wacky idea - non-smoking oil?

I think you're confusing the "cloud" of smoke with "noxious smoke". Think about diesel engines - many output smoke as a daily routine.

Heard of using synthetic in such situations, higher flash point, allegedly less or no smoke. A "runaway" diesel is usually the result of blowby (rings).

Thinking back to my courses in organic chemistry: Any good antifriction material will act the same way - molecules slipping over each other. The larger the molecule the better the antifriction ability. It takes energy and oxygen to break down and then oxidize the smaller parts. Injecting oxygen into the system at several hot points should oxidize the broken HC molecules... Hmmm... sounds like a catcon witn an AIR system.

It was a Chrysler/Dodge/Plymouth with a 3.0-litre Bitsushitti V6 engine and less than 70k miles on it.

The O2S and the rest of the closed-loop engine management system has no effect on the amount of smoke produced by an oil-burning engine. The catcon consumes a great deal of the smoke, but a great deal more still remains.

No.

Better and less expensive: Fix the older vehicles so that they don't burn oil.

Well mostly when they ingest enough oil via worn-out rings, yes. Briggs & Stratton lawnmower engines can run on a dry fuel tank, too, when the engine's worn enough and the oil's contaminated enough.

Daniel J. Stern wrote:> >

Long before there was such a thing as the EPA, Detroit was making the two-stroke diesel. This engine put out lots emissions, made huge amounts of noise and never failed to pass up the diesel pump. Anyway, these engines were notorious for sucking oil past the rings and running wide open without having a drop of diesel in the fuel tank. The manufacturer was smart to put an air flapper in the intake so that the operator could shut off the air to stop the engine in an emergency. So, yes, it can easily happen.

One problem with this is that most of the oil emission is NOT from burning oil, it is oil vapor. We use the term "burning" somewhat colloquially. Pour cooking oil on a hot frying pan. See the somewhat bluish white vapor? Most of it is not combusted (burned) oil.

What happens to most of the oil in an SI engine is that the oil reaches the boiling point after touching hot metal, boils off, comes out the exhaust or breather, and cools enough to start condensing in very small droplets.

Situation in a diesel is different. Here, the fuel (oil) is indeed partially (actually- mostly) burned, but some carbon particles remain. Believe me the industry has spent many man years- probably man centuries- trying to reduce or eliminate smoke (carbon particulate emission). If you can come up with a way, you can achieve fame and fortune, but it is not an easy task.

Back to spark ignition- if you can come up with a lubricant that will lubricate as well as oil, but has a boiling point higher than any metal temperature it is likely to achieve, this would be a great thing. However, years of trying so far haven't worked. This is one of the main roadblocks keeping people from productizing adiabatic engines.

There are two kinds of diesel smoke- bluish white smoke, which is oil vapor with same cause as blue-white smoke in SI engine. However, black smoke is due to incomplete combustion in combustion chamber.

I don't think visible smoke is the real problem. Even if we would design a lubricant that would burn invisibly, it would still be burning and polluting. The real question I think is whether the owners of vehicles with worn out engines should be required to repair the the engine or take it off the road.

Engine by Mitsubishi, no doubt. ;-)

Synthetic oils (at least Mobil 1) hardly smoke at all when used in an oil burner. HOWEVER- who would pay the $$ to feed synthetic oils to an egregious oil-burning engine? Thats how I even found out that synths don't smoke. I switched my tired old 300,000 mile '66 383 back over to conventional oil when oil consumption got out of hand, and it became an instant smoker. Put it back on Mobil 1 (just to see...) and the smoke quit. Same grade oil, same RATE of consumption- just no smoke with synthetic. I retired the engine not long after that and built up a 440 to go in its place.

Aside from that, I'll bet that even though they don't smoke, synthetics still pollute quite a bit when burned in a gasoline engine. A fluid with the long-chain polymers needed to lubricate well just isn't going to burn very completely in an engine optimized for gasoline (I'm not a chemist either, just an educated guess).

Or the oil can. I did a job on an all-Detroit Diesel powered research ship a number of years ago. Two 12-v-71 generator engines, an 8-v-71 pierside/backup generator, two 12-v-71 thruster engines, a number of

3-71 inline threes and6-71 inline sixes for hydraulic pumps and cranes, and a 12-v-149TI quad-turbo 4-stroke for the main thruster. I heard that "Detroit Diesel scream" in my nightmares for months afterward. Nothing grates on the nerves quite like that racket. Anyway, the ship's engineer confided that the in-port generator engine (the 8-V-71, basically a Grehound bus engine hooked to a generator) burned about 5 GALLONS of lubricating oil per day. The 12-V-71s burned around 7-9 gallons of lubricating oil each per day.

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Peugeot designed and patented something as simple as a filter. It works fabulously well, only most car manufacturers chose not to apply it because it costs a little money.

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shakiro