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50% Efficiency Boost From New Fuel Injection System
chudnall notes a Technology Review story on a new gas engine injection system that promises increased efficiency of up to 50%. "The key is heating and pressurizing gasoline before injecting it into the combustion chamber, says Mike Rocke, Transonic's vice president of business development. This puts it into a supercritical state that allows for very fast and clean combustion, which in turn decreases the amount of fuel needed to propel a vehicle. The company also treats the gasoline with a catalyst that 'activates' it, partially oxidizing it to enhance combustion."
then you haven't read the damn article!
Get back to it!
It's not just a concept, they have a prototype too.
their test vehicle got 64 miles/gallon, that's around 27km/l
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
Same snake oil that was being pitched at county fairs in the 1970s.
Nothing to see here, please move along.
It is a diesel.
When is the two-cycle version coming out?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
That sounds damned impressive.
I hate "up to". Anything that claims an improvement of "up to" something is a essentially misleading. You won't get a real world improvement anywhere close.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
You've just invented direct injection, again.
Let me have some doubts about anything that boasts more than 10% economy. All those fuel saving devices are usually scams.
I'd like it to be real, but please, have some critical thought before posting a story like this...
No, didn't RTFA.
Call it what it is
The article starts out saying it can increase efficiency up to 50%. Later it says efficiency can be improved on the order of 20%. Which is it. Hate to say it but this is a classic red-flag.
"This puts it into a supercritical state that allows for very fast and clean combustion, which in turn decreases the amount of fuel needed to propel a vehicle."
Because as we know 33% of petrol that you put into a car passes straight through the engine and into the exhaust, and.. oh wait
Even if it greatly reduces fuel usage, this still won't solve the energy problem the world faces. New combustion engines aren't the future; renewable energy is.
"50% Efficiency Boost"
"promises increased efficiency of up to 50%. "
Please, /., learn the difference between "50% efficiency" and "a 50% increase in efficiency". I come here to get away from the slapdash treatment of science in the mainstream press.
That is a lot of effort to make a diesel engine run on gasoline... I'd guess the 50% improvement includes increasing the cylinder compression ratio and excludes the fuel pre-treatment. This won't displace gasoline direct-injection systems in the market.
just in time. my mr. fusion is out of beer.
Also, if you put rare earth magnets on your fuel lines, it streamlines the molecules as they go into the engine.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
From the article:
> If it works as promised, the new technology would improve fuel economy by
> far more than these other options, some of which can improve efficiency on
> the order of 20 percent.
Thus the 20% number refers to other technologies (which not to say that the article may not be hype for other reasons).
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
For instance, what about doing this to cigarettes? Compress the tobacco, and heat it.
Actually, by the end of TFA (which I'll assume _you_ have read before making a RTFA demand of others) they get even more generous with the claims, and say it gets 98 MPG at 50 mph. (I.e., in a range where, sorry, but it's not _that_ aerodynamic.) I.e., basically 2.4l per 100 km on the highway.
I'm sceptical of anything which proposes to simply double the amount of energy extracted from that gasoline, because, well, physics is physics. The efficiency of the cycle is capped the hard way by the max and ambient temperature difference, and short of inventing an engine which runs at thousands of degrees, the alternative would be that conventional engines were spewing out half the gas unburned. Which just isn't the case.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Is it still 50% more efficient, after you add in the energy required to "heat and pressurize and treat" the fuel? All of that must be factored into the efficiency of an energy producing engine. If it is indeed true that they have gotten 50% more efficiency, then that would put the internal combustion engine (which has an average of 14% efficiency) to 21% efficiency. Wind turbines are 33%. I am still amazed at the overwhelming use of the internal combustion engine. The only reason why is because for so long oil was so cheap the engines could afford to be inefficient. Well, those days are over my friends.
http://wwww.zerospeaks.com
So is this guy an actual scientist, or someone just fishing for VC?
New in the News....gas companies announce a 50% INCREASE in gas prices....
NEGATED!
NEXT!
How much are replacement injectors using this technology going to cost? How much are other various parts going to cost (wiring harness that connects to the injectors, etc.)? How big will the heating and pressurizing mechanism be? (although based on the pic in TFA, it looks like it may piggy back right on the injector...which would raise the cost to replace them by a LOT) How much would that cost to replace? Would it be available only through the OEM company, or will other companies be able to build their own?
All things to think about.
Living With a Nerd
The age where the country rube was the only mark of the snake oil salesmen... well, probably never even existed. A lot of snake oil is sold to the investor who wants to pay for that manufacturing, or subsidize the research or whatever. See the Phantom console, or several cars supposed to run on water or even urine, etc. And it's not even a new thing. If you go back as far as the middle ages or even antiquity, you'll find the likes of the alchemist who sold the promise of endless gold or eternal youth to whoever just invests in his research, or mis-haps like the South Sea Bubble where you were supposed to get endless riches if you just invest in someone's expedition there.
