Water in your engine - ooops or mmmmmmm

[guest27]

What do you think...

R

http://tinyurl.com/r66lk

My guess he is cooling the cylinder on a 3rd set of strokes and injecting water into the now hot cylinder

[Andy M]

Inject water on the induction stroke in the right amount and the pressure increases as it turns to steam. It also cools the air giving a kind of supercharging. Ever noticed a carbed bike likes wet mornings? Similar effect if I read it right.

The Luftwaffe had a similar trick. They had no resources to develop new engines, so Daimler and BMW used water, methanol and nitrous oxide boosts on the capacity they had. Used in this way and engine only lasted a few hours, but I guess like any technology you can tone down a performance boost and turn it into an efficiency boost with a few design tweaks.

Pure guess, but I'm thinking this works now and didn't then because the valve, timing and injection controls are now much easier to control with electronics.

Andy

[hondamichael]

hm i would prefer a slow moving two  stroke diesel  as you normaly find them in oil tankers on see theire efficency
is at around 55% , only problem would be to get them build in a scale they could fit in a roadgoing vehicle
but in the moment they have about the size of a 3 bedroom house and compare to other engine types they are
very low in emmisions , as they are slow moving , there ios only a minimal loss
and water is something to drink or for your garden , nothing i would ever let near an engine
AIRCOOLED it has to be , as air doenst freeze and air doesnt overheat if the fins are big enough or a fan is attached to the flywheel wich the engines has anyway
i already made a huge compromise with my oilcooled engine as i know oil is neccesary in a engine so why not using it to cool it

[guest27]

MM - think the 6 stroke is going for economy - as you can inject something like 30% water to petrol with no special kit and 50% with serious kit - increases power output nicely.  The 6 stroke will rely on <15:1 mix (pretty much best run in a cold engine - for the ignition stroke and thenuse the spare heat on the second stroke.  Not sure about the keeping the exhaust closed on the 'exhaust stroke' to reduce loss of heated gas - seems that this would be a recompression and lost power - mind the heat would go up.  Suppose if you could inject water into the exhaust stroke to make more expansion than the zorst could come with...

Big engines are always more efficiant than small - it is to do with the volume to surface area and the physics of that.  Look at lil RC engines - make loads of power from 1cc but use loads of nitroX doing it.

R

[Ken]

At work back in the 70s we had several companies testing this set up on our trucks along with every other fuel saving device. It used a heat exchanger around the exhaust and fed the steam into the intake. Although i believe the separate parts of water will burn we noticed no difference in economy or power. But we have all noticed that on a damp day  an engine will seem to run better or is it the fact that on a cold day the air in more dense and therefore you get more in the cylinder. Also trailed was propane injection, viscous fans, wind deflectors,speed limiters, several that have now become common.

Ken

[MrFluffy]

"Veteran camshaft designer waits 30 years to find a use for hot exaust gasses". Did he miss the whole turbo thing?
Call me a cynic here, but he runs crowther cams, has 160 people working for him, but has never put his baby on a dyno to make hard numbers?
Its all pr rhetoric till he does that.

[hondamichael]

so even if it is working , has anybody thought about water shortages , hosepipe bans ,
so one dry summmer and you cant use the vehicle any more , you cant travel with it unless
they invented waterpumps at petrol stations where you can get destilled water from , and get charged
£1,50 per liter for it or more ,because
i dont think its a good idea to fill in normal water with all the lime , you know what happens
 to washing machines after a while , so you may also have to  buy calgon ,
 would have a advantage, if the watertank is big enough you could  do your washing on a rideout :-)
ok you  then would always have a excuse to go for a ride , your better half cant say anything against if you
say to her "just go out for a washing "

[themoudie]

Hate to think what would happen if you used 'Volvic'!

As for the washing, any bush driver worth his salt has a 45 gallon drum on the front end of the ute, adds water, suds and manky togs. A days dirt bashing later, take em out and spread on the bonnet for drying. All cleaned and softened, by that deep cleaning action!

G'night, Bill

[guest27]

Some interesting pointsd I have been thinging about whilst bramble bashing with the strimmer.

Turbos - whilst all energy released in the engine is heat - causing the expansion of the gas etc - I think turbos essentially utalise waste kinetic energy - it is the rush of gas that spins the turbine rather than the heat itself.  Strips loads of energy out of the gas - hence the reduced requirement for silencers - but I think I am right that the gas coming out of the turbo is still bloody hot and that if you turbo a normally aspirated engine you will need more cooling.  I guess this is if you turbo for power not for economy?  Would seem that you could still turbo his engine - but less successfully as the gas velocity will be so much lower having had so much heat energy stripped.

Dyno - yup, but to look at the specific output of the engine (is that right) ie HP per ml fuel burnt.  I am pretty sure that his engine will produce less power per unit time as it has this extra set of strokes, where the energy is stripped from the exhaust gasses in the cylinder - but he is thus missing out on a power stroke from fuel combustion.  However he should be getting more power in total for each ml fuel burnt - increasing the efficiancy of the engine.  He suggests that the water could be pretty much a closed system with a condenser etc - his extra power needs to be somewhat greater than that to run the condenser.

Water shortages - interesting point - but a bit of a red herring - look at a refinery and there are clouds of steam coming off - to make 1 litre of petrol uses something like 100 litres of water - now some of this is condensed back but this has to be economical - so I think it is something like 10% of the water is vented as steam.  So each litre of petrol consumes something like 10 litres of water.  His engine has to use loads of water before the use becomes an issue.  Ditto the liming up of the system - the booys running water injection tend to use distilled water - if they can get it if not they use tap, having lives in both hard and soft water places I cannot see that the liming problem is not also a bit of a red herring - clearing limescale is not difficult - run a tank of distilled vinegar through it once every so often will do the trick, or fit one of those magnetic thingies.  The WI boys (Womens Institute?) typically find their engines run a lot cleaner and after a few thousand miles all the coking etc has gone from the pots / heads etc.

Think there is either some real issue with his idea - hence the desire for Ford or GM to take it on - or maybe he realises that it is not his area of real knowledge - as they say - in business stick to the knitting.

R

[hondamichael]

found a even better thing about water power