Slashdot Mirror
RX-8 Hydrogen RE a Dual Fuel Car
greekgod8591 writes "Japan's Mazda Motor Corp. said on Wednesday it will begin leasing a dual-fuel car that can run on both hydrogen and gasoline in the auto industry's latest effort to reduce oil consumption in vehicles. Mazda said the RX-8 Hydrogen RE, based on its popular RX-8 sports car, gets around these problems by running on gasoline in the absence of a hydrogen fuelling station, and using existing engine parts and production facilities to lower costs."
Even if someone wanted to pay the $3400+ lease (not including local taxes, licenses, delivery, etc.) there are but a handful of places in North America where you could find a fill. Not that there's even a standard fueling nozzle, nor one proposed to ANSI at this point. You could buy land in Illinois, grow corn, distill your own alchohol and at least have a few places to not only fuel up but some cars that can actually use the fuel for that kind of money.
And so, this is Mazda's PR machine cooking up hope where it'll be a decade or more before consumers will see something tangible on this side of the Pacific. Must be a dull news day.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Mazda has been the main user of the rotary engine for the past decade or so. Both their RX-7 (which ended it's lifespan in 1995, IIRC) and the current RX-8 are rotary engine designs.
From the reading car enthusiast forums that I frequent, both are seen as great cars, but have their share of oil leaks. Additionally, it's rather difficult to find a mechanic that is willing to work on rotary engines, so most cars are maintained by shade-tree mechanics.
You can really save money driving this thing. With it's 62 mile hydrogen range and its lease price of $3577 per month I figure I could hire a chauffeur with the money I save. Sign me up.
I ran an RX8 (hi-powered, UK) for two years, 30,000 miles. It drinks like a fish.
Hydrogen , whilst its a nice step forward isnt going to help much overall, and 62miles is ok if you live very close to where you fill up. As for 340miles out of the gas tank, forget it, most mine did was 275, typicaly 200-220.
Stunning cars though, balance, power and practicality, tho the Hydrogen cycle runs at 50% power and thats with a turbo.
mazda have had a demo/development duel fuel RX8 for a number of years.
I imagine to use hydrogen, that Mazda must have solved the sealing problems in the engine. They first dropped the rotary because of it's poor mileage and leaky rotor seals. I know a number of RX-3s and 4s had horrible problems with their rotor seals. It looks like they corrected that enough for the RX-8 (the 7 had problems too) to be an efficient gasoline engine. Hydrogen seems dicier to me in the regard of sealing. If they haven't corrected the problem enough to do hydrogen over the long term, this will be a flop.
...on the RX-series as well as the wankel-style rotary engine check out the following:
http://rx7club.com/
http://fc3s.org/
http://www.mazdatrix.com/
http://rx7.org/
and if you live in or near Ohio:
http://www.ohiorotaries.com/
These are some of the better sites/forums maintained and populated with rotorheads.
Its a two way exchange too, if you know anything about multi-fuel or new fuel vehicles we would like to hear from you as well.
Fortunately, not much goes wrong with wankel engines. Very few moving parts. Biggest problem is the seals wearing out, iirc, but the rx-7 i had in the 80s ran over 100k miles without any engine work, and didn't leak oil noticibly between oil changes, either.
XML causes global warming.
That's one of the huge cases for them; no valves, valve springs, cam shafts, pistons or rods to deal with. They are commonly used in planes due to their small size and light weight per horsepower they can produce. Specifically, my RX-7 runs 400 horsepower out of a 2 rotor 1.1 liter 350lb engine... Granted it's race only, because the intake ports are huge; it doesn't start making power until around 9000 RPM, but maintains it until around 14,000 RPM. (That's the other thing; since the rotors themselves are only spinning at 1/3 rotation per crank rotation, you can get them to rev all to high hell.) Their negatives are that they tend towards low gas milage, because of the long narrow combustion chamber (hence why then generally run with two spark plugs per rotor).
They don't leak oil, as such, they consume it. The design of the engine requires that oil be injected into the combustion chamber to lubricate the apex seals. Of course, the net effect to the owner is the same - you have to keep an eye on your oil level, but the consumption is really pretty slight in the RX-8 engine - I check my oil every 1,000-1,500 miles and need to top off about half of those times. After 26,000 miles, I've added a total of less than 2 quarts between scheduled oil changes.
Whenever there is an artical posted about any type of alternative energy there are about 400 trolls complaining that X energy isn't a good enough and that it is a complete waste of time and money to even try.
