beamer Steamer -- Copyrighted and Trademarked and for sale for $1,000,000 USD.
There had been previous steam-powered cars -- at least three decades before Stanley -- but they seemed to be taking off at right around the same time people like Benz (in Germany) and Daimler (in France) were coming out with gas internal combustion models.
As far as the tradeoffs, Stanley's assessment is described this way by About.com:
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Well, I live where it stays below freezing for about half the year, and we get days below -40F, and I've started my Jetta TDI in -30F from a cold start. It just takes a couple minutes while everything warms up.
So long as you replace your glow-plugs periodically, they start fine, you just have to wait a few seconds while the plugs heat up. The only problem is that some biodiesel fuels start to soldify around that temparature, so unless you have a heater, you might have to stick with petroleum fuel in the winter months.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Heat in the form of engine exhaust, and in the form of friction braking are two major areas of energy loss for a vehicle as well, but only recently has capturing this lost energy been a potentially desirable goal.
This BMW heat capture system seems like a great idea. Ford also has a regenerative braking system called Hydraulic Launch Assist which could capture much of the energy lost in braking as well. Electrics and hybrids already reclaim some of this energy by using it to generate electricity to charge the storage batteries.
It will be interesting to see if the ultra efficient cars of the future use any or all of these technologies.
280+ miles per gallon .
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http://www.canadiandriver.com/articles/gw/vw1litr
Pretty amazing .
A model made with less expensive materials would still exceed 100 mpg .
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I realise that the US is a different world, but there are parts of Europe where about fifty percent of cars sold are diesel (France) and it's getting on for that here in the UK. My last three have been diesels. They're exactly the same as the equivalent petrol car, except the red line is a bit lower, you can roll onto the power from 1500rpm and they're slightly harder to get as autos. My current car has the awesome VW DSG twin-clutch gearbox, which hooked to a turbo-diesel engine is wonderful.
Railway locomotives use diesel electric transmission because they need to generate immense starting torque to get an 800 tonne (or far more in the US) train moving from stationary. And because of the low coefficient of friction between wheel and rail, they need to power most or all of the wheels, so bogie-hung traction motors are a lot easier than somehow delivering a cardan shaft to every axle.
None of this applies to road vehicles. Either a clutch or a torque converter is perfectly suitable for getting a car or a lorry moving, and drive is easy to deliver to axles because they aren't mouted on pivoted bogies.
Before someone says it, there are diesel rail locomotives with mechanical transmission (early LMS shunters, say, which because the BR Class 08) and a lot with hydraulic transmission (DB stock of the 50s, and the whole sorry saga of the Western Region of BR). But diesel electric wins out.
What killed steam, by the way, was the fact that the thermal efficiency of the typical locomotive, even with fall Chappelon compounding, was about 18%. Boilers got up to about 85% efficiency on things like the BR Class 7 `Brittania'. Attempts to use more efficient mechanisms to convert steam into power --- condensing and non-condensing turbines, generators, etc --- fell victim to either loading gauge issues or the technology of the day.
ian
No. All a turbo allows you to do is burn the fuel in the engine more rapidly. You get more power, but at an increase of fuel economy. This solution is making use of the currently wasted byproduct of internal combustion; i.e heat to get more power from the same amount of fuel.
Well, it depends on how you use the turbine. As the exhaust gasses expand through the turbine they cool down. Having a steam engine is just another way of extracting part of the heat that goes out the tailpipe.
So, usually with a turbocharger the turbine is used to compress the intake air, which as you said allows one to produce more power with the same engine. Due to less friction there might be slightly less fuel consumption than a larger equally powerful naturally aspirated engine.
But then, you can instead connect the turbine to the output shaft via a reduction gearing. This is called turbocompounding, and was used in aircraft engines in the late 1940'ies (also, some modern truck engines by Scania use it today). That sure IMHO sounds like a simpler solution than adding a steam engine.
" I think you are confusing fuel and engine form. Diesel is just a fuel, it doesn't dictate the engine type."
Oh yes it does! Just try putting diesel fuel into your Otto Cycle automobile!
The Diesel Cycle is inherently different from the Otto Cycle in that there are no sparkplugs. As opposed to an external ignition source, diesel engines use nothing but the compression in the cylinder to ignite the air-fuel mixture. Overgenerallizing a little, diesel engines operate entirely on what you would call "knock."
I could go on about temperature vs. entropy comparisons between the Diesel and Otto cycles, but your eyes would glaze over.
For the same compression ratio, the Otto Cycle is more efficient than the Diesel Cycle. However, when engineering comes into play, you can have much, much greater compression ratios with a Diesel engine than an Otto engine. The source of ignition in a Diesel Engine is the pressure in the cylinder, and the pressure is uniform throughout the chamber, ensuring uniform combustion and uniform expansion of the cylinder. You can get away with building cylinders, say, 1 m in diameter. With the Otto Cycle, because you need an ignition source (sparkplugs), combustion in the chamber will be non-uniform and there will be more energy lost because of it, so F-1 and GPX cars use many, many cylinders that are very long but very slender. Only a fool would use an Otto Cycle engine to power a locomotive, let alone a ship.
"So... there's no reason you couldn't make a highly efficient diesel external combustion (probably steam) engine."
No. Diesel means internal combustion. If you want external combustion, you build a steam turbine (far fewer moving parts), and they don't care what you burn. There's no reason to burn something as expensive as refined diesel fuel. Modern steamships burn whatever it is the refineries can't sell to anybody else.
