Fuel Vaporization and fuel economy

While it is certainly true that internal combustion engines tend to operate more efficiently when the fuel is well vaporized, there are limits to how much mileage benefit there is. Think about it- your fuel injected Neon doesn't get 78 mpg, does it? So why would you think it's possible to get 78 MPG out of a 400 inch v8, no matter how perfectly the fuel is vaporized?

Or to look at it more scientifically, vaporization only helps ensure

100% combustion and prevents/reduces the amount of unburned fuel that gets sent out the exhaust pipe. But even with PERFECT vaporization, you still need to burn enough fuel to overcome friction and air resistance, and allow for the other loss mechanisms (such as thermal loss from the combustion chamber to the cylinder walls). Some benefit can be had from leaning the mixture beyond stoichiometric (the perfect amount of oxygen to burn each and every fuel molecule), but not much and you begin to trigger excessive NOx emissions.

No, further improvments in fuel efficiency aren't going to come from miracle carburetors or fuel injectors. They're going to come from more optimized utilization of the engine's power curve (hybrid cars, for example, once we get better battery packs) and better thermal efficiency inside the engine (insulating coatings inside the combustion chamber, higher temperature engine materials that can survive without cooling, altered combustion cycles, etc.)

Reply to
Steve
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Cody, I have a bridge to sell you. Well built and in good shape. Great location, Brooklyn. I sell it to you at a really good price too.

----------------- Alex

Reply to
Alex Rodriguez

Any real advancements to the IC engine is not going to come from more efficiently atomizing the fuel. Unfortunately the engine has to operate at a specific temperature to operate efficiently. Someone needs to develop some way to regulate heat lose and convert it into some type of useful energy with sucking the performance out of the vehicle. Much like a hybrid takes the energy from stopping and recycles it.

Chris

Reply to
blur

you mean like an exhaust driven turbocharger does?

It's all been done before. You can't get something for nothing. (but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try because sometimes you CAN get something for ALMOST nothing.)

Here's an example: My Trans Am. 325 HP. 30 MPG. Clean tailpipe.

13.11 second quarter mile time. 20 years ago, you would have thought I was full of it. Pretty cool, huh? here's the catch: money. It takes a lot more money to buy one than it used to, and a lot more money to maintain it than it used to.

Cheap, fast, good. Pick any two. That's my philosophy.

You CAN build a car that gets 100mpg. It's either going to be so slow, or so expensive that no one will buy it. You CAN build a car that will last for 500,000 miles with no maintenance, but who's going to pay the $100,000 for one?

to the OP: I believe Mercedes has done work on direct injection for gasoline engines. They've been trying for years to get ceramics for engine internals to work so they can run the engine hotter and not need a cooling system (or a lot smaller of one.)

Ray

Reply to
news

think of it. We are running our cars on some clunky technology from the early 1900's. We're on step up from a damn steam engine.

Surely... in Area51 or some other place, there is a technology just waiting to be distributed to solve all this and get away from deriving power from synchronized contained little explosions and fossil fuel.

Reply to
ed

The way to increase performance in an IC engine is to get more fuel and more air into the cylinder in a shorter amount of time.

Atomizing the fuel to increase the volume makes it _harder_ to do this rather than easier.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

I swear I can make this work. If they got it to work in the early 20th entury I think I'll be able to get this to work. Look up the Fordson tractor.

Reply to
cody_e

You're nuts. Nuclear IS a steam engine, turning a generator/turbine. Hardly anything is more efficient at a complete range of revs/minute than a steam engine. And the fuel is (almost) free, that being water.

Don't hold your breath. See that big tank that the big shuttle is attached to? That's full of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen IIRC.

18th century technology...the same shit Goddard used in -his- liquid fuel rockets.

Lg

Reply to
Lawrence Glickman

I wasn't talking about exhaust, I was talking about the cooling system and heat loss. For example if they could find a fuel that works at a lower temperature. The cooling system of the car is literally sucking energy out of the engine and releasing it. If there is some way to use the heat energy and turn it into electrical or mechanical energy while lowering the overall temperature maybe the over all efficiency could be raised. The all-mighty dollar will always be the determining factor in the success or failure of any new technology. Right now people are just beginning to realize the fuel is a finite source of energy. In the long run spending gross amounts of money to develope more efficient use of a finite source of fuel doesn't make sense. There better off starting from scratch.

Reply to
blur

This is what this thing would do.

Yes you have a finite amount of energy but it's better to use it mroe conservatively while you are perfecting a new type of vehicles based on a new energy source.