Basically "but they plan to built it" is no reassurance and never was. It can simply mean they have a rube with deeper pockets in mind.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
People keep saying this is a diesel engine, but it is not. In a diesel engine, the air in the chamber is heated by compresssion up to something hot enough to ignite the fuel. In this design they are heating the fuel and pressurizing it before they inject it into the chamber, so that it turns to vapor as soon as it is injected into the chamber. Someone seemed to be making fun of the term 'supercritical' but that is the word for vapor that has completely transformed from a liquid and has excess internal energy. This is very different from spraying the gas with an atomizer.
...for Transonic. I also installed an HHO system and a 100 mpg carburetor that I built from some 1932 plans along with a tornado action swirl generator in the intake. My mileage and horsepower have improved so much that the car will run 87 mph in 1st gear at idle and gets over 257 mpg. It runs on Burger King bio-diesel.
Contrary to the deceitful puppet act they like to put up in front of audiences, the Open Source movement has not in the least forgotten the concept of "stealing":
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=stealing+gpl+code
Results 1 - 10 of about 37,500 for stealing gpl code
If the fuel goes in pre-heated and pre-compressed, who does all this work? Does the 50% take that into account?
During the first oil crisis, we heard the exact same claims. "Heating the fuel ahead of time gives more miles per gallon". Sure - and more detonation, which is what you get when you ignite ALL the fuel at once. So to suppress detonation, you have to go to higher octane - and higher octane fuels contain more energy, which translates to more mpg. The difference between regular and premium on my car is 5% (yes, I keep track of my mpg on every fill-up - I can tell the difference between the seasons, or when I've made the mistake of filling up at a place that sells gasohol - 10% drop right there ...), so if premium is less than 5% more expensive, I buy it.
Welcome to the world of the diesel cycle, which has always been more efficient.
Snake-oil alert.
I can totally see this working great until it just fails. It's putting high temperature high pressure fuel through a tiny hole. Either you clog the hole with deposits, or you erode it out.
Compression ignition is the hallmark of a diesel engine. Some of Rudolph Diesel's initial work used coal dust as a fuel (!), injected by a blast of compressed air. I can imagine he ran into problems with wear, ash buildup, and fuel delivery.
Does the exhaust also smell like bullshit?
It's been known for a long time that engines will run very efficiently if you run them very lean. In TFA, you will see that's what these guys are doing. The problem is that the engine then runs very hot, and the thing wears out in short order, or you have to make it out of unobtanium. They are also using unusually high pressures and temperatures. In the fine print, you will see they still have some work to do on verifying that the engines will last very long under this treatment.
So, yes, it will get great miles/gallon, but probably not very many miles/engine.
Computers obey me.
http://books.google.com/books?id=qq6GBPoHQpAC&pg=PA82&lr=&rview=1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Go to Google books and look up a book "Internal combustion", circa 1910.
In there you'll find the basic equations of IC engine efficiency.
Clue: They haven't changed a bit since then.
It all depends on the Carnot cycle, which is basically immutable. A proper gas-air mixture burns at a certain well-defined temperature, and then with expansion, generates a certain amount of work. There's nothing you can do in the way of injection that makes any difference.
You can come up with minor tweaks, like stratified charge, external mixing, heating, cooling, intercooling, ( all well explored in the 1910 book ).
If this is actually an efficient option, then great. It would be even better if people would just adopt on a mass scale some of the existing efficient technologies... no, I'm not talking about hybrids. Small turbo diesels, for instance. If the majority of the country stopped worrying about having the biggest damn SUV on the road to attack all those off-road obstacles in yuppie suburbia, we'd have be a great start in the right direction.
Macs, Linux, Windows... who cares, they all suck at something.
This is a novel application of existing ideas. Some of this technology is in use on diesel engines (compression ignition, direct injection, timing direct injection to time ignition) and heat regeneration is in use in all power plants, and some major industrial processes, a lot of ovens and forges use exhaust to preheat combustion air and fuel.
Heat regeneration is already used in cars through exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) technologies.
One of the larger losses in an engine is "pumping" or simply moving air through the engine for combustion, and exhaust out of the engine. In the article they call it "throttling losses"
The catalyst can be as simple as a coating on the injector nozzle as it enters the chamber, partial oxidizing does sound dodgy though.
They are also comparing to a rather small vehicle, the Prius, so I think their numbers are plausible, not too sure about this going mainstream at this kind of efficiency though. Automakers and oil companies will likely screw up the implementation, and lawmakers will regulate inefficiencies into existence, and the system will have to be proven safe and not a bomb on wheels, especially in the case of accidents.
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!
This reminds me of articles in Popular Science during the 70's touting columnist (and notable mechanic) Smokey Yunick and his super efficient engine that also used pre-heating of the intake charge, but I think the technology of fuel injection hadn't moved far enough to get to this level of direct injection.
