Posted on 12/02/2005 6:16:06 PM PST by Tank-FL
My only complaint is that people think I am liberal because I drive one, but I am happy to disavow them of that.
I was glad somebody said this, because the hyping of the hybrid automobile is in the Emperor-Has-No-Clothes-On category.
A hybrid is a Rube Golberg, hokey contraption of redundancy. The marketers of it have the wool pulled over a lot of people's eyes.
It is basically a Liberal's status symbol, and its claims are as phoney as theirs.
Hmmm, how is a executive branch appointee impeached?
Driver of the p.o.s. Prius = clone.
For the record, Trajan88 drives a '01 Bullitt Mustang GT... she LOVES Tejas Tea (aka black gold).
I was glad somebody said this, because the hyping of the hybrid automobile is in the Emperor-Has-No-Clothes-On category.
A hybrid is a Rube Golberg, hokey contraption of redundancy. The marketers of it have the wool pulled over a lot of people's eyes.
It is basically a Liberal's status symbol, and its claims are as phoney as theirs.
I read an article recently that said new diesels are 90 percent quieter than they were ten yeas ago, you no longer have the cold starting problems etc.To: supercat I don't know much about a car's engine. But, I can't stand the smell behind a diesel car even if it's a Mercedes.
It's like being behind a bus.
75 posted on 12/03/2005 7:45:33 AM EST by AmericaUnite
The fuel is what smells; you smell the same odor at an airport from the jet fuel, and you smell the same thing, very strongly, if a mechanic works on your oil furnace and has some open raw fuel oil in a pan in your basement.So the diesel smell problem isn't the fault of the engine and, other than conceivably in some sort of catalytic converter, can't be cured by modification of the engine. The "diesel" smell can only be avoided by burning something that doesn't have the particular noxious substances in it which normally go into, and come out of, the diesel engine. For example, if you burn vegetable oil in a diesel the exhaust is said to smell like french fries.
That's why I like the dual-fuel concept - very little conventional diesel fuel oil is used. None at all, if you decided to use vegetable oil as the pilot charge . . .
I heard Rush read this. The author is an idiot. As usual, the truth lies in between.
Hybrids DO get better gas mileage than their conventional counterparts. The Prius does not have a conventional counterpart, but the Civic and Escape do. Compare the real world mileage there.
Do hybrids save their owners money? Not on gas. Maybe on wear and tear - oil changes come farther apart, brakes not used as much, very little engine idling - but who knows how much replacement battery packs are going to be in five years when the warranty runs out?
Bottom line is, hybrids aren't going to save the planet. There are benefits to the owners though. Hybrid owners are not being ripped off, nor do non-owners need to feel guilty about not jumping on board.
It boils down to choice.
Whatever. My hybrid uses the same 5w20 that the conventional version uses. Please try to rely on the facts.
We've been shoveling crap and you fell for it. Sorry. However, we will continue to shovel the same crap in the future.
"The process for making vegetable oil uses more energy to produce it than it generates and leaves the whole neighborhood smelling like a poorly managed McDonnalds and will give you zits."
I got behind an old diesel Mercedes with bumper stickers claiming it ran on veggie oil. The thing smelled like intense mega french fries. It nearly made me sick. I don't think I would ever get used to that smell.
I love to catch 'em when they're weak though. They assume you are on their side, and then you nail 'em. Besides, I refuse to be influenced by what the libs think.
Eh? It is a car. It gets you from one place to another in more or less comfort.
There is no 'law of physics' that dictates that an engine which is capable of supplying more power would have to be significantly less efficient than one which isn't. As a practical matter, that is almost always the case because engines have, for over a century, used a very inefficient method of controlling power output (the throttle).
When a naturally-aspirated (i.e. non-turbocharged/non-supercharged) engine is running, it will try to draw in air faster than it can flow through the air intake. This produces a partial vacuum. To limit the power output, the air intake is constricted by the throttle. Thus, when the engine is throttled down, it draws a deeper vacuum.
In a normal car, almost 100% of the energy used to draw a vacuum is wasted (some may be used to operate things like power brakes, but that amount is really tiny). The lower the power demand on an engine, relative to its capacity, the more energy it must waste in the throttle.