Reply to
cody_e

Consider that GM and Ford are big owners in oil - domestic and foreign. The Bush family is heavy in politics and oil. Pro and con!! Vehicles are pretty much running at the top efficiency that they are going to ever going to reach. You can add all the magnets or air turbines you want but these engines are tapped out as far as mpg goes. And not one of the aftermarket gadgets have ever been proven to make a fraction of a difference. Most have actually reduced performance and mileage.

Invest heavily in hydrogen fuels - but it usually involves fossil fuels to separate the hydrogen for those fuel cells.

Electric cars seem well off, when you consider that a full charge allows a round trip of 50 miles a charge. This is our future but better batteries need to be developed to allow travel before this is effective.

Alcohol does seem to be the prime answer. Current engines run too hot on alcohol, but it seems this could be worked around. Many protest, but you can make alcohol in your backyard. I still wonder why they complain about this ?? Much of our garbage can be made into alcohol, most is being thrown away. Living here in CA they are using a mix of alcohol in out fuel.

Everytime fuel cost goes up there is suspicion and con men. People are fooled by scams and deceived by thoughts of better MPG.

Reply to
ferretkona

Alcohol is good but it reduces gas mileage. Plus there's not enough land to meet our energy needs if you grew it in corn. How come I can read 5 different patents along with a big history and easily find information on the internet when this is supposedly a "scam?"

Reply to
cody_e

The primary reason there are more forested acres in North America now than in 1920 is because we're not feeding the work animals that ran the economy back then. Any idea how much horses and oxen eat?

The same people that are proposing that we run our cars on booze are the same ones that will scream blue bloody murder when they see all those forests ploughed under again. ("But where will our spotted owls live now? Sob!").

Reply to
Hugo Schmeisser

***************** Santose for PRESIDENT !!!!

Thank You snipped-for-privacy@msbx.net

To reply to this email please remove the AT after the kgs in the reply to address as shown above.

Reply to
KG

Present cars are a LONG way from the 1900s. In the first decade of the twentieth century carburetors were so primitive that many cars used ignition timing to control speed. Carburetors evolved until in the seventies a carburetor was a very sophisticated fluidic computer.

Fuel injection has evolved similarly. Early FI had such bad drivability that it was useful only on race cars. FI required true computers to make it work properly, first analog computers and then digital fuel control computers.

Even in my car owning lifetime (about fifty years) I can see tremendous advances. If you got a hundred thousand miles from a car when I was a kid you were doing great. Now, that is more like 200K. Metallurgy and manufacturing tolerances have improved tremendously. So has gasoline and lubricating oil. Twenty thousand was good milage on a set of tires. Now I can go fifty thou.

Brakes are far superior. Clutch throwout bearing replacement seems to be a thing of the past instead of a frequent repair. Mufflers used to last two or three years. General reliability is way up, as is performance.

I still hear people say, "they don't make cars like they used to." I say thank goodness.

Reply to
Don Stauffer

Hydrogen seems to be the next naturally occurring consumable and it would be the storage of the fuel rather than the combustion of said fuel which is the problem. If we are to stay with a combustion engine, and from the way the industry is, it looks like we're gonna have it for a long time to come, using oil or not as fuel.

(My other reference was more directed at coal powered steam engines)

Reply to
ed

I was wondering how long it would take the slack-jawed raving nut-jobs to hijack this thread.

Reply to
Steve

What lagging sales? Sales didn't start lagging until last year, when gas prices were up. 3 years ago gas prices were pretty low. Dec 2002 average retail prices was 1.316 /gallon, a buck lower than it is now.

See

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I wish I was working at Ford and was getting laid off. They get a pretty sweet deal for 2 years. 90% of their pay, and they can go and get another job in the meantime.

Reply to
Larry Bud

Just because you can patent something doesn't mean it's a product that can be feasably manufactured and sold at a profit.

A patent is nothing more than a piece of paper and some drawings and text that describe HOW your invention works. It doesn't say whether or not you can currently build such a device. Do a quick google for "patent perpetual motion."

Ray

Reply to
news

Having owned cars from 1970,1975,1976,1977,1980,1982,1984,1986,1990,2001 you can see the evolution over time - each car is slightly different, but not radically changed, but if you compare 30 years there's not much the same. That said, it's still ~3000 pounds of steel and glass, 4 tires and engine, and anything called a "car" will probably always have a similar layout.

Ray

Reply to
news

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