The system itself is expensive on top of that you need a catalyst. They fail to mention how much the catalyst costs, or how it is added to the gas. Do I have to carry around bottles of the catalyst and add it each time I fill the tank or is there a secondary tank? How long does the catalyst last? If it is a secondary tank then that's just one more thing to break down. It all sounds counter-productive since if you can afford the upfront costs and whatever the additional ongoing costs are you can afford to spend 50% more on gas.
Kerosine, not fuel oil. Diesel engines run on kerosine, and kerosine for motor fuel is called "diesel" because that's what kind engine it burns in. The fuel is named for the engine, not the other way around.
Free Martian Whores!
This article describes a very similar process from a New York company that uses supercritical diesel fuel -- and they report much more sensible efficiency gains of up to 10%. They've only tested in a lab setting so far though.
I found the article because I was looking for the supercritical points of gasoline, which is a complex mixture of many different hydrocarbons, making the critical points very tricky to estimate. Turns out they are 720K and 60Mpa, from the article above. Their system achieves temperatures this high (almost 400 degrees higher than normal fuel system operations) using exhaust heat. Given that higher temperatures mean improved efficiency, I'd buy the 10% they propose -- though I remain very skeptical abut the 50% proposed in this article.
Hey mate, spare a sig?
Actually, that's exactly why one should be skeptical: at heart it's just a Diesel engine. Using a Diesel engine with gasoline isn't even a new idea, such engines already exist. So exactly what is the magic bullet there?
And improving oxidation doesn't do much, unless your engine ejects a large quantity of fuel unburned. What limits the efficiency of either the Otto or Diesel cycles (either theoretical or in actual cars) isn't their failing to burn most of the gasoline. So pre-oxidizing and catalysts to improve oxidation can't even begin to account for the claimed efficiency improvement.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Diesel is the name of the guy who invented the diesel engine.
:)
BTW: Funny sig.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
At least in Europe, 100km is a suiteable unit to measure distances in. So measuring what you need for that unit makes sense. That's why I guess everyone is using that unit.
You usually start with a distance and want to know if you have to refill fuel before that or how much it will costs, and not the other way around.
I was always told that if the mix is too lean it will damage the engine. I had a wrx sti and on the dyno when the mix was lean it produced a lot more power (torque & hp). So the real question, which is also hinted in the article, is what is the lifespan of the engine under these conditions?
Octane is a measure of how resistant gas is to self detonation. Higher octane fuels simply have more octane boosting additives added to them. 87 octane actually has slightly more energy than 93 because 93 contains more additives. All gasoline starts at the same grade and then has the octane boosted up to the required level by additives.
If you are getting better mileage on 93 than 87, your car probably has a knock sensor that detects pre-ignition and adjusts the timing accordingly.
Or your engine has carbon buildup and is pinging (pre-ignition) on the lower octane fuel (even if you can't hear it, it can be happening).
I've had high mileage cars before that ran like shite on 87 (even though that is the fuel they were designed to run on) due to carbon buildup. Running 89 solved the problem unless I was towing a trailer (which makes the engine run hotter), in which case I needed to run 93 to avoid pinging (pre-ignition).
This sounds exactly like what Smokey Yunick claims to have engineered back in the day. http://www.legendarycollectorcars.com/featured-vehicles/other-feature-cars/smokey-yunicks-hot-vapor-fiero-51-mpg-and-0-60-in-less-than-6-seconds-see-and-hear-it-run-in-our-exclusive-video/ Basically it uses hot gas vapor to improve fuel efficiency. It basically doubled the mileage of the Fiero's iron duke motor. Link to diagram: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3190/2738903116_71abf7785c.jpg
“Leaving research exclusively in the hands of engineers, we would have perfectly functioning oil lamps, but no electricity.”
Same thing with combustion engines.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Cheq my turbo Diesel with nawssss!!!
I don't even understand what it means to "partially oxidize" the fuel ahead of time. Isn't oxidizing fuel, by definition, burning it, since fire is an oxidation reaction? If so, why isn't "pre-oxidized fuel" like "pre-eaten food?" In other words, wouldn't it mean wasting fuel?
Surely my pathetic chemistry knowledge is at fault here, right?
An innovation that utilizes a non-sustainable energy source! Where's my friggin' air-powered hover-bike, you fools!?!?
I guess we'll have to wait ten years for this to reach the market then?
~don't feel threatened by my pineal~
The company also treats the gasoline with a catalyst that 'activates' it, partially oxidizing it to enhance combustion."
Doesn't oxidizing mean burning it ?
So they make it better by half buring it already...
Hummm....
Listen, Jackson! I've got an invention that'll boost efficiency one billion percent! It's a loo-loo!!!
Watch!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=ojpGKCNgaLw#t=2m40s
(Welp, back to the drawing board!)
