Does LPG wear out the engine more than petrol?

That was not quite the point of discussion, or my remark FTM...

You're right anyway. Cheap energy is still required to produce hydrogen, I wonder if solar panels are ever going to be viable...

Peter

Absolutely. My LPG Omega was dirt cheap to buy because the previous owner had maintained it so badly that the cambelt broke. This was a taxi driver for god's sake! You would think that someone whose livelihood depends on the vehicle he drives all day would look after it better, but all the signs are of total lack of maintenance - needed four new tyres, brake pad sensor wires were cut off, lots of other minor stuff. Amazing.

Check the relative prices. LPG cars hold a clear price premium. FWIW my LPG Omega has now done 230k and only needed an engine swap because the previous owner didn't change the cambelt before it broke. I can get LPG at 36p/litre. Well worth it, as I'm now running a huge estate for less than my Mini costs to run!

It'd still be more efficient to charge batteries than use the electricity to disassociate hydrogen and oxygen.

It's directly relevant. If the chemical production is unfeasible due to energy input requirement, it's simply not worth researching methods of storing/using this incredibly inefficient chemical as if it has some sort of environmental benefits!

Stick them on the roof of the car and feed them into a battery pack.

To get decent efficiency, you need the batteries to store the regen energy from braking and hill descent anyway. The solar panels on the roof would increase range, too. If you run out of power, just wait in the sun until there's enough charge to proceed. :-)

No sense carrying all that heavy hydrogen reacting stuff as well as the battery system.

Just to bring it back on topic for the LPG group, this is like wasting energy carrying around a petrol system on an LPG car.

The message from athol contains these words:

Very probably, but car makers simply refuse to accept that there's a market for electric vehicles that /don't/ have the performance of internal combustion engined vehicles.

On or around 20 Jan 2006 07:08:03 GMT, athol enlightened us thusly:

not necessarily. depends on the relative efficiency of the battery charge/discharge process, as compared with electrolysing water and using the H in a fuel cell.

ISTR that the fuel cell itself can have very high efficiency. Batteries, enough to move cars about, tend to be heavy and/or have long charge times, too.

On or around 20 Jan 2006 07:18:05 GMT, athol enlightened us thusly:

might work in the outback, or other sunny places. no bloody hope in this country.

hydrogen plus fuel cell looks to be the most likely option, really. and a rather more practical approach to transport which doesn't waste lots of energy going very fast.

hehe. I've run LPG-only. But even these days, you need a lot of tank-space on the vehicle to make it practical.

But batteries have such an utterly, utterly, utterly crap energy density. Hydrogen, on the other hand, is much more petrol-like.

Cheers,

Colin.

You mean like a 53L (usable) tank in a Volvo 264 with a 350 chev, or the

88L (usable) tank in a 4.0L 6-cyl Falcon wagon? The latter will happily do around 800km to the tank (particularly since the new plugs and magnecore leads went in). Oh, and the Falcon is factory LPG-only, with the LPG tank under the floor where the petrol tank would usually be...

On or around Fri, 20 Jan 2006 16:36:58 +0000, Colin Stamp enlightened us thusly:

Principle advantage of water + solar energy > H > fuel cell > water is that it's zero pollution (apart from pollution created by the manufacture of the infrastructure, of course) and on a global scale, it recycles in a short timescale. Carbon recycles, but it takes too long for the CO2 in the atmosphere to get made back into oil.

Contemplate, theoretically... You could take CO2 from the atmosphere, reduce it to C, process the C with H created by electrolyzing water and combine the C and H to produce hydrocarbons.

But that's just adding a layer of complexity. We only use HCs because they're relatively readily available. A fuel system based on H alone would be inherently more efficient.

Of course, plants, geology and lots of time do the processing of CO2 into HCs, but that takes far too long.

There's a bloody lot of desert out there doing no good to anyone that could readily harvest sunlight...

On or around 20 Jan 2006 23:53:07 GMT, athol enlightened us thusly:

Just reworked the Falcon figures into british mpg, and I get a touch under

1. Not bad - obviously the factory LPG-specific engine is worth it - I've never got anything like that from 3.5 V8 rover engines on open loop conversions - mostly lucky to get half that. What system does it use?

You've obviously got more LPG outlets than we have. I've been out on a bank holiday weekend before now and found no gas within a hundred miles of where I'd got to and run out. Luckily, the vehicle still had a petrol system on it...

On the LPG-only one, which was admittedly inefficient, I used to get a bit over 220 miles on full tanks. That had a main tank which held about 64l and a reserve tank that held about 36l, so about 100l overall. It required careful planning sometimes to make sure of getting gas. One of the problems in the UK is that the suppliers don't take gas very seriously, even now. There's typically only one pump on any given forecourt (some very large ones have 2) and if it's out of order it sometimes takes weeks to get it fixed.

The LPG system isn't really anything special. I can't remember the brand name off hand, but it's made in Holland. I've been told that the dedicated LPG model can be significantly improved by fitting extractors (headers), a slightly bigger cam and remapping the original computer. Apparently the engine is built for LPG but really not optimised anywhere nearly as much as it could have been - allegedly the computer is the same one as used for a dual-fuel model and just wired as if switched to LPG!

Oh, and that was the highway economy. Can drop to more like 450km around town.

I have driven through areas where the servos with LPG are about 200Mi apart. In fact, I did that (including 37km of gravel road) to avoid driving through Sydney (big polluted city, lots of bad drivers and a very bad road from there across mountains to where I was going) on Boxing day. I topped up near home, then drove about 550km. Drove 25km back into the local town the next day and filled up on the way to visit someone else (about 400km round trip).

Mind you, I've bought an LPG transfer pump on eBay and had a friend pick it up - now I have to sort out getting it home from Melbourne (about 1000km &

12 hours).

The main problem here is that the servos are so far apart outside the cities.

LPG bowsers are maintained to about the same standard as petrol & diesel. In a small town, it's likely to take a few days to get the service guy out from the bigger city nearby. In most cities, it'd be fixed within about 1 day. Of course, given that a lot of taxis here use LPG, if it's a bowser used by taxis it is likely to be fixed within about 2 hours. :-)

Most bowsers here tend to be double sided (and jammed between the petrol bowsers of course), so can pull up on both sides to fill. Most servos that have LPG will have one double bowser, but high-volume servos often have 2 of those.

Hmmm - and how is the flashlube actually delivered. My understanding is that it needs -ve manifold pressure to pull the flashlube into the manifold. As you have a turbo surely the flashlube delivery is gonna be a bit intermittent?

Sean

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Sean Nugent saying something like:

Why are you replying to a five month old post?

Maybe found it on Google?

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "PC Paul" saying something like:

Ah, I see the lpg group is there; maybe there's not much traffic.

Didn't read the date and just got back on news...

Sorry

Sean

On or around Tue, 09 May 2006 02:02:09 +0100, Grimly Curmudgeon enlightened us thusly:

more than one every 5 months...