Increase gas mileage 40%, just add tap water.
<div class="IPBDescription">No need for engine coolant either.</div>Yeah, usually when you hear something involving water and cars.
Usually it's a scam. (<a href="http://www.greyfalcon.net/hydrogen" target="_blank">Hydrogen included</a>)
However this one actually makes a hell of a lot of sense.
Turn a 4 stroke engine into a 6 stroke engine:
<img src="http://www.ecogeek.org/images/stories/sixstrokeengine.gif" border="0" alt="IPB Image" />
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->If somebody tells you that adding a little bit of water to your engine can get you 40% better mileage, they're probably blowing a lot of hot air. If Bruce Crower, <a href="http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology/c1609351d9092110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html" target="_blank">winner of the 2007 Popular Science Invention Award</a> tells you it's possible, be prepared to be blown away.
In today's gasoline and diesel engines, the four strokes of the piston - intake of air, compression of the air/fuel mixture, combustion of fuel, and exhaust of the resulting fumes - generates temperatures above 1500°F. Crower's new engine design harnesses this otherwise wasted heat by injecting water onto the blazing hot piston. The water instantly vaporizes and expands in volume 1,600 times to power the piston through another two strokes. The resulting steam is then recaptured and fed through a condenser to be used again.
Not only does this increase the amount of power produced by the engine by about 40%, it cools the engine as it operates, completely eliminating the need for a cooling system. No radiator, no coolant, no water pump... it could shave as much as 1000 lbs off the weight of semi-truck engines.
Best of all, the technology could be used in any kind of internal combustion engine. Gasoline, hybrid, series hybrid, biodiesel, and it would always save huge amounts of fuel.
<a href="http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/664/" target="_blank">http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/664/</a><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Pretty nifty, huh?
Closed loop steam powered hybrid engine <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile-fix.gif" />
<img src="http://img.timeinc.net/popsci/images/2007/05/invent_engine_485.jpg" border="0" alt="IPB Image" />
Usually it's a scam. (<a href="http://www.greyfalcon.net/hydrogen" target="_blank">Hydrogen included</a>)
However this one actually makes a hell of a lot of sense.
Turn a 4 stroke engine into a 6 stroke engine:
<img src="http://www.ecogeek.org/images/stories/sixstrokeengine.gif" border="0" alt="IPB Image" />
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->If somebody tells you that adding a little bit of water to your engine can get you 40% better mileage, they're probably blowing a lot of hot air. If Bruce Crower, <a href="http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology/c1609351d9092110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html" target="_blank">winner of the 2007 Popular Science Invention Award</a> tells you it's possible, be prepared to be blown away.
In today's gasoline and diesel engines, the four strokes of the piston - intake of air, compression of the air/fuel mixture, combustion of fuel, and exhaust of the resulting fumes - generates temperatures above 1500°F. Crower's new engine design harnesses this otherwise wasted heat by injecting water onto the blazing hot piston. The water instantly vaporizes and expands in volume 1,600 times to power the piston through another two strokes. The resulting steam is then recaptured and fed through a condenser to be used again.
Not only does this increase the amount of power produced by the engine by about 40%, it cools the engine as it operates, completely eliminating the need for a cooling system. No radiator, no coolant, no water pump... it could shave as much as 1000 lbs off the weight of semi-truck engines.
Best of all, the technology could be used in any kind of internal combustion engine. Gasoline, hybrid, series hybrid, biodiesel, and it would always save huge amounts of fuel.
<a href="http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/664/" target="_blank">http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/664/</a><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Pretty nifty, huh?
Closed loop steam powered hybrid engine <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile-fix.gif" />
<img src="http://img.timeinc.net/popsci/images/2007/05/invent_engine_485.jpg" border="0" alt="IPB Image" />
Comments
Yeah, I read the article.
But nice find!
You would lose horsepower since the gas will only be firing every other rotation, and I highly doubt the steam will work as well as people seem to think.
This.. ugh, this is such a bad idea. Distilled water would have to be used, since evaporating tap water will leave behind calcium, and any other salt that made it's way into the water system, thus destroying your engine in probably a week. Distilled water is expensive to buy, and uses alot of energy to make (Evaporate the water, condense the water). Lets see, what else. Water is heavy, thus you lose gas mileage from carrying around 300 pounds of distilled water.
