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."

Comments

Same old snake oil

[Cmdr-Absurd]

Same snake oil that was being pitched at county fairs in the 1970s.
Nothing to see here, please move along.

Re:Same old snake oil

[eldavojohn]

Same snake oil that was being pitched at county fairs in the 1970s. Nothing to see here, please move along.

Well, I don't understand how their scam is supposed to work if you're right. From the article

The company has demonstrated the technology in its own test engine, and says it is currently testing it with three automakers. One key question is the impact the high pressures and temperatures will have on how long the engine lasts, Rocke says. The company, which is supported by venture-capital investments from Venrock and Khosla Ventures, plans to manufacture its system itself, rather than licensing the technology. It plans to build its first factory in 2013, and to introduce the technology into production cars by 2014.

So pretty much I just have to sit back and wait for the major automakers to offer these cars? Sounds like the fresh country rube is insulated from the snake oil salesman by the car manufacturers who apparently are prepared to buy into it. On top of that, it looks like they're not looking to license this technology to these companies but instead build a plant to manufacture them. So, they're at quite a bit of risk and are probably pretty interested in seeing this thing through if they want a piece of the manufacturing action. If you're selling snake oil, you usually just want to be selling it and not heavily invested in it.

If you have a citation of high pressure transonic combustion in the 1970s, I'd love to read about it.

Re:Same old snake oil

[mcgrew]

Fuel injection wasn't very widespread in the 1970s. The snake oil then was a carburator, not fuel injector. I knew a mechanic who actually got hold of the plans and built one; it increased his gasoline mileage slightly (it was supposed to triple it), but the car performed like a dog. It did NOT actually increase efficiency.

If an engine's efficiency is increased, not only will you get better mileage but better performance as well, although you can increase mileage without increasing efficiency (back in the old days it simply took a smaller carburator). There have been a LOT of engineering enhancements since the '70s. I had a '74 Pontiac with a four barrel carb, dual exhaust, milled heads on a 350 CI V8, it got 19 mpg tops on the highway (stick shift). That car was fast, would burn rubber in all gears. The car I'm driving now is an '02 Concorde. It's as roomy as the Pontiac, nearly as fast (automatic tranny, will burn rubber without a clutch to dump), but has a far smaller V6. At 50 mph I get 35 mpg, 28-30 at 68 mph (that's 100 kph for those of you in more civilized parts of the world; 1 km = .6 m iirc), and gets up to 20 mpg in the city, depending on traffic lights, etc.

THAT'S increased efficiencey. Today's automotive engineers are awesome.

Re:Same old snake oil

[radtea]

On top of that, it looks like they're not looking to license this technology to these companies but instead build a plant to manufacture them.

That alone should be a red flag, for several reasons.

1) They are an engine technology company, not a manufacturer. How much experience to they have in mass production, supply-chain management, etc? Not a small learning curve.

2) Tooling costs are high, increasing their capital needs, which is a convenient way of pulling more money out of their investors and therefore creating more opportunities to skim.

3) By manufacturing themselves they don't have to reveal the "secret secret", just the "secret". Any attempt to independently verify their claims will be made vastly more difficult by not having a full and public disclosure of their trade secrets in patent documents or under NDA to a licensed manufacture. So this approach puts off the day of reckoning for a good long while, and during that time company insiders can happily pay themselves big fat bonuses. It will also be much harder to prove they were lying about the technology's potential when the house of cards falls.

An engine technology company that's going to manufacture rather than license? Sounds too good to be true. Because it probably is.

Re:Same old snake oil

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but what does your current car WEIGH compared to the 70s sled?

Re:Same old snake oil

[Andy Dodd]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_Direct_Injection - GDI goes back to 1925, and this "high pressure transonic combustion" is just some buzzwordy gobbledygook used to try and hide the fact that it's just GDI plus some snakeoil claims (nearly any claims of major improvements from fuel preprocessing are snakeoil and have been for decades...) if you actually read the description of what they claim to be doing.

Re:Same old snake oil

[ScentCone]

So, they're at quite a bit of risk and are probably pretty interested in seeing this thing through if they want a piece of the manufacturing action.

There are factories (with investors) that also make things like Homeopathy supplies, and special magnets to reduce joint inflamation. Just because the claims of a product's utility are lies doesn't mean you can manufacture the product without a factory.

Not just "similar" to a diesel

[John Hasler]

It is a diesel.

When is the two-cycle version coming out?

Re:Not just "similar" to a diesel

[Chris Mattern]

You've got it backwards. Diesel engines aren't "Diesel" because they use diesel fuel, diesel fuel is "diesel" because it is the fuel used in standard Diesel engines. An engine in which fuel self-ignites without a spark plug is, by definition, a Diesel, whether or not it uses diesel fuel.

Those "up to" words again.

[onion2k]

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.

50% efficient car engines? Now that's news!

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

I'm sceptical

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:I'm sceptical

[poetmatt]

there's plenty of safety risks in partially oxidizing the gasoline prior to injection for combustion, too. That's like asking for a higher risk of gas fire from a frontal collision.

Re:I'm sceptical

[knarf]

I.e., basically 2.4l per 100 km on the highway.

So? Both Volkswagen as well as Fiat have produced cars for years now which can do 100 km on less than 3 liter of diesel at that speed. Don't forget that the efficiency of a diesel stems partly from the high compression ratio and the absense of a throttle valve. It is certainly possible to create a petrol engine which can achieve this level of efficiency, even though the energy density of petrol is slightly lower than that of diesel. As to whether the system this article is about is snake oil or not I don't know but there is nothing impossible about driving 100 km on less than 3 liters of fuel. Or 2 for that matter.