This idea isn't too far from from Smokey Yunich's hot vapor engine from the early 80s, only this time with fuel injection instead of a carburetor.
For those who don't know who he is; Smokey Yunich was a famous race car driver, mechanic, and inventor.
I naturally didn't RTFA but it sounds like a diesel to me. Diesel engine already have greater economy from less volatile fuel. The fuel itself isn't heated, the cylinders are heated via glow plugs at start, and then by the combustion itself afterwards. More gas engine should go to direct injection first.
Or just skip all these "inventions" and keep refining the diesel engine. The latest iteration of the Mercedes diesel is very smooth and incredibly quiet (rivaling gas engines in the same model car) with greater output.
-m
http://www.invisik.com
On the other hand, another improvement in internal combustion engines seems much more promising : variable compression ratio as implemented in the MCE-5 engine, which could yield 15% to 35% improvements in mileage, while being cheaper to produce than equivalent diesel engines.
Several car brands have acquired licenses for those engines, and a few cars should equipped by 2015.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Vapor-ware?
I hate when an article talks about some newfangled engine tech and says it's more efficient than hybrids. A perfect hybrid is going to be more efficient per mile than a perfect gas engine. Period.
Why? lots of reasons.
Regenerative breaking is a big one.
You can use a sterling engine or a turbine or diesel instead of a 4 stroke gasoline engine.
You can remove the transmission entirely and just have the engine connected to a generator, like the Volt is going to do.
And finally, any increase of efficiency you wring out of a gas engine can also be used in the gas engine of a hybrid.
(for naysayers, I'll admit that current batteries are heavy)
As any (mechanical) engineer knows, to get an efficient internal combustion engine you want compression pressures as high as possible and combustion temperatures as high as possible (an oversimplification, to be sure) because an internal combustion engine is a heat engine, and the greater the temperature and pressure difference between the combustion event in the cylinder, and ambient conditions at the end of the exhaust system, the more efficient it is.
UNFORTUNATELY, some three quarters of the gas that the internal combustion engine draws in from the atmosphere is Nitrogen, and when you expose Nitrogen to the high pressures and temperatures of a combustion chamber, what happens next is simple, and unavoidable, chemistry, you get oxides of nitrogen out the exhaust pipe.
So on the one hand an efficient engine will be running petrol / gasoline at 13:1 compression ratios, or diesel at 25:1 compression ratios, and polluting the crap out of everything.
On the other hand, a "green" engine will be running petrol / gasoline at 9:1 compression ratios, or diesel at 17:1, and wasting energy efficiency like an ice rink in Dubai.
You can't have it both ways.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Why would it be surprising to so many people if this worked? To a layman, it might not make sense that inflating your tires (or something else along those lines) would increase gas efficiency. This is the same type of thing: significantly more complex, but still based on fairly sound basis.
Consider: an engine runs better when it's warmer, many (the majority) people in the US and Europe live in a 'cold' climate during half the year, and
many people go for 'short drives'. If you're preheating the fuel, it'll reduce a significant amount of energy loss due to the engine having to get warm before it can warm the fuel.
Additionally, pressurizing it (more than it's being pressurized already -think of how vehicle performance decreases when your fuel pump is malfunctioning or the filter need replacement, reducing pressure) and feeding it through a smaller injector would, I suspect, result in better performance. Higher pressure = better/quicker dispersal from the injector. (Also, I seem to recall that diesel is pressurized fairly highly before being injected, but I'm not certain.)
I've got an "HHO booster" in my 2000 Focus. No, I'm not seeing the 50% fuel economy improvements - but I am seeing improvements. I get about 15% better fuel economy during the fall and spring, and almost 20% better during the summer if I'm driving (my wife likes the AC on, silly her). The water freezes during the winter and we don't take road trips then, giving it a time to melt, so I disconnect it then.
I've got a friend who's uncle is a
As for the fuel additive... possibly. Consider how much processing (and mutilation) is done to our fuels now to come in line with EPA requirements: if they're putting in an additive which increases the octane or something like that, it's quite possibly effective. I know some vehicles perform significantly differently when they're using (say) 87 vs. 89 or 89 vs. 91 octane gas.
I've got a friend who's uncle worked on microwave technologies before he retired. This uncle was a bit of an eccentric, but he was also really, really smart (whether that has bearing on this topic or not, I couldn't say). His claim was he was getting 150-180mpg - an offhand comment, mind you - in an F150 truck by bombardment of the fuel line with microwaves (iirc). That same friend has a 6cyl Kia which he will regularly get 50mpg in on road trips (through the local hilly terrain using an HHO booster), and he's been doing it for 6 years.
In high school, I knew an older recluse - he lived on an old farm by himself and went to town maybe once a month for "supplies". He's occasionally come over to socialize. He had a 1979 F150 (something like that) which he'd put a 4BT Cummins in and a 12 speed manual transmission in it. He ran it as a greasel, and he would get about 70mpg on road trips to visit family on the other side of the state.
