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New Gasoline Engine Prototype Claims 3X Current Engine Efficiency
erfnet writes "A cool new high-efficiency gasoline engine prototype has no radiator, no pistons, no valves, no transmission, and no fluids (except for the fuel). At first glance it has a few similarities with the Wankel engine, but is more advanced. The engine is only suited for hybrid-electric vehicles, but that's okay. The efficiency they are claiming: is over 3x what today's gasoline engines produce. The developers, a team at Michigan State University, hope to have this engine on the market in the next two/three years."
Let's assume for a moment this conspiracy theory and pretend that major oil and natural gas companies have bought up a bunch of energy-related patents that were filed before 1991 and granted before 1994. Now that those patents have expired, why haven't products based on those inventions been announced?
And what's this thing about "the engine is only suited for hybrid-electric vehicles, but that's okay. " ... what does THAT mean?
Most likely it means that the engine has terrible spin up/down times and/or is inefficient at doing them. Its best operated at constant speed, generating electricity for an electric motor which actually pushes you forward.
Have you ever noticed that *everyone* has a grandfather who invented a miracle engine that was repressed by Big Auto? This is at least the tenth time I've heard a story along these lines.
I'm sure your grandpa was an amazing engineer, but the "200 MPG engine" was the cold fusion / room-temperature superconductor of the mid-20th century. Maybe somebody's grandpa really had the answer, and maybe somebody's grandpa did get hushed up by GM ... but maybe a lot of peoples' grandpas like telling stories to their grandkids.
As for the specific engine in this story: I don't see an engine. I see a nicely machined chunk of steel and a piece of lucite on a bearing, some heavy handwaving, and an efficiency claim which can only be achieved if the engine operates at a temperature high enough that steel is as useful a construction material as pudding.
As someone consulting in the auto industry at the time, I can tell you that the auto company engineering departments at the time - including the upper executives - were DESPERATE for ANYTHING that would give them another MPG within the emission and performance constraints. The federal regulations were draconian and tightening while the Japanese competition was whipping their butts - especially on the west coast and among they new generation which was setting its lifetime car-buying preferences.
If your granddad had something that would give it to them - even if it meant redesigning the power train and retiring an engine production line - they'd have been on it like a shot. It would have been in the labs and undergoing testing. If it proved even marginal it would have been in a "concept car" prototype at auto shows. And if it had performed well enough to be a significant improvement, manufacturable at reasonable cost, and causing a car to perform well enough that it would sell, they'd have put it on the market to see if the public would accept it.
The problem is that there are a HOST of constraints, besides raw efficiency, on what ends up in cars. You can't have a car that accelerates so poorly that it gets rear-ended by road-raged drivers. You can't have one that only gets good MPG at some particular speed range. You can't have one that stalls about a car length after a stop sign. You can't have one that doesn't run when the temperature is below 10 degrees farenheit. you can't have one that needs an engine replacement every 20,000 miles. And I could go on for pages. There was a BUNCH of stuff they knew at the time would be fantastic - like hybrids for instance. Batteries weren't up to it but flywheels were. But it couldn't be done reliably until control and extreme power electronics was good enough to do the job - and were just getting there now.
And it has to be buildable, reliably, for an affordable price. Have you ANY IDEA what a tiny cost difference means when you are making millions of units? Figuring out how to eliminate a single screw that costs five cents to buy and install, at the cost of living at the time, would pay for TWO FULL TIME ENGINEERS to figure out how to do it. A big-three company spent many millions developing a flash-boiler steam engine during that period. If they could have gotten the construction cost down to $75 per unit it would have been their new power plant. They could only get it down to about twice that, so it only saw a racing car and a handful of prototypes.
So I call bull.
If it's real, the patent has expired by now. Give us the patent number. If it's still enough of an improvement over modern engines, and the patent attorneys didn't totally obfuscate some "secret sauce", a power plant like that could still be worth pursuing and could be engineered from the patent description. And there are a lot of applications BESIDES the US big-three ... two ... one car companies who could use it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way