The Case of the Splitcycle Engine

self | 02/24/02 | self

[medved]

Sixty years ago, the kinds of people who purpetrated 9/11 did not have the financial wherewithal to be doing anything like that; they mostly rode around the desert on camels and lived in tents.

Given the nature of what we are faced with and the clear fact that the problem mainly arises from our dependency on foreign oil, you'd think it would be national policy to see that we used as little of the stuff as possible. The fact that no such policy has existed in the past does not prevent us from devising such a policy. One obvious way to start would be to haul oil company executives into some sort of a serious office of inquisition with appropriate torture implements much in evidence, and demand a full accounting of every gas-saving device which has ever been made to disappear over the last 100 years.

The two items which I would start with would be the Pogue carburator and other "thermal cracking" carburators, and the splitcycle engine. The case of the splitcycle engine does not require going back 50 years or digging up dead bodies. Five or six years ago a bunch of Australians were jumping up and down claiming they'd reinvented the internal combustion engine and this wasn't just pictures on paper. They had working models of the thing which were astonishing, they had their patents in place, and they were making no secrets of what they were doing. The basic idea appeared totally logical and workable. Noting that the basic inefficiency of modern engines arises from the piston being pulled away from the charge exploding above it by the mechanism of the engine, these guys had devised an engine without any such problems. Their basic engine had no crankshaft or connecting rods. Power was being taken off a flywheel which was being turned by geneva wheels, and pistons were riding up and down on those geneva wheels.

A geneva wheel is a thinking-man's cam, basically a wheel with half tear-drop shapes wrapped around it. This provided a quick rise as the piston rode up the fat side of the half teardrop, and then a long, slow, hard push as the piston came down on the slope side. There was about 8 times the dwell around TDC of the engine so that the thing amounted to nearly a pure device for turning gasoline into motion. It ran so cold you couldn't even use the engine to heat the car in the winter; you'd need a propane heater in the car. Such an engine in a Neon-sized car, it was claimed, would produce more than 100 mpg while blowing the doors off Mustangs and Ferarris, and would look like mostly empty space under the hood.

As nearly as anybody could tell, the project appeared to vanish in a sort of a cloud of legal and financial manipulations and machinations, much like the cheshire cat which vanished down to the grin and then the grin vanished.

It doesn't strike me as terribly likely that Detroit and/or Exxon/Mobile could ignore something like that to death. It would be too easy for them to go to Mercury/Evinrude or Cessna and ask them how they'd feel about an engine which could push cabin cruisers through the water at 25 mpg instead of the usual five or fly a small plane from Baltimore to Vegas without having to stop for fuel.. My guess would be that somebody with an idea like that would simply be handed a check for 50 or 100 million dollars and told to disappear from public view along with his family, preferably to some island where the idle rich live, but that's just a guess. I'd like to see somebody like Tom Torquemada ttry to get the real story out of the oil execs so we wouldn't HAVE to guess...

I saved a few of the images from the www site at the time:

[IronJack]

I'm afraid this really doesn't tell anyone much. And there have been "miracle engines" developed ever since Da Vinci's day. Oddly, they all seem to disappear under intense scrutiny, kind of like that Cheshire Cat you cited (not "sighted").

Somebody build one of these things, then hand it over to the scientific community for testing, and I'll believe it when the confirmation is published. Until then, it goes down beside Dr. Hector's Phrenology Helmet and Ike's Patent Tonic.

[zog]

--well, this is all well and good, but several people will now claim publically that such a thing isn't possible, because of their..uhh. of their posting as such on an internet forum, so there. If it doesn't come from a traditional and proper firm, it can't be done, it's perpetual motion and tinfoil hat lol, and "everyone" knows that or 'they" would be doing it already doncha know....

[gcruse]

Now where did I put that spellchecker....?

[Jolly Green]

Given the nature of what we are faced with and the clear fact that the problem mainly arises from our dependency on foreign oil, you'd think it would be national policy to see that we used as little of the stuff as possible.

There is a problem with your premise. There is no shortage of oil. According to Rush last week, the CEO of BP claims that the largest known oil reserves EVER found are in the Gulf of Mexico and as yet they are untapped. Similarly huge reserves are known to be off the coast of California. We remove millions of barrels of oil from Alaska safely every month without any harm to the environment, yet the environmentalists prohibit drilling in ANWR. There are also thousands of capped wells in Wyoming and Texas.