Hell, in a pretty plane-jane 2 ton 1985 Blazer, a non-turbo 5.8 Detroit will get 23mpg highway without much more than basic maintenance. That's better than many smaller, more aerodynamic cars.
All told, some of these fuel improvement techniques/technologies work. I've seen them work, and there are a lot of other people out there who have as well. What it all comes down to is common acceptance and realization that, yes, a sedan getting 50 mpg isn't all that unreasonable, and that, no, you don't need to run an electric hybrid (with lithium based batteries) to do so.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
http://www.sae.org/mags/aei/7160
And I would have thought that they would be amongst the first to call BS. The gist seems to be by correctly heating and pressurising the fuel at the moment of injection, the time it takes to mix adequately with the compressed air charge in the cylinder is reduced greatly, such that the flamefront never reaches the cylinder walls (thus reducing thermal loss to the cylinder lining) and also occurs quickly and early in the power stroke such that less energy is lost down the tailpipe.
By reducing the fuel to simpler hydrocarbons through the use of a catalyst the combustion time is further reduced, which means that it can be initiated during the power stage rather than being introduced before the piston has reached top-dead-centre. This should mean that the usual problems of direct gasoline injection - that it is difficult to avoid knock as the charge needs to be injected before top-dead-centre due to the duration of the combustion event - can be avoided.
Furthermore, as the engine is able to run very lean - you can just leave the throttle open even under low load conditions (such as cruise) - and just control the power by varying the amount of fuel injected, thus reducing the energy used to draw the intake air through a part-closed throttle.
Although I often think 'if it is possible, why did Honda or Toyota not come up with it a decade ago?', there is nothing here that sounds beyond the realm of the possible to this Engineer.
The key is heating and pressurizing gasoline before injecting it into the combustion chamber, says Mike Rocke, Transonic's vice president of business development.
So by heating the gasoline, I can ignore The Otto Cycle and its associated Thermodynamic Cycle? Amazing! All I need to do is pay these people money to suspend the laws of thermodynamics? KDawson will buy 2!
Can't these people even come up with an original scam of their own? This is an old scam from the 70's. Its pretty much the same as "leaning out" the fuel/air mixture in an old carburetor based engine. Yes it works for "efficiency" but runs the engine hot so that it wears out more quickly, and reduces power.
KDawson is an idiot for falling for it. Fire him for repeatedly being an idiot and hire a real nerd, not another hipster dufus like him.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Buy a manual transmission vehicle. You get an automatic 2-5mpgs better, plus the initial cost and maintenance costs are significantly cheaper.
Smokey build a Hot Vapor Cycle Engine 30 years ago that heated the fuel using the exhaust heat and a turbo. Emissions and fuel consumption went down, power went up.
Wonder if the filed a patent...
An increase from 20% to 30% might be described as a "50% efficiency boost".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
There are a half dozen things like this that will add 10% mileage improvement each- dynamic injection, continuous variable transmission, regnerative brakes, etc.
As someone who has his fair share of university-physics I have to say two things:
A) What they claim might be possible. 50% increase sounds like a lot but
B) if you ask yourself the question where the energy for the pre-heating and the pre-pressuring is supposed to come from it's not that magical anymore.
B) is going to pose a real problem to all this, I guess. Sure, if you are in a laboratory and have access to a lot of extra energy (well, coming from the wall plug) that you can use for all sorts of things you can increase the efficiency of a machine greatly.
You could use that energy to cool the incoming air, to increase the pressure in the machine or add some extra heat just for giggles, you can even plug an extra electro motor that exactly cancels out all friction the real motor creates. All these things will increase the efficiency of your machine.
But if you have to build it into a car you SOMEHOW need the energy to compress the fuel and heat it. How do they do that?
I guess pre-heating and pre-compressing CAN increase the effiency. The question now is: Will it increase it enough so it pays for your extra effort (you have to burn fuel to for the heater and pressurer and those things weigh extra as well) plus gives you a bonus that is worth it? If the 50% increase will all those practical limitations in effect go down to 10% it still might be worth it.
Tricking thermodynamics is a tricky business. ;)
Come on, give him his proper title.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
You actually graduated in chemistry without the faintest idea of what "thermodynamics" might mean? Sheesh.
Usually someone throws down a car analogy... what happens here... a computer analogy?
All of pop sci is now online so I was able to find the original article.
That tech combined with the ceramic engine and advanced lubrication.....that could work.
That's how a Common Rail diesel engine works. The fuel is already under extreme pressure in the fuel line, before even being sprayed into the engine.
As for the best moment for injection, well, that's what everyone is trying to do. It's not like everyone else was deliberately injecting the fuel at the wrong moment or anything.