To get an appreciation of how much energy is wasted in a throttle, recognize that when you downshift so as to use the engine to slow down the car, it's the throttle that's absorbing all the car's kinetic energy. That 'drag' you feel when you downshift is drag that the engine has to overcome while you're driving, and represents 100% wasted energy.
Replacing the conventional throttle with something better would go a long way to improving the efficiency of large engines.
Yeah, that's my thinking. And I've seen designs that don't look too bad.
2. Power control using variable delayed intake closure instead of throttling (gives the Miller Cycle's advantages at lower power levels, while allowing more power when needed)
This sounds better than variable displacement.
Agreed. This seems like it really shouldn't be too hard, but could offer some big improvements when operating at moderate throttle (which is what most engines spend most of their time doing). The biggest difficulty, from what I understand, is that there needs to be a certain volume above the piston at TDC between the compression and power strokes; that same volume must be there after the exhaust stroke. Consequently, if air is drawn into the engine and then some is pushed out, this will cause some exhaust gasses to go out the air intake.
3. A five-cycle mode of operation when cruising (another freeper posted a white paper here some time ago; on an inline four, during low-power operation, the inner two cylinders would be used together as a double-sized "compounding" cylinder for the outer two).
I could understand wanting to expand the exhaust gas of cylinder #1 "isentropically" in cylinder #2, but isn't an exhaust turbine more practical? As long as we're discussing hybrid, why not consider an electric generator to absorb the energy from an exhaust turbine?
How about using two turbines in a jet configuration? Actually, there are some variations on that concept which would seem like they could yield some very good effiencies, but would unfortunately be rather expensive.
For the payoff you can hope for, using hybrid to tame the dual-fuel diesel cycle really seems to me to be worth a look. Its main fuel isn't fuel oil, so the smell would be less obnoxious. And since its main fuel is carburated, you get smooth, blue-flame combustion rather than normal diesel knock.
I'm partial to the notion of continuous-combustion engines, myself; it would seem that going with continuous combustion would allow one to do things like put a catalytic convertor between the combustion chamber and the power-producing area (be it a piston, turbine, or whatever); this in turn would allow some of the heat produced by the cat to be converted into useful work.
There was a time when I thought that recovering the chemical energy that you describe mattered - but when you realize how low a fraction of the energy in the fuel goes to the catalytic converter I think it is pennywise to chase after it. Can you actually make your cat stable at the peak working temperature of the cycle - and do it cheap enough to make a profit from recovering 1% or so of your fuel's heat value???
Well, from my understanding of physics (please correct me if I'm wrong), if one could avoid frictional losses, the best thermal efficiency would be had by using several stages of compression, then a combustion chamber, and then several stages of decompression; left-over heat could be fed via heat exchanger into the area just past the first compressor (whose temperature should still be fairly low) since adding heat at that point would add useful energy to the system.
In practice, I would expect that the increased frictional losses from adding more than 2 or 3 stages of compression or decompression would outweigh any improvements in thermal efficiency, and going even to that level would probably be of only marginal benefit. On the other hand, if one did use a multi-stage design, there might be a stage in there where a catalytic convertor could function nicely. Alteratively, using a two-stage compressor would allow for a heat exchanger past the cat to be used to reinject waste heat into a spot where it could ultimately yield work, though the frictional losses in the heat exchanger might outweigh the energy savings.
How about using a turbine generator(/alternator) on the intake (possibly including a bypass valve) instead of a throttle? I think I calculated that a V8 cruising down the highway wastes over 25% of its power in the throttle. If half that energy could be recovered usefully, that would improve highway fuel economy by over 10%. Further, harnessing energy in the throttle would have another benefit: a normal throttle turns energy into heat; almost all of this heat goes into the intake air. Adding heat there makes the engine less efficient. A device which harnessed the energy instead of converting it into heat would improve efficiency by cooling the intake air. I don't think the effect would be significant, but if it's a freebie why not take it?
Nope...it was the Honda Civic...not the hybrid...that got the complete makeover and the award.
Whatever. My hybrid uses the same 5w20 that the conventional version uses. Please try to rely on the facts.
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