"In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
Posted on 04/09/2003 1:08:01 PM PDT by Nov3
THE original blueprints for a device that could have revolutionised the motor car have been discovered in the secret compartment of a tool box.
A carburettor that would allow a car to travel 200 miles on a gallon of fuel caused oil stocks to crash when it was announced by its Canadian inventor Charles Nelson Pogue in the 1930s.
But the carburettor was never produced and, mysteriously, Pogue went overnight from impoverished inventor to the manager of a successful factory making oil filters for the motor industry. Ever since, suspicion has lingered that oil companies and car manufacturers colluded to bury Pogue’s invention.
Now a retired Cornish mechanic has enlisted the help of the University of Plymouth to rebuild Pogue’s revolutionary carburettor, known as the Winnipeg, from blueprints he found hidden beneath a sheet of plywood in the box.
The controversial plans once caused panic among oil companies and rocked the Toronto Stock Exchange when tests carried out on the carburettor in the 1930s proved that it worked.
Patrick Davies, 72, from St Austell, had owned the tool box for 40 years but only recently decided to clean it out. As well as drawings of the carburettor, the envelope contained two pages of plans, three test reports and six pages of notes written by Pogue.
They included a report of a test that Pogue had done on his lawnmower, which showed that he had managed to make the engine run for seven days on a quart (just under a litre) of petrol.
The documents also described how the machine worked by turning petrol into a vapour before it entered the cylinder chamber, reducing the amount of fuel needed for combustion.
Mr Davies has had the patent number on the plans authenticated, proving that they are genuine documents.
He said: “I couldn’t believe what I saw. I used to be a motor mechanic and I knew this was something else altogether. I was given the tool box by a friend after I helped to paint her house in 1964. Her husband had spent a lot of time in Canada.”
The announcement of Pogue’s invention caused enormous excitement in the American motor industry in 1933, when he drove 200 miles on one gallon of fuel in a Ford V8. However, the Winnipeg was never manufactured commercially and after 1936 it disappeared altogether amid allegations of a political cover-up.
Dr Murray Bell, of the University of Plymouth’s department of mechanical and marine engineering, said he would consider trying to build a model of the Pogue carburettor.
Engineers who have tried in the past to build a carburettor using Pogue’s theories have found the results less than satisfactory. Charles Friend, of Canada’s National Research Council, told Marketplace, a consumer affairs programme: “You can get fantastic mileage if you’re prepared to de-rate the vehicle to a point where, for example, it might take you ten minutes to accelerate from 0 to 30 miles an hour.”
The worst part of the whole affair is, the Aliens of Gamma Quadrant Six have taken the "gift" of your grandfather's underwear as the insulting gesture that it is, and commissioned their Space Battle-Fleet to execute reprisals upon our upstart Planet -- with extreme prejudice. They'll probably arrive in orbit by next Tuesday.
In short, you have endangered the entire Human Race by bringing a genocidal Interstellar War down upon our collective heads. Yet again.
Oh, now I see. Distator would be juxtaposition of Dattator.
Now take a quarter cup of gas and dump it in a large brown paper bag. Neck down the opening and twist it shut. Shake it until the liquid fuel in side stops sloshing. Place it on the ground and make a small "fuse" of gasoline on the ground to give yourself about 20' of space. Light the fuse.
Come back and tells us what happened. Be careful, take proper safety procautions.
Here's an online version still available that hits the salient points. Sorry, it's from Sweden... so forgive the english translation a bit.
Exactly, depending on how you look at it.
I see your point (but isn't this what a carburetor does - mix air with fuel)?
The real problem, as far as the application is concerned, is that (no matter HOW the vapor is generated) the vapor situation must be very carefully controlled or a tragic explosion could occur! This could be fixed with proper design, but there's no way the petroleum companies are going to allow this to happen - they would lose too much income!!
The first clue would be its half-life of 4 billion years.
I've seen small, inefficient vapor systems work on cars - by inefficient, I mean not enough vapor was produced to run the whole thing, so it was used to AUGMENT the normal carburated "mixure" (much experimentation with carburator adjustment and jet size, etc., all done on a dynomometer before installing in a car). Mileage went from 18 to low 50's!
I was once told (long ago) that changing the price of gasoline by one cent in the state of Califronia made a difference of two to three million dollars PER DAY in state-wide total gasoline sales receipts. At the time, I had no reason to doubt the source. This was when gasoline was about 50 cents per gallon (that's how long ago - LOL). If this is true, even marginally, one might understand why the petroleum companies don't want vehicle milage to increase AT ALL!!
