Posted on 03/24/2008 5:45:29 AM PDT by Uncledave
No text to post - follow video.
The intriguing bit for me was the gent who invented a gizmo that he activates with a switch when he's traveling over 35 mph. He cuts the fuel to 1/2 the cylinders, and thereby increases his gas mileage to nearly double.
Obviously, passing power and hills would be more challenging with this activated, but can any engineering experts here comment if this is feasible and practical?
maybe I should call it a "stuttering advance."
It is not so much turning heat into energy, but turning the energy that creates the heat in the first place into another form of energy.
Example; applying brakes creates friction which creates heat. instead of allowing the process of slowing a car to create heat, you have the slowing process create electricity via a generator activated when you apply the brakes. Just think energy containment because there is no free ride on energy. You cannot just put a fan out the window of a moving car and create energy to run the car, eh?
Our neighbors had one of those engines, it was about the same year my dad bought one of those gas/diesel conversion engines in his new pickup.
There wasn’t many nice things said about GM over the fence line for a few summers...
I thought the 1959 Cadilac el dorado did this with its multiple carbourator set up...
Funny thing diesels .... I still have a MB 240D with 450k miles. Never a problem with that. Go figure.
Someone on this thread compared the engine to an aircompressor ... that is totally correct. Most of the time if you get intake flow balanced with outflow you hit peak efficiency. But, that is hard. In the 60’s as a hotrodder we always looked to the exhaust .... funny, as an engineer/physicist we would have been wise to take and equal look at restrictive intakes.
A lot of flow technology is going on .. some of it is getting very good. There is always tradeoffs though.
Hey .... I invented a perpetual motion machine ... but ... I can't figure out how to start it.
Yes, but the experiment I’m talking about involved simple conversion of heat directly into electricity. They had one terminal that was heated, and another that was not, and they were connected by a nanowire. The effect of that was to create an electric charge on the non-heated terminal. If you could take all of the waste heat from an electric engine and convert it to electricity, think how that would revolutionize the auto. No alternator. Perhaps only a very small battery large enough to start the engine. Reduced (or no) cooling system, since the conversion of heat to electricity would itself cool the engine.
Lucas:Once the storied Prince Of Darkness to owners of Triumphs-two wheels and four.
I am no physics guy, but it seems to me if the heat was already created, you lost a chance to more efficiently turn it into electricity before it was turned into heat.
Now you want to undo the heat that was generated? Sounds a lot like shutting the barn door after the horses got out.
Cadillac had the V-8-6-4 engine in the 80’s.......
Yeah, and we all remememer what a stunning advance that was.
There are some things Detroit should buy up and bury.
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Not quite as bad as Fords variable venturi carb from the same years... but close... at least the Caddy system could be easily disconnected ... I think the caddy system had servo controls for the rockers/intake valves as this was pre-fuel injection and cutting fuel to a bank of cyls was impossible without 2 carbs and 2 seperate intake manifolds.
Cutting fuel to 50% of the cylinders will increase mileage by about 25% , leave you without power for critical seconds if re-introducing the cyls isn’t automated and linked with the throttle and no doubt creates havoc with the computerized controls if they don’t have this provision accounted for in their programming.
I see your point. But burning gasoline is necessarily going to create heat. The question is whether you can somehow utilize it rather than waste it as we are doing now.
Of course, a fuel cell will convert the fuel directly into electricity without first converting it to heat. That would be preferrable, I guess, if you can make the fuel cell idea work. And even then, there is some wastage in the creation of heat.
Hey...we done figured that out here in Gawgia.....
Just put a pull cord on it and start 'er up like a lawnmower...
Not very new, either. It's called thermo-electricity and has been around for quite a while. It works both ways -- you can also apply electricity and cool something (heard of thermoelectric coolers?)
What you read recently was probably some hyped up 'improvement'.
I am no physics guy, but it seems to me if the heat was already created, you lost a chance to more efficiently turn it into electricity before it was turned into heat.
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I’m no physics or chemistry guy either but I know that gas engines need to be kept in a narrow temperature range to avoid creating pollutants that cannot be recombined/destroyed in a catalytic converter,, most of todays engines could be made much more energy efficient if we rolled back pollution controls to the early 1990’s or so and reprogrammed the fuel and ignition curves. Capturing and using the heat created after the fact is the only workable solution I see to creating electricity via induction as he proposed... Think about how inefficient your cars alternator is ,, it makes AC power (which is why it’s called an alternator) and then 1/2 of the wave is discarded using a diode to turn the output to DC..
Press Release lazy media.
Journalists don’t work, they just reprint press releases. They don’t think or investigate stories.
I see it with each and every legal story where the media 9.5 times gets the legal issues wrong or reports as major motions which are procedural or very minor at best. (ie motion for rehearing or requests for a new trial as a routine and required precident to appeal)
This traveled across some lazy reporters desk, she/he wanted to “look busy” and knew NOTHING about cars so it was run as “new.”
I am a physics guy, and the heat Brilliant is talking about is waste heat due to the fact that engines are far from 100% efficient. If you can turn that into useful energy with a TE device, that would be fine, but cost-effectiveness and the useful integration of the energy into the rest of the electrical system would be the main issues.
Was that like the ZR1 that you could put into valet-mode and lock down half the engine?
Look at the write-up on “Thermocouple” at Wikipedia: http://tinyurl.com/yr5zl7
This device sounds like what you describe. It has been known about for years, and has been used in temperature measuring devices for years.
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