Plus basically you can just look up the Otto or Diesel cycles. The efficiency is in the theoretical case limited by the compression ratio, and in the more practical case by temperature too. Whether you inject fuel in advance and compress it, or spray it just at the ignition moment, or even just using a laser to heat the air without any actual fuel, it doesn't change a damned thing.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm left with the same old question.
If the major car companies could indeed implement any of various technologies or techniques to enhance fuel economy, why would they NOT do it?
For instance, if just introducing turbulence in the fuel stream or direct injection in the chamber improved fuel economy substantially, why would they not do it?
Actually, they do.
TFA makes a few claims about the Transonic invention:
- Heating the gasoline.
- Pressurizing gasoline before injecting it into the combustion chamber.
- injecting it into the combustion chamber.
Pre-heating the gasoline is not common, to my knowledge, in passenger car engines. However, it is the subject of a patent. Indeed, there is an fascinating writeup by a determined and fairly clever amateur (maybe) on preheating the fuel. His concept seems dangerous, but it might work... Might, if we could test it adequately.
Pressurizing the gasoline is fundamental to injection; the process is obvious upon inspection. Higher pressures are being used now to overcome other problems. So far, we are not seeing improved economy, largely because these techniques are being used to improve performance. More about that later.
Injecting it into the chamber is not new, nor is it unused in passenger cars. Porche uses the technique, and advertises that it does improve economy. This is not new art.
So, if these techniques are well-known ( I know of them, so I expect the engineers know them even better), why aren;t they beign used to improve economy?
Well, it's later now. Performance is also a goal.
Turbocharging is used to essentially stuff more air and fuel into the chamber and either improve performance or economy, at little cost since it uses exhaust gas to power the pump. Usually used to deliver performance. actually, to deliver improved performance from otherwise economical engines. Serving two purposes at the same time - good engineering. Supercharging requires engine power to deliver the improved performance, so economy is not a goal there.
And the American market at least is not so focused on economy. Somewhat, but we also want to be able to beat the other guy to the end of the ramp. Deal with it.
Toyota clearly demonstrates the incentive manufacturers have to pursue economical cars, though right now it's as much marketing as it is market share. All-electric cars were tried - the Chevy EV1. It probably failed primarily because it threatened dealer profits. There is some diversity of opinion on this. The EV1 was just an experiment.
But my answer to the question "why not" is simple. These techniques to improve economy are not without consequences. Preheating fuel increases pressure and therefore chamber pressures. This imposes new demands on engine design, some increasing weight and size, which is contrary to current design trends. Complex injector design needs to be tested to verify it can survive at least the 100,000 mile standards. Lots of inventors don't ever test long-term or design life. The EPA does.
Bottom line, for me, is that if it were that simple it's either a true breakthrough or it's not that good in practice. Which one is this? I vote not that good in practice, but if it is, the manufacturers will either license it or steal it. Or not, for a good (to them) reason.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I've read TFA, actually, and it still smells like bullshit to me. Sorry.
For a start, efficiency is not the same as unburnt fuel. I hope you don't think that your car actually dumps 80% of the gasoline unburnt out the back.
Not wasting energy by heating up the chamber walls, well, it's a noble goal but too bad it's impossible. Regardless of how you time the ignition and how it burns, you still have an expanding chamber full of hot gas. That's mostly why it's higher pressure than before the ignition. That's why it pushes at that piston. That's why that engine works. And if you really believe that hot gas in contact with metal won't transfer heat to that metal, just because of some magical way of heating up that gas... I have some logging rights in Sahara to sell ;)
Even if you managed to work that engine by supersonic detonation instead of deflagration, heck, even if you did it in zero time, the fact is that the same amount of heat per gallon has been released in that chamber, heating up the gas. How do you think that prevents that gas from transferring energy to the metal?
Really, any given piece of that cylinder is in touch with the same hot gas for the exact same percentage of the total time. How do you propose to make the same metal surface absorb less heat in the same amount of time from the same gas? Short of making the gas cooler, that is. But just burning the fuel in a fancy different way isn't going to cut it.
So, yes, maybe I should have picked that claim instead. It's a better BS flag than anything else.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
In a diesel, the fuel is injected into the cylinder.
FTFA: "Once the fuel is injected into the piston, the heat and pressure are enough to cause the fuel to combust without a spark"
No, what we have here is a true revolution. This company is only one step away from screwing spark plugs directly into the fuel tank.
Okay.. since I lost EVERYTHING I just typed thanks to slashdots faulty human verification system, I'll make it short. "Pogue" - Look him up, this is nothing new. It is not snake oil, but the technology simply will never see the light of day. This is "vaporized gasoline", Liquids don't burn, that is why your generic car is between 10-33% fuel efficient, the rest goes out the tail pipe as HC(unburnt fuel, Hydro carbon, ie. gasoline) or is lost as heat. As far as you "BTU" people, I don't know where to start. The BTU table is so far off it isnt even funny. There is enough heat energy at the atomic level in a gallon of gasoline( or even water ), to nuke half the planet, so don't even get me started. Now, anything that goes against the norm of about a 1-3% increase in fuel eff. per year simply will not make the light of day. There are 1000's of inventions, all have been silenced. Toss it up to big oil, gov., or Ronald McDonald, whoever you think it is, I really don't care. Simply put, you the public will only see a general 1-3% increase in fuel eff. per year and no more, anything more would upset the system. fin.