I could keep going on, but seriously. Terrible idea.
That's nice... in theory. However, as anybody who has tried to build a steam-flash cannon knows, you need something really really hot to effectively flash water to steam with pressures that will be at all useful.
You would lose horsepower since the gas will only be firing every other rotation, and I highly doubt the steam will work as well as people seem to think.
This.. ugh, this is such a bad idea. Distilled water would have to be used, since evaporating tap water will leave behind calcium, and any other salt that made it's way into the water system, thus destroying your engine in probably a week. Distilled water is expensive to buy, and uses alot of energy to make (Evaporate the water, condense the water). Lets see, what else. Water is heavy, thus you lose gas mileage from carrying around 300 pounds of distilled water.
I could keep going on, but seriously. Terrible idea.
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I know very little about science, but it sounds like most of your criticisms have been answered. Isn't 1500°F really, really hot? and is losing a little horsepower really a big deal to gain 40% efficiency, eliminate the need for a cooling system, radiator, etc? and it sounds like it's a closed system, doesn't it? you wouldn't have to 'buy' distilled water more than once, unless you have a leak.
that said, being a layman, the science doesn't make me skeptical, but the fact that no one thought of it before does. I would think something so deceptively simple must have been tried like 40 years ago...
And to say it "removes the radiator" is just as stupid. Lets say, hypothetically, that somehow putting a little bit of water sprayed onto the pistons in an engine magically cools <i>every other aspect of the car as well</i>(oil radiators, etc). How does he plan to magically cool and re-condence the steam? Somehow I think he's going to need a.... radiator.
It's nice and all that he is using the wasted heat in an engine for something, and Im sure his idea "works", but to make an outrageous claim like 40% increase gas mileage is an insult to anybody with a basic knowledge of auto-mechanics.
Have you ever poured some liquid nitrogen on your skin and noticed how it skips along while barely touching your skin and barely cooling it? Or seen a water drop on a very hot stove plate(it must be significantly above the boiling point for this to work) survive for minutes apparently floating on a cushing of evaporating water vapour just above the plate; seemingly able to glide in circles frictionlessly on a tiny depression in the plate?
Flash evaporating liquids can be difficult, especially on very hot surfaces. Spraying it on some kind of fine wiremesh or using very fine mist might work. It may well be here that he's found some clever mechanism.
distilled water is cheaper than bottled water. at 3.50/gal for low-grade gasoline, bottled water is still less than half as expensive as gasoline.
i, for one, am interested. most of the theories seem to check out and (as with every other freaking invention ever) the numbers seem stacked a little bit (lotta bit) high (probably to attract investors)
distilled water is cheaper than bottled water. at 3.50/gal for low-grade gasoline, bottled water is still less than half as expensive as gasoline.
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True, but I highly doubt the vaporizing water will have the same energy to mass ratio as gasoline, aka it will require more water to do the same amount of work.
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Wrong again Xyth, the water isn't where the energy is comming from, it's the excess thermal energy from burning octane and there IS a lot of that.
I think really though this would be better implemented in an engine made for a system like this. There would be a lot of better efficiency yes, but I think some horsepower would be lost without an electric drive to supplement the acceleration.
Gas-Electric-Steam Hybrid Internal Combustion Engine (GESHICE) anyone? <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="biggrin-fix.gif" />
Heat of vaporization for water is very large, this will absorb a significant quantity of the free energy without providing useful work and make it harder to cool the water back into liquid form as a lot of heat needs to be removed.
Have you ever poured some liquid nitrogen on your skin and noticed how it skips along while barely touching your skin and barely cooling it? Or seen a water drop on a very hot stove plate(it must be significantly above the boiling point for this to work) survive for minutes apparently floating on a cushing of evaporating water vapour just above the plate; seemingly able to glide in circles frictionlessly on a tiny depression in the plate?
Flash evaporating liquids can be difficult, especially on very hot surfaces. Spraying it on some kind of fine wiremesh or using very fine mist might work. It may well be here that he's found some clever mechanism.
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It's in a piston, that's how it can be cooled again; piston closes, water comes out, water turns to steam, steam expands, steam pushes piston, piston creates more volume, more volume means less air pressure, less air pressure means a lower temperature in the steam. However, I don't really see a viable way of getting all of the steam/water out of the piston - and it seems like there'd be a negative impact on the gasoline's combustion if it's still in there.
