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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."
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.
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
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.
That's almost a full US Gallon. You could drive 100km on a jug of milk.... Well if you could run a car on milk. That would give new meaning to milking it for all it's worth.
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.
My work here is dung.
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.
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.
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.
In all fairness though, the renewable plans for transportation do include combustion engines.
The world seems to be aiming at two or three concepts:
1. Biofuels. Same old engine, sustainable fuel.
2. Electric engines. Sustainable electricity, new fuel tank, and (for cars at least) new engine.
3. Fuel cells. New fuel, new tank, and (for cars at least) new engine. Still in research stage it seems.
It seems that option 1 is the easiest to implement, because most of the existing infrastructure will be needed.
In the end, it'll be a transition, and it looks like we're developing all 2-3 in parallel.
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.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
"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.
What the fuck are you talking about? The "X times more than is not the same as X times as many" fallacy does not apply here.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
Does the exhaust also smell like bullshit?
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.
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.
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...
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.
Free Martian Whores!
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 lesser known fact is that most conspiracy nuts work for oil companies to discredit those who discover the real conspiracies. /ducks
Stop being so cynical! It's clear to me and other freethinkers that this invention, coupled with Roger's Patent Home Fusion Contraptor, the Bloom device, and the Smithe Perpetual Motion Machine will lead us to energy independence! Free renewable power for one and all!
You could drive 100km on a jug of milk
I once went over 200km with a gallon of milk.
I think it was bad by the time I got home cuz the wife was real mad.
No no they don't propose using a different oil ... just preprocessing the gasoline ... I mean, who can imagine a car running one snake oil? How many snakes to the mile would that take?
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
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.
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?
This idea has been "out there" for several years. Perhaps its time has finally arrived. See http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Boiled_20Gasoline_20Engine
Bah, the technology is fine. They put it in our cop cars and they work fine. Good thing too, since I'm just a few days from retirement and I've got this new partner. Nope, no explosions here.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
Umm, you're right about ethanol blending (which is going to become increasingly hard to avoid). Ethanol has a significantly lower energy density of gasoline. Notice that I didn't say regular or premium. Despite your claims of 5% increase in gas mileage, there is no energy density difference between 87 and 92/93 octane fuels. The only thing that octane (and the difference between regular and premium gasoline) is in the knock resistance. If your engine doesn't knock with regular fuel, you gain exactly 0 performance benefit from using premium fuel. If higher octane equated to higher energy density (which you stated in your post), then ethanol would have more energy than gasoline. However, despite ethanol having an octane rating of 116, it has less energy per gallon. If you look at wikipedia, you'll notice that regular and premium gasoline are separated on the "octane rating" page, but in the same gasoline category on the "heat of combustion" page.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
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.
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
You're right -- you need timed direct fuel injection so that there's no predetonation. What gets compressed in the cylinder is just air, and then -- at the right time -- you add fuel into it. The supercharged injection means that the fuel will flash-vaporize and self-ignite. I presume that the propagating flame front, aided by thermal expansion of the combusted gas, will mix the fuel and air. I also think that there may be benefits to lubrication, as there is never raw fuel (not even as a vapor) in contact with cylinder walls.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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?
the right snake can go many many miles, my car's snake injection system only unspooled and used half an anaconda yesterday.
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.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Porsche 918 Spyder gets 58mpg and this is a freaken scream machine. Porsche
I mean, really, if they can get this kind of car (0-60mph in 3.2 seconds) then there is no excuse for ALL cards to get such great ratings. The whole "hybrids are slow" is ridiculous.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
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
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
Heptane = C7H16 + 11 * O2 = 7 * CO2 + 8 * H2O
Octane = C8H18 + 02 = 8 * CO2 + 9 * H2O
When cracked at the refinery, the oil companies try to get as much heptane as possible while still being able to keep the RON (Research Octane Number) within the target range by adding additives. So no, the wiki article is too simplistic, and flies in the face of the fact that refineries can't produce as many gallons of premium as they can of regular for the same amount of crude - a higher ratio of C8H19 to C7H16 than regular, which requires an extra CH2.
the "octane rating" has nothing to do with the actual octane content - it's a measure of detonation resistance compared to burning pure C8H18 - octane - instead of a mix of heptane and octane.
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.
No, you were right the first time. Most diesel engines run on processed fuel oil, i.e. very heavy petroleum distillates. Kerosene is a very light distillate, used by jet engines in planes or rockets.
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.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
NO2 injection is not without its own costs and risks. It will add to the performance of the vehicle, but adds to the risk of predetonation, or worse. Plus you need a steady, cheap source of the gas, which is not really viable as an mass marketable additive.
That and NO2 is a contributor to climate change, reacting with ozone to the atmosphere when it burns.
So much for that.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
I think we all know how a Diesel engine works.
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.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The difference between regular and premium on my car is 5%
be careful using premium fuel, because if the engine is tuned for a lower octaine, running a higher octaine will damage the exhaust valves. Higher octaine burns more slowly (which prevents detonation at higher compression ratios), and too high of an octaine and it's still burning when the exhust valves open. By the same token, too low an octaine and it will knock, damaging the heads, pistons, or (most likely) piston rings.
A cheaper way to stop spark knock than premium fuel is to adjust the spark timing. If it doesn't knock on regular, you're better off running regular.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
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!