It's nice that they promise up to 50%, but a 0% increase in efficiency meets that promise. So they can do nothing and still succeed. :)
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
This sounds like nonsense to me. If they claimed a 3% increase I would have some hope but a 50% breakthrough sounds like a snake oil sale to me.
From TFA:
The key is heating and pressurizing gasoline before injecting it into the combustion chamber, says Mike Rocke, Transonic's vice president of business development.
Yeah. Well, my father-in-law had a collection of Model T Fords - and one of them had a vaporizer plate on the engine block - I believe that was on his 1928 model (could have been the '24).
It was simple - and an installable option. Engine block had a slight circular recess with some screw holes on either side. One mounted a *small* tin plate (seemed like tin to me, much like those disposable ashtrays) via the screws - it had contours for the gas line lead-ins and -outs.
The gas was heated, vaporized, and pressurized - back in the '20s.
Substantiation here, see part 24 of Fig 1, the hot plate:
http://old-carburetors.com/1927-Dykes/1927-Dykes-059.htm
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Wow, amazing. It sounds as though they are describing something I've seen before. Now, where have I seen it?
Oh right. It's called a supercharger (be it belt driven or a turbocharger). They're fairly commonplace now. I drive a turbocharged car daily. When I drive conservatively I achieve as high as 43mpg, which isn't bad at all for a relatively heavy sedan. Of course, I only drive conservatively from time to time for academic curiosity (how high can I get the mpg without hypermiling?) and love acceleration, so what I usually get is 26mpg.
What I gather from reading this is that it's some type of supercharger, not intercooled (which means decreased performance and running very lean, so I hope the cylinder walls are made of tungsten and titanium alloys), and running some sort of oxygenator, such as nitrous oxide injection. All very old tech.
Relatively low compression lean burn engines were tried in the late 70s and early 80s. They didn't work well then due to sludge buildup and short ring and valve seal lifetimes. This engine will only run hotter, so what makes them think this will fare any better? This is going to be a GM-style 36K-mile warranty rather than everyone else's 60K to 150K mile warranty.
"The company also treats the gasoline with a catalyst that 'activates' it, partially oxidizing it to enhance combustion."
That's how you can tell this is BS. Technobabble coupled with taking advantage of public scientific illiteracy. Oxidizing gasoline is what the combustion chamber does. If you oxidize gas outside of the combustion chamber, you get a big fiery explosion.
It is possible to "Oxygenate" gasoline, which is just essentially dissolving Oxygen into gas like Carbon Dioxide into soda. But we already do this at all gas stations to cut down on emissions.
I thought direct injection was supposed to accomplish some of what's being claimed here. Fuel is not pre-heated, but it is injected into the combustion chamber at extremely high pressure and already allows for very lean combustion. And to be honest, it's debatable whether the added complication of DI is even worth insignificant gains in fuel economy.
I went from a 2.2 liter 4-cylinder to a 2.0 liter 4-cylinder with direct injection. Both produce the same horsepower and fuel consumption is virtually identical, 24-26mpg on average. What advantage there may be with the 2.0 could be attributed to the smaller displacement.
Then there's an issue that's affecting virtually all direct injection engines. Excessive and premature buildup has been found on intake valves. Because no fuel passes over the intake there is no cleaning action occurring. So whatever cleansers may be present in fuel, or fuel additives are totally ineffective. Apparently the problem is linked to recirculation of unburned fuels, carbon and whatnot cycling through the system. But from my understanding part of the problem has to do with the slightly higher temperatures DI engines run at which help promote this sort of buildup. Additionally, some claim that DI engines have a tendency to breakdown engine oil more quickly than conventional fuel injection.
As I've mentioned, it's a fairly widespread problem and some automakers are trying to find solutions. VW lists these as known issues in their patent filings for their DI engines and list one possible solution as cutting off recirculation. Of course that isn't permissible because of EPA requirements. I've read that BMW maybe institute some kind of intake cleaning regimen as part of regular maintenance. Ford, I believe, is working on a solution that incorporates both fuel and direct injection to address the problem. I suppose it's just the growing pains of new technology.
I'm not entirely sure how this new solution is will help in that regard. Unless ignition is happening at even higher temperatures and burns off some of that buildup. But more importantly, I'm skeptical that it will net much of anything in terms of gains. From what these guys describe I don't see their engine doing anything profoundly different from existing designs.
I'm confused; does someone have a car analogy that could help?