Here's the thing, if someone doesn't start the ball rolling it never will start, so its great that Mazda has done this, perhaps it will be a failure, perhaps it will do better then they expected but mainly this is planting seeds.
The first company to bring out competitive alternative energy cars is going to be in an excellent market position, the only way to do this is to actually start bringing out the cars once they see what works and what doesn't they will be miles ahead of the competition.
The Sopwith's engine wasn't a rotary engine like a wankel (which uses a rotor, not pistons), but it was called a radial rotary engine because the crankshaft was in fact fixed, and the cylinders, pistons, heads, manifolds, propeller--everything rotated around the crankshaft. As a matter of fact, the propeller was mounted to the engine itself!
In effect, the rest of the engine became the flywheel. Because it didn't need an external flywheel, these engines had better power to weight ratios, which is obviously very important in WWI biplanes. There was also a French airplane, which, IIRC made dual use of the crankshaft as a gun barrel... So bullets fired straight through the center of the engine, and the barrel was very effectively oil cooled if you can imagine!
They're wrong, however, saying that Mazda makes the only Wankel engine, because of course, Moller international also makes them, and they're going to be used in their much anticipated VTOL Skycar.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
There are already a lot of duel fuel propane/LNG/gasoline trucks out there. Most of the places I've seen them though only fill them up with gasoline. Also, the tank for the LNG fills up about a quarter of the truck bed in the back. Same problem, although worse with hydrogen. Since hydrogen naturally doesn't have as much energy densities at similar pressure you have two choices: Make the tank even bigger, or compress the gas to a ridiculusly high pressure. Both choices have their own associated problems.
For those who aren't in the know, Mazda is a division of Ford. Many of the cars use the same components and sometimes they are the same cars with different model names. People looking for a "japanese" car often buy Mazda not knowing they are buying a Ford. Go to the mazda site and compare some of the models to the ford site, the resemblance is uncanny ;)
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
The solution, of course, is to use nuclear power to generate more portable fuels. When people realize the inherent relative safety of pebble bed reactors, and the way that fuels such as hydrogen are a storage facility and not an energy source, we'll be far better off.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Rotary engines were not used on WW1 era aircraft. These were *radial* engines, with a set of cylinders in a circular arrangement.
The rotary has some big benefits and some notable acheivements:
Power-to-weight ratio is excellent. Minimal moving parts, no valve train and short eccentric shafts mean that vibration is very low, and this enables rotaries to rev very smoothly and at relatively high RPM (10,000+ RPM on a normally aspirated rotary in street trim is not difficult). Hot, high velocity exhausts make turbocharged rotaries capable of very high power levels.
The Mazda rotary has seen enormous success on the racetrack - Mazda is the only japanese manufacturer to win Le Mans, and the RX-7 has been extremely successful - winning more races outright than any other model in major US racing classes.
A 1.3L rotary engine is easily capable of producing 500bhp with a good turbocharger and fuelling setup, and the most powerful 13Bs used in drag racers produce up to 1000bhp in the extreme (it is true that a 1000bhp 13B will not last long).
the 2 litre (20B) engine was the torquiest production engine in a japanese car while the JC Cosmo was being made, and the boosted 20B in the worlds fastest rotary does the quarter mile in 6.9 seconds/202 mph with something approaching 1000 bhp.
The engine that powered the Le-Mans winning 787B in 1991 used a 2.6l 4-rotor normally aspirated engine with ceramic coatings, which produced about 700bhp, exhibited an almost perfectly flat power delivery curve over the entire race, and when disassembled at the end of the 24 hour race, showed practically no wear whatsoever.
Not only does the rotary produce excellent power for it's weight and displacement, it is also very reliable on a racetrack, or as an airplane engine.
On the downside:
Unfortunately heat/cooling cycles are the rotary's worst enemy, as the engine is constructed of a 'sandwich' of different metals, which tend to expand and contract at different rates. This leads to failure of coolant seals (letting water leak into the engine) - analogous to head gasket failure.
Apex seal breakage is the other major failure mode of the rotary, often due to detonation, or oil starvation.
Both of the major failure modes necessitate removal and rebuild of the engine block, which is labour-intensive and expensive.
Fuel efficiency is very difficult to maintain over a wide rev-range because of the shape of the rotary's combustion chamber, which is long and narrow, meaning it is difficult to get a smooth flame front and complete combustion, something piston engines (due to their 'closer to spherical' combustion chambers) have a natural advantage in.