Considering it's supposedly a closed system, I have no idea why you'd need 300 pounds of water (that's 136kg of water which in turn is 136 liters of water (35.9 gallons), so, thanks for that arbitrary number that exceeds the fuel tank capacity for most cars.
I do, however, have a similar query to a different question, and that is: how it could possibly replace the entire cooling system, that's the pistons being slightly cooled by the water, and potentially being recondensed near the piston so that it can flow around near the engine, potentially absorbing heat and maintaining a near 100°C temperature (which would help the steam-creation process), but I still don't see how he's cooling it quite enough to replace the entire radiator and cooling system.
Wrong again Xyth, the water isn't where the energy is comming from, it's the excess thermal energy from burning octane and there IS a lot of that.
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Eh, that's not really what I meant. A certain amount of water will only expand so much, so to create enough steam pressure I believe it would take more water then gasoline. If you see what Im saying.
<!--quoteo(post=1630599:date=Jun 1 2007, 03:07 PM:name=UltimaGecko)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(UltimaGecko @ Jun 1 2007, 03:07 PM) [snapback]1630599[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
It's in a piston, that's how it can be cooled again; piston closes, water comes out, water turns to steam, steam expands, steam pushes piston, piston creates more volume, more volume means less air pressure, less air pressure means a lower temperature in the steam. However, I don't really see a viable way of getting all of the steam/water out of the piston - and it seems like there'd be a negative impact on the gasoline's combustion if it's still in there.
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I think you've got a lapse in logic there. The steam will not push the piston that far, it will only push on the piston until it reaches it's natural pressure (I forgot what the term for this is).
However I'm sure it helps somewhat to remove the heat away from the engine.
It's in a piston, that's how it can be cooled again; piston closes, water comes out, water turns to steam, steam expands, steam pushes piston, piston creates more volume, more volume means less air pressure, less air pressure means a lower temperature in the steam.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The heat of vaporization for water is huge. You're going to have a lot of waste heat that you need to cool as you normally would with a radiator and by the AC if the weather's cold. I don't think it saves much of off the BoM.
<!--quoteo(post=1630599:date=Jun 1 2007, 02:07 PM:name=UltimaGecko)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(UltimaGecko @ Jun 1 2007, 02:07 PM) [snapback]1630599[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->However, I don't really see a viable way of getting all of the steam/water out of the piston - and it seems like there'd be a negative impact on the gasoline's combustion if it's still in there.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
All pistons are not in the same stage, some provide torque to the crankshaft while others consume torque from the crankshaft to push out exhaust products. The momentum of the flywheel and crankshaft is not insignificant either and helps smooth the vibrations out. Your run of the mill petrol engine will produce lots of steam as a waste product from burning petrol and it manages to deal just fine with that; why would the occasional steam powered stroke + exhaust be so different?
At any rate, this is a way of making the engine do some work with the excess heat. Pretty clever! I wonder how much this same effect works on the petrol. Surely it's gotta vaporise and expand in volume a pretty large amount during the fuel-sucking-in stroke.
I'd also like to know whether this 40% is an experimental number or theoretical.
--Scythe--
But wouldnt you need alot of water stored in the car to be able to use water as much as fuel for the engine? Since im guessing you'd need alot of water since it will probably run dry first, since you need less gas every stroke of a piston. And wouldnt it make your car run uneven?
He'd probably be killed by OPEC before he even reaches the patent office if its true.
But wouldnt you need alot of water stored in the car to be able to use water as much as fuel for the engine? Since im guessing you'd need alot of water since it will probably run dry first, since you need less gas every stroke of a piston. And wouldnt it make your car run uneven?
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The water is recycled though, where as gas can't be recycled.
The only thing that sounded weird to me is the claim that you could do away with the radiator. You've still got that heat there mate. It's not going to go away unless you vent the steam. You're going to have to take its heat away to get it back to a liquid and as such you need a radiator.
At any rate, this is a way of making the engine do some work with the excess heat. Pretty clever! I wonder how much this same effect works on the petrol. Surely it's gotta vaporise and expand in volume a pretty large amount during the fuel-sucking-in stroke.
I'd also like to know whether this 40% is an experimental number or theoretical.
--Scythe--
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Well yeah, like said the cooling thing probably is just an adage by that blogger.
But I have seen the 40% figure tossed out.