You could try a gas turbine, but, again, diesel fuel isn't designed for that; it will ignite when you don't want it to, and not ignite when you need it to. Go with kerosene.
"So... there's no reason you couldn't make a highly efficient diesel external combustion (probably steam) engine."
Not a mechanical engineer, are we?
"If the water runs out,"
Then you take it back to the dealer. The water isn't supposed to come out, you put your superheated steam through the preheater, getting it back down to saturation before you put it back into the boiler again. You should no less run out of water than you would run out of motor oil or transmission fluid (with similar Very Bad Things happening to your engine if you do).
" I think you are confusing fuel and engine form. Diesel is just a fuel, it doesn't dictate the engine type."
;-)."
Umm no a Diesel engine it a specific type of engine the correct name is a Diesel cycle engine. It was invented by a man named Rudolf Diesel and uses extermly high compression to ignite an air fuel mixture. The typical car engine is also called an Otto cycle engine after it's inventor.
While by definition any fuel you put into a Diesel engine is Diesel fuel Diesel engines can burn a many differn't types of fuel. Everything from heating oil to jet fuel will work in a diesel cycle engine.
"The biggest problem with internal combustion is that the heat of the reaction can't be avoided and is absolutely not wanted, so you have to carry around cooling systems. For external combustion the heat is exactly what you want, and it's pretty easy to obtain
Again no. The heat is what makes an internal engine work. It is a good thing. You only have to cool an engine because of the limits of the material. The hotter a Diesel gets the better it will work up to the point the lubrication or the material fails. BTW External combustion systems have EXACTLY the same limitations on max temp. A steam turbine is limited by how much heat the material and lubrication system can take before failure. You will still have to a cooling system for a steam engine and limit the temperature of the turbine.
An Otto cycle engine has issues with detonation so there is also a chemical limitation on max temp.
" The downside is you have to carry around some other material (for the state change) which is typically voided rather than cooled and re-used."
Not all external combustion engines use a state change. The Stirling cycle engine for example.
Some of the most efficient prime movers on Earth are massive Diesel cycle engines used in shipping and at power plants.
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This idea isnt new, doing it in a potentially production car is.
35+ years go we did a paper exercise in a thermodynamics class to evaluate the potential efficincy of a Rankine cycle (steam) engine running off waste heat from an internal combustion engine. IIRC, we got efficency numbers about like what BMW is claiming.
One weakness is that the systems aren't very efficent at low power, such as stop and go traffic or slow driving. There just isn't enough waste heat in the cooling system to do anything useful until you start making a reasonable amount of horsepower.
Some ships and stationary power plant use steam engines (usually steam turbines) that run off waste heat from gas turbine engines to boost efficency. Celebrity's Millenium Class cruise ships are one example.
Wow, you have 'Troll' in your name, you copy/pasted a well known apple troll, barely making any changes, and you still got serious replies. Well done, sir, I applaud you. May trolling success follow you unto the ends of the earth.
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massive drag? have you ever taken apart the airbox in a modern vehicle? They are very restrictive, you can get another ~20 HP in some vehicles just by replacing the standard air intake system with a cold air intake. You would likely have large gains in airflow from even a 3 inch hole because the air is being forced and not pulled in. There would not be much gain at 5 or 10 MPH but this is not much different than turbo lag with a turbo charger. The system might not produce quite as much HP as an all out turbo charger, but it would produce those gains with almost no added weight or cost.
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Does this mean a car that gets automatic repairs and upgrades all delivered through Steam?
I've always wondered why the exhaust heat was never put to better use. All that heat going out the back is wasted energy. The catalytic converter alone gets very hot. At the very least I figured it could be used for electricity generation so I think this is an idea that couldn't have come soon enough and I hope it gets used industry wide. I wonder why they chose water though. I would have expected them to use something with a lower boiling point and lower specific heat, like alcohol. Granted water is about as safe a substance as you can possibly get.
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The used cars don't get crushed as soon as the first owner is done with them, they go onto the used market and hopefully allow less enviro-trendy people, who just want a new car, to replace the old gas-guzzler they'd been driving.
You're assuming the new owner doesn't have to drop a few k on new batteries. If a used car is going to take many thousands to make right, how well will it do in the used market?
From that standpoint this new "Snobby Steamer" is better as there are not lots of nasty batteries that eventually wear out.
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Curtis-Wright did something similar with the turbo-compound engines, where exhaust turbines were coupled to the crankshaft - got about 20% more power for a given fuel consumption - and allowed the DC-7C and L-1649's to go from New York to London/Paris nonstop.
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Speaking as a man who used to own a 1995 VW Golf, I have to take issue with you on this.
Germans made a car that in theory was reliable and well-built and efficient. In fact it was continually breaking down, costly to fix, had exterior parts falling off every summer when the adhesive softened, and rarely got more than 25 miles to the gallon out of a gutless 2 liter engine. Also, the seats were uncomfortable, and my ignition switch assembly caught fire while I was driving one day.
The 2006 VWs may be better, but my sister-in-law bought a 2004 Jetta, new, and it was totalled when the electric seat heater caught fire.
BMW, on the other hand, is fine. I have fond memories of my Dad's 1984 318i, and wish I still had it.
-- Jeff Paulsen
Lots of links on this page: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/biofuel/message/1477 0
Looks like we finally have a challenger for "break my windows" :)
Apparently you are right.
(What I want to know is, what do they use as a starter and a fuel pump for this thing?)