Ceramic coatings and side-port designs such as used in the Renesis keep heat in the charge and insulate engine parts better, which provides cleaner burns and smoother combustion.
The Renesis (1.3l 2-rotor RX-8 engine) can burn hydrogen because it's side-ported intakes and exhausts (as opposed to the peripheral exhaust ports in production cars and the peripheral intake + exhaust in race engines) enable a complete separation between the intake, combustion and exhaust chambers, equivalent to zero valve overlap in a piston engine, while retaining the ability to rev high and without majorly impacting on flow.
This is more or less impossible with a conventional 2 or 4-stroke piston engine - any piston engine running hydrogen either needs a totally different and switchable cam profile which produces anemic performance, or is built to run on dedicated hydrogen fuel and is still a pretty poor performer.
The Renesis is an outright better hydrogen hybrid engine than anything anybody at any other car manufacturer can come up with, despite their much longer histories and enormous research budgets.
You can only go 62 miles on a tank of hydrogen in an RX-8, but how far can you go running hydrogen in any other vehicle? Not very.
Many people trash the rotary out of ignorance, but the truth is that it is the
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Mazda has been the main user of the rotary engine for the past decade or so. Both their RX-7 (which ended it's lifespan in 1995, IIRC) and the current RX-8 are rotary engine designs.
From the reading car enthusiast forums that I frequent, both are seen as great cars, but have their share of oil leaks. Additionally, it's rather difficult to find a mechanic that is willing to work on rotary engines, so most cars are maintained by shade-tree mechanics.
The Oil leaks are not leaks, the nature of the lubrication system of the rotary design intentionally burns a small amount of oil during operation as a part of the lubrication process. However it is only like a 1/2qt every 3000-4000 miles.
The older RX3 and RX5 vehicles made by Mazda in the 70s DID have oil leaks, but this was due to a faulty seal design that was overcome with the 12A Rotory engine introduced in the new 1979 RX7. The engine's size was increased and refined again in 1985 with the GXL-SE RX7, and this engine, the 13B, then became the standard engine of the new body style that ran from 1986.
Mazada redesigned the RX7 again in 1992, and it still holds as one of the top sports cars ever produced, with under 5sec 0-60sec times, over 1g skipad, etc. However the engine in the 1992 RX7 Was the same basic 13B engine introduced in 1985, but with an improved twin turbo system, giving this simple engine amazing horsepower and the lower end torque to move.
The RX8 is a new revision to the Rotary engine, giving it more horsepower without the need for turbo. (However if the earlier Twin-Turbo was added to this engine, it would be in the ranks of the fastest cars ever made, a decision I think Mazda skipped on due to the market of the RX8(too much power for the average buyer); however, rumors of it or a new RX7 with twin-turbo are going around.
As for working on the rotary engine, it is out of ingornance if mechanics won't work on them, they are a very simple design, much simplier than the more complex piston based combustion engine.
The biggest failure in RX7s were the transmissions, as the rotary engine normally runs at a higher RPM than other engines, as it just keeps spinning and doesn't have to reverse direction. So a 9K redline is nothing, in fact many street racers and modders in the late 80s early 90s used RX7s in racing because the standard engine could still perform reasonably well in the 15,000-18,000 rpm range, it was the transmission to hold up to this amount of speed and power that was the trick.
Rotary engines are quite interesting and surprising that they have not caught on more in the market. They can be more fuel efficient, and emmissions are often better as the engine does a more complete burn process of the fuel. They are also surpsingly small, and lightweight. An average person can lift the engine. Which is kind of cool seeing a tiny engine that back in 1992 and 1993 was basically a 2 cylinder engine and could out perform even the Corvette ZR1 at the time.
The light weight nature of the engine and lack of vibration were also benefits to the performance of the car, as the engine could be mounted futher back in the car giving the car a 50/50 weight distribution for great cornering, and unlike other cars in its class, no vibration problems that other companies like Nissan were plaqued with when they tried to compete with their 6cylinder engines of the time.
Another footnote on the Mazda/Rotary engine is that in the racing circuit, Mazda for years has used a 3cylinder version of the rotary engine in its racing cars, and unline competitors like GM/Corvette, Porche, Ferrari, etc - the Mazda team uses the SAME engine throughout the racing season because of its high durability, where the other competitors usually replace engines between each race.
I am somewhat of a car enthusiast, and have owned all 3 variations of the RX7. I actually miss them, they were fast, nimble cars that were easy to do things well in them.
In contrast to the Corvettes and other performance cars I ha