However that was 40% for gasoline.
And only 5% benefit for a turbodiesel.
(All the following calculations, to make things easier, assume that the boiling point of water is constant, the rate of heat transfer through the engine to the water is infinite, the specific heats of all involved materials is infinite, the system loses no energy to the outside world, and probably a few other things I forgot to add.)
The heat of vaporization of air at 1 atmosphere is 2258 kilo Joules per kilogram(kJ/kg); and the specific heat of steal, the highest in my textbook, is 480 Joules/kilogram*Kelvin (J/kg*K). At 1500 degrees F or 1088.1 Kelvin, the steel would have 522.58 kJ/kg of energy. Now this might seem like there is enough energy there to work since your engine weighs a good bit more than the small amount of water that is being added; however, engines cannot operate at these temperatures. Like most things, steel expands when it gets hot. The whole reason for the cooling system for the engine is to keep it from getting too hot, and preventing the precision made parts from expanding and seizing up. Since the water in most cars radiators are not actively boiling over, it can be save to assume the engine is at no more than twice the boiling point of water. This would reduce the amount of heat energy in the engine to around 179 kJ/kg. Assuming the outdoor temperature is around 80 Fahrenheit and the water is at the same temperature, it would take around 292 kJ/kg to raise the temperature of the water at atmospheric pressure.
Of course all of these numbers are actually meaningless without knowing how much water needs to be boiled to get a useful pressure in the already engine to actually do work. If it actually occurred once, then all the energy used to boil the steam and heat it up would be gone. Since the heat transfer between the burning gas and the engine are so low it could take a few hundred cycles of burning fuel to actually raise the temperature of the engine enough so that the steam could be boiled again.
Now, none of the assumptions I made are true, of course, as heat take from the engine, it cools down. When this happens the rate of heat transfer goes down. and since the engine is operating at over a few rpms there is little time to actually transfer heat to the engine. Not only that but if the pressure in the engine is above atmospheric pressure it takes more energy to get the water to the boiling point of water since the pressure is higher, this also slows down the rate at which the water will boil. The water needed to boil also depends on the size of the engine, a bigger engine means more water which means more energy is needed to boil the water.
Furthermore heat must be transfered from the burnt fuel to the engine. In order to maximize the heat transfer from the fuel to the engine surface area must go up. However an increase in surface are would cause problems with the airflow in the engine which reduce the efficiency of the engine.
All of this energy must come from burning a few grams of fuel every cycle. Not only that, but the fuel must also transfer a far portion of that energy into the engine as heat so that the engine can then boil the steam. The energy transfered as heat to the engine is energy not used to push the piston. This reduces the overall efficiency of the engine again.
Since I don't have numbers on how much water is added, the operating temperature of the engine, or the heat transfered from the fuel to the engine; I cannot make an accurate assumption of whether or not his design would work. From just looking at the raw numbers though, I cannot believe what he says is possible in any way.
Also, how come this has never been thought of before. I find it extremely doubtful that no one has ever tried watering down petrol before, since almost every liquid sold ever has been watered down by someone at some point.
Brain asplode.
Also, how come this has never been thought of before. I find it extremely doubtful that no one has ever tried watering down petrol before, since almost every liquid sold ever has been watered down by someone at some point.
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Man you don't even have to read the post to realize you're wrong. All you have to do is look at the freaking picture.
He'd probably be killed by OPEC before he even reaches the patent office if its true.
But wouldnt you need alot of water stored in the car to be able to use water as much as fuel for the engine? Since im guessing you'd need alot of water since it will probably run dry first, since you need less gas every stroke of a piston. And wouldnt it make your car run uneven?
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Actually I think efficiency increases just make OPEC happy; then we can all just hang on to petrol products for longer.
Actually I think efficiency increases just make OPEC happy; then we can all just hang on to petrol products for longer.
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OPEC doesn't care how fast we run out of oil. As far as they are concerned they just want as much money as possible, and they'll make less money if people need to buy less gas. There is no advantage for their product being spread out among a bunch of people, because if per-person demand is lower then prices can go down.
Man you don't even have to read the post to realize you're wrong. All you have to do is look at the freaking picture.
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You are right, I suck, I misread. And mislooked. Then misposted.
You are right, I suck, I misread. And mislooked. Then misposted.
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"I came, I misread, I misposted."