Just a thought.....
Honda, a few years back, had a CCV (?? can't remember, 'zakly) engine which had a pre-burning chamber which fed each cylinder - they got GREAT gas milage for the time, as I recall. This was merely a scheme to have the mixture in each cylinder in as close to totally gaseous state as possible.
If the fuel-air mixture could be totally gaseous (uniform air + vapor mixture), when it entered the intake manifold, the problems of trying to get a fuel-air mixture of air plus droplets of liquid (which ends up being NON-uniform, cylinder to cylinder) to each cylinder disappear!
Fuel injectors merely insure the same amount of fuel is delivered during each stroke to each cylinder.
Massive BS
There are engines in production cars which have multiple spark plugs per cylinder, and this is to produce more efficient burning of the fuel-air mixture within the cylinder (eliminate "cold spots" inside the combustion chamber). Same with mulitple valves - more uniform distribution of the fuel-air mixture for more efficient burning. STILL a problem of droplets of LIQUID rather than a truly gaseous mixture of air + vapor!
What's BS is the petroleum companies and their massive rip-off of the fuel-consuming public!
Just because one does not understand does not make someone else's statements "Massive BS"! To explain: It is a FACT that vapor burns more efficiently than droplets of liquid. It is a FACT that more efficient burning releases more energy than less efficient burning. It is a FACT that releasing more energy results in better gas milage.
Now, I have my own doubts about 200mpg without, as someone else in this thread pointed out, rather extreme measures such as 0 to 60 in 10 minutes or some such, BUT I have no problem whatsoever with 90 mpg or more from a true VAPOR system!!
As stated, these principles and, yes, improved engine performance, can be demonstrated on a reliable, repetivie basis.
"In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
Big words from someone who doesn't have a clue. 200 mpg carburetors, free energy machines, perpetual motion machines all massive BS. It doesn't matter if you have vapor or really small droplets, the amount of energy you get from a gallon of fuel is limited by the first law of thermodyanamics, and while you might be able to get .01% more energy by getting the heat of vaporization out of the air rather than out of the fuel, it isn't going to make a measurable difference in the fuel efficiency of the engine. And btw I have a much better understanding of thermodynamics than you'll ever have.
You obviously feel VERY strongly about this issue - almost sounds like you work for the petroleum industry. I am NOT trying to invalidate your feelings, but I documented the 50 mpg vehicle which I described earlier, and have no problem with the concept of a practical 90+mpg car.
I do not see 200mpg cars as possible unless (maybe) one goes to hybrid powerplant designs, special aerodynamic shapes, and small acceleration rates. As you say, rightfully, there is no such thing as free energy - the current carnot cycle internal cumbustion engines could do a lot better if they were more efficient at extracting the energy stored in petroleum-based fuels that they use. The fuel vaporization process, an innovative form of which was employed by the "preburning" of the Honda CCV (or was is CCCV?) engine of yore, allows this increase in efficiency.
It's not a matter of magic, it's an issue of how efficiently one extracts the energy which exists in the fuel and, right now, a significant amount is NOT being extracted.
Don't mean to p*ss you off, or even be confrontational, but I know what I saw, I know the instrumentation was calibrated correctly (in fact, there were two sets of instrumentation, NOT identical, which corroborated each other), and I saw both "laboratory" and on-the-road results.....
I had a Honda with the CCV three valve engine and it did not work as you said. The stratified charge enabled the average mix to run leaner without detonating by giving a richer mix to the area near the sparkplug. It got good mileage by A. being very light (for a car) and B. being underpowered.
Knowing more about thermodynamics doesn't make me feel better; it better enables me to separate truth from BS in discussions about energy.
As for efficiency, this is determined by the theoretical efficiency of the particular cycle used. The Otto cycle (or any other cycle for that matter) is limited by the underlying thermodynamics (which you should be aware of since you know physics and thermodynamics,) not by the vaporization of the fuel. Diesels get better gas mileage because they're more thermodynamically efficient. I sort of remember the Carnot cycle being more efficient than either, but so far no one has made a practical engine using it. If you want better efficiency from any cycle raise the max temperature and lower the min temperature. In the Otto, this translates into raising the compression, but again there are practical considerations in going beyond 10 or 11 to 1.
There was almost a 200 mpg car specially built about 15 years ago - very aerodynamic and very light used racing bicycle tires and wheels , and ultralight frame and body and a very small (like 100 cc) highly modified motorcycle engine insulated to run about 200 degrees hotter than it should. It was supposed to cross Australia, but I think it broke before it finished.
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