HydroICE Project Developing a Solar-Powered Combustion Engine

cylonlover writes "OK, first things first – stop picturing a car with solar panels connected to its engine. What Missouri-based inventors Matt Bellue and Ben Cooper are working on is something a little different than that. They want to take an internal combustion engine, and run it on water and solar-heated oil instead of gasoline. That engine could then be hooked up to a generator, to provide clean electricity. While that may sound a little iffy to some, Bellue and Cooper have already built a small-scale prototype."

Comments

There is a FAQ here:

[Tapewolf]

The last comment at the bottom of the article is a post by one of the project team, linking to a FAQ written in response to the comments.

http://hydroice.wordpress.com/

Re:Why bother with the oil?

[vlm]

It's not being burned, it's only being used as a heat carrier. Seems to me it would be more efficient to just heat the water directly, and use it in a steam turbine. What am I missing here?

The hydraulics. I can't be bothered to crack open a steam table at this time of day, but a substantial sized tank of stored 500F water is going to be ridiculously thick walled and heavy... 500F oil can be more or less unpressurized.

Reading the article I'm not sure what "oil" they're using. Cheap canola oil isn't going to like 500F however asphalt isn't going to like being piped around at room temp.

The journalist articles don't detail it, but stereotypically there is a huge insulated front end tank being heated by panels so you can run the engine at midnight. Usually its a couple orders of magnitude cheaper to redesign the system to not require operation at midnight, but thats a higher level system failure.