Re:I'm sceptical

[radtea]

Why not use km/l?

This is strictly a usability issue, and if you carefully and realistically consider user needs you'll see that l/100 km is better. Consider a car-buying couple:

"Hey, this one gets 10 mpg!"

"But this one gets 20 mpg! It's twice as good."

"This one gets 30 mpg, that's even better!"

"Yeah, that's as big a difference as between 10 and 20. Let's go for that one!"

Or:

"This one gets 10 l/100 km!"

"The one gets 5 l/100 km! It's twice as good."

"This one gets 3.3 l/100km, that's even better!"

"Hmm... that's not such a big improvement. Maybe the best value is at 5!"

The ratios are the same in the two cases, but the sad fact is that most people can't deal with ratios, and l/100km produces differences that reflect the relative magnitude of improvement, whereas the inverse scaling does not.

100 km is also a nice convenient unit for driving distance, and produces numbers for typical vehicles that can be adequately represented as small integers. But the specific choice of 100 km is less important than having a linear rather than an inverse scale (scaling as x rather than 1/x with fixed driving distance, which is the realistic constraint.)

Re:I'm sceptical

[mcgrew]

I'm sceptical of anything which proposes to simply double the amount of energy extracted from that gasoline, because, well, physics is physics.

Skepticism is good, but you could have made the same statement about carburation back in the 1970s. But my '02 Concorde is as roomy as my old '74 Le Mans, almost as fast, and gets almost twice the gas mileage the Pontiac did. The secret to extracting more energy out of a gallon of gasoline is to send less of it out the tailpipe.

Re:I'm sceptical

[Shakrai]

Anyone can achieve 98mpg given the right conditions (downhill in neutral)

Actually you'd be better to leave it in gear than to leave it in neutral. Modern engine control units will cut off the fuel supply when the engine speed is being maintained by outside factors and your foot is off the gas. If you shift into neutral you take away this option and force the ECU to supply enough gas to keep the engine running at idle.

Re:I'm sceptical

[BobMcD]

Miles per Gallon is the silly figure. It's so silly it's practically useless.

The car is built for travel, not fuel use. Knowing how far you can travel on the fuel you're using is the opposite of silly. The word would be 'necessary'.

Re:If you post before this

[Socguy]

No, they REPORT that they get 64 miles/gallon. Who verified this? Lots of startups make outrageous claims to suck in investors. Is this under optimal conditions? In the lab, the Prius gets amazing mileage too. How heavy is their prototype? That's one funky, aerodynamic looking car... why not use a standard automobile... you know, something that might actually be driven by you on your way to work.

Oh, but I'm sure when the technology never quite makes it to market, die hard conspiracy nuts will claim some Oil company bought the technology only to destroy it so they can sell more oil.

A lot of snake oil is sold to the investors

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:Doesn't solve the oil problem

[icebrain]

The technology (assuming it works, which is a big if at this point) may be applicable to renewable fuels as well, particularly if those biomass-based gasoline/diesel analogs ever work out.

The thing is, you're never going to really get away from some kind of combustible fuel for some methods of transportation. Yeah, trains can be electrified, everyday commuter cars equipped with batteries, and large enough ships equipped with nuclear power... but large trucks, construction equipment, "traveling" cars used for longer distances, smaller seagoing vessels, and pretty much any aircraft larger than a Cherokee or 172 will still need something combustible, whether it's something like biodiesel, or ethanol, or algae-based. Weight and volume restrictions pretty much require something with a high energy density (and the weight reduction with consumption benefits aircraft); you won't find those with fuel cells or batteries or cryogenic hydrogen tanks.

There are several promising biomass-based fuels in development; Embry-Riddle will soon be testing a sorghum-derived fuel with better performance than regular avgas, and without the lead. Combine this with more efficient IC engines, and you'll not only reduce emissions output (carbon, toxins, particulates) but also reduce the dependency on foreign energy.

Re:If you post before this

[jonbryce]

64 mpg isn't that amazing. My car manages about 65 miles per british gallon on diesel. 64 miles per american gallon on petrol is better than that, but within the realms of the possible.

Re:Doesn't solve the oil problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Sustainable POPulation is.

Re:Does not contradict itself

[confused one]

Note to self: You're an ass. OK, now that that's over, I skimmed the article at work and totally missed that part of the sentence. I wish I could mod myself to -1 right now...

Re:No Thanks

[Pingmaster]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalysis Read the section where it states that the catalyst is not consumed as part of the reaction, it is merely there to enhance the effects/enable the reaction to happen.

Diesel?

[invisik]

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

Re:Partially oxidizing?

[digitalunity]

Throttle body fuel injection sucks. If you want to be efficient, you either inject it directly in the cylinder or you inject it just ahead of the valve.

The efficiency claims sound preposterous initially, until you sit down and think through the theoretical energy capacity of gasoline and then consider how much of that power really reaches the tires in an IC engine. Drivetrain losses are pretty much unavoidable, but the engine itself is wildly inefficient.

There was another new idea that came out a couple of years ago involving applying an electric current to gasoline just prior to injection, reducing surface tension and greatly increasing atomization. In that case, the claimed efficiency increase was over 20%.

I have no doubts that either of these ideas work as intended, but I do doubt the efficiency improvement numbers they claim. They seem oddly round.

Re:If you post before this

[mugnyte]

Porsche 918 Spyder gets 58mpg and this is a freaken scream machine. Porsche

If they were all made of paper-light materials with low-drag-cof. surfaces and one-weather tires, and had specialized components - all with a budget 3x the cost of a normal auto manufacturer, then HEY! You could be right!