Agreed! If the warning light comes on, I know I have about 1 gallon of gas in the tank. At 22 mpg, can I still make it to the cheap gas station? It's usually less than 22 miles, but not always.
Nothing here sounds new. In fact there was a guy who used this "heated pressurized fuel injection" technique on a Pontiac Fiero in the '80s and sold the technology to GM, who summarily shelved it. It was a gasoline engine though it made something in excess of 40MPG. The heating was done by some kind of radiator device attached to the exhaust. I don't understand what is revolutionary about this?!? It seems like it just uses a combination of:
#1 direct injection (not so common in the US because of increased emissions but a commodity in European models)
#2 this heated fuel technique (already stated this was done in the '80s)
#3 common electronic fuel injection control systems ("The company has developed proprietary software that lets the system adjust the injection precisely depending on the load put on the engine. ")
#4 forced induction using a turbocharger, which has been around for decades (just shy of a century, the first turbos were fitted to large locomotive and airplane engines in the 1920s)
Other than #2, which has been done before and the patent for which might still be owned by GM, the rest of the technologies have been done extensively before and I believe there are at least a handful of car models that use all three (although again, 1 might be more common in gasoline engines rather than diesel). I wouldn't be surprised if GM sued this company for infringing on #2 if the patent is still valid after all these years.
what is weired about this news articles is, that if you read about
some tech before it is actually on the market, you will never see it on the market.
but with new tech that actually gets build, you discover it in the show-room ...
or when you go for a test drive
Pogue (1930's), Pantone, GEET(1990's), plus a score of others in-between.
Next in the news : running cars on "new electrolysis" products.
I tried to post earlier, but it did not stick...
The only think moderately rare is the hot vapor fuel idea on a diesel, which was done in the '80s. I think GM bought the technology and shelved it - business/marketing IDIOTS! Everything else is commonplace: direct injection (increased in popularity in the '90s, especially in european models due to the increased emissions, but you see more and more here in the US), electronic control based on engine load (EFI, welcome to the 1970s and present day), turbocharging (welcome to the 1920s).
Smokey's Hot Vapor Fiero
50% increase in efficiency... high quality well tuned internal combustion engines can operate at up to 58% of the theoretically available energy with the bulk of the losses being from friction in they cylinder wall, crank, etc... It's just another 100 mpg or HHO/water driven engine scam.
Why don't you clamp some magnets on the fuel line- my guess is it will give you 10% better fuel economy till you actually test it or bother learning about internal combustion engines.
Try: Fundamentals of Internal Combustion Engines, Heywood 1989
Still the best.
Unlike every single butt-scratching ape creature who posted nonsense above me, the way they inject it and how similar it is to existing technology or how much it supposedly won't work is unimportant. The huuuuuuuuge thing that sticks out to anyone who actually knows something about cars is that somehow magically adding an oxidizer to gasoline is like adding NOS but more direct and that's like a 50% boost in horsepower. You know why rocket fuel burns so fast? It contains its own oxygen! If they can do that to gasoline, you need less oxygen to come in and burn it from the air intake. There's still the same amount of air coming in though so the effect is it sends in more fuel and you get WAY more horsepower! So how this could possibly help gas mileage I don't know but it will sure give a performance boost!
By the way, the way they phrase it makes it sound like the new system is more efficient because current engines don't burn all the gas completely. That's bullshit! If cars were spitting out gas left and right or losing 20% of it straight into the catalytic converter, the car would never pass emmissions tests or have remotely good gas mileage. Warming up the gas and chopping it into smaller pieces so it "burns better" is a big load of crap no matter what form they package it in.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
You can also boost your fuel economy by 50% by making your car look like an aeroplane.
see http://www.free-energy.ws/transportation.html it is a good read
partially oxidizing it
So... they burn it a bit outside the combustion chamber?
I use km/l all the time. I live in Canada. The odometer is in km. I pump l into my tank. AND it's a simple numeric conversion (2.75 roughly) to multiply mpg to get km/l
l/100k has it's merits too. I just haven't made that conversion in my mental processor yet. And converting back and forth in my head always requires division.
It's curious how I use different measuring systems in different domains. People's height: feet and inches. Weight: pounds. Fertilizer: kilograms. Construction: 2x4's and 4x8's. Plumbing: both. Weather: Centigrade and mm. Cooking Farenheit.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Do a search on "smokey yunic adiabatic". He was working on this 10-20 years ago.
I looked through a container ship engine room about 20 years ago, they heated the "fuel"; they use the cheapest fuel, it's like tar, has to be heated first. isn't good efficiency all about friction (and heat)
Transonic keeps talking about fuel efficiency in miles per gallon. That is misleading on a number of fronts. The vehicle could be light weight, the test conditions could be extremely favorable, etc. Since we are only talking about engine efficiency, a better measure would be brake specific fuel consumption (BSFC).