All that is missing is the will to tap into known reserves. Any serious shortage will remove that obstacle. During the last real oil crisis, a bumper sticker that was quite popular at the time said "Let the bastards freeze to death in the dark". If there is ever another real crisis, environmentalist whackos will become very unpopular indeed.

I'm all for more efficient vihicles and favor the fuel cell myself, but I'm not going to loose any sleep about a hypothetical shortage.

[Grut]

There is a certain amount of heat energy in fuel; a conventional gas engine typically turns, say, 25% of it into work. This means that a 100% efficient engine can at a maximum get four times the mileage in a given car... at which point it will make no noise, produce no waste heat and have an exhaust temperature of zero Kelvin (if I understand Carnot's theorem correctly).

[Jhoffa_]

Bump to find tomorrow, getting late.

Is this thing like a wankle? I just skimmed the article, but it sounds like it.

[Valpal1]

I don't put any stock into the idea that "the powers that be" stifle or buy out these whizbang inventions to protect what --- oil companies.

Build a better technology and people will line up to buy it. Build that 100 mpg car (without the safety and other trade downs) and people will get in line to own it. The "oil companies" are not so almighty powerful that they could overcome all the other marketplace players who stand to make an extreme profit off of such technology.

[tet68]

Dr. Hector's Phrenology Helmet

I got one of the new Aluminium ones.Bumpy bump.

[okie01]

"Given the nature of what we are faced with and the clear fact that the problem mainly arises from our dependency on foreign oil..."

Can't comment on Geneva wheels, but blaming terrorism on our dependency on foreign oil is misleading.

If our SUVs were burning mashed potatoes, the radical Islamists would still hate our guts. That we buy oil from Saudi Arabia, among others, has nothing to do with it.

[Jhoffa_]

The Wankel Rotary Engine..

YAWN.. Night!

[opinionator]

Thanks. I'll add this to my list of revolutionary inventions that are being supressed by evil corporations.

[jlogajan]

It's true IC engines are not at the peak theoretical efficiency. So there is always room for improvement. However, some big losses on cars are the frictions, such as axel and atmospheric drag. You can find coefficients for these and therefore determine pretty accurately the amount of "energy" needed to overcome them to maintain a certain speed. No magic there.

So yeah, getting a more efficient (and cheap) engine would be a useful and probably possible thing -- you aren't going to get many times the fuel efficiency, because a lot of that "waste" is overcoming friction -- which is a limit of aerodynamics, not engine design.

[Paradox]

produce no waste heat and have an exhaust temperature of zero Kelvin (if I understand Carnot's theorem correctly).

Almost, it will have an exhaust temperature equal to the ambient air.

Good analysis otherwise. These "breakthroughs" do usually fall apart upon further scrutiny. The internal combustion engine, as we know it today (Diesel and Gasoline cycle) are remarkably capable of producing the power and torque, at the required rpms, with the required reliability, that is desired by the public.

When I was getting my degree in MEchanical engineering, we had a mad scientist working on an improved ICE (Internal Combustion Engine). There was never any pressure from anybody NOT to develop it, quite the contrary. His ideas were, and are, sound, however the increased complexity and cost were not outweighed by the increase in efficiency. No tinfoil needed..

[damnlimey]

Check out the ceramic motor from reg tech Here
Apparently they were just awarded a US navy contract.

[fleur-de-lis]

Remember "cold fusion"?

[BikerTrash]

Very interesting, have never seen this before. Thanks!

[Grut]

I stand corrected. Who was it during WW2 who developed an engine that ran on half gasoline and half water? Famous Brit, wrote books about IC engines and was most famous for an improved flathead combustion chamber. Blackstone, Blackwell, something like that or else totally different.

Anyway, they got the engine running and producing the same amount of power with only half the gas consumption and promptly discovered the water and combustion byproducts combined to dissolve the insides of the engine!

It's not easy to improve mature technology.

[Justa]

J.C. Whitneys sells water injection kits. They're mostly used in commercial vehicles and apparently add to the low-end power. But yeah, I could see where combusting oxygen and hydrogen could rot out the inside of an engine.

[zog]

--I had to sell mine to help raise money for the "ceo-aid" telethon on the WSJ journal that was running last night. I sent all my rent money, too, I feel so sorry for those guys who only made little normal accounting errors and are forced into bankruptcy with only like their last 300 million to live on......