50% Efficiency Boost From New Fuel Injection System 379
chudnall notes a Technology Review story on a new gas engine injection system that promises increased efficiency of up to 50%. "The key is heating and pressurizing gasoline before injecting it into the combustion chamber, says Mike Rocke, Transonic's vice president of business development. This puts it into a supercritical state that allows for very fast and clean combustion, which in turn decreases the amount of fuel needed to propel a vehicle. The company also treats the gasoline with a catalyst that 'activates' it, partially oxidizing it to enhance combustion."
Not just "similar" to a diesel (Score:5, Insightful)
When is the two-cycle version coming out?
Re:Not just "similar" to a diesel (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep, sounds exactly what it is.
Transonic's injection system varies from direct injection in two ways: it uses supercritical fluids and doesn't require a spark to ignite the fuel. The supercritical fluid mixes quickly with air when it's injected into the cylinder.
Not sure what is considered 'super critical' but diesel fuel under 180 MPa/26,000 psi is pretty super critical to me.
Once the fuel is injected into the piston, the heat and pressure are enough to cause the fuel to combust without a spark (similar to what happens in diesel engines), which also helps provide fast, uniform combustion. Ignition can be timed to happen just when the piston is reaching the optimal point, so it can convert as much of the energy in the gasoline into mechanical movement as possible, without wasting energy by heating up the combustion chamber walls, as happens in conventional technologies. The company has developed proprietary software that lets the system adjust the injection precisely depending on the load put on the engine.
So it sounds exactly like a diesel engine or VW's TSI gasoline engine. [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
You can run diesel engines on E95, AKA 95% ethanol and 5% gasoline. In one study static compression was raised to 23:1 and timing changes were made, with no other modifications. So this is interesting, in that it's a diesel engine running on gasoline, which has been formerly impossible. But then, it's still an evolution and not a revolution. Also, I'd rather burn diesel.
Re:Not just "similar" to a diesel (Score:4, Informative)
Eh, yes.
The fuel is named after the engine, not vice versa (i.e. it's a fuel to work in diesel engines). Diesel engines can use many different fuels.
Re:Not just "similar" to a diesel (Score:4, Insightful)
You've got it backwards. Diesel engines aren't "Diesel" because they use diesel fuel, diesel fuel is "diesel" because it is the fuel used in standard Diesel engines. An engine in which fuel self-ignites without a spark plug is, by definition, a Diesel, whether or not it uses diesel fuel.
Re: (Score:2)
I always thought the definition of a Diesel engine was that it used the heat of compressing the chamber to ignite the spark. In this engine it sounds like they are heating the fuel before it goes into the chamber.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but that doesn't ignite the fuel outside the cylinder. It's preheated, but it's still the compression heat in the cylinder that causes combustion, making it a Diesel.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you sure? The article doesn't say how hot the preheated fuel gets, other than it is supercritical. I can't find properties tables to see where this lies.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It would be better to have asked if the article describes a homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) or diffusion burn process. There's a huge difference between them in terms of emissions and thermal efficiency. In the traditional diesel cycle, fuel combusts along a locally "rich" flame front that propagates outwards from the kernel. Since it's locally rich, you get particulate and NOx formulation. In HCCI, you have a uniform (lean) distribution of fuel and air that combusts simultaneously with
Re: (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Diesel [wikipedia.org]
Diesel is named after the inventor of the engine. The fuel was named after it was found to operate the engine well.
Phil
Re: (Score:2)
There are two meanings for diesel, the fuel and the process of burning the fuel. When your gasoline engine knocks from improper timing or not enough octane, it's said to be "dieseling". If it has no spark plug, then it's a gasoline diesel rather than a fuel oil diesel.
Oops, correction: (Score:2)
Kerosine, not fuel oil. Diesel engines run on kerosine, and kerosine for motor fuel is called "diesel" because that's what kind engine it burns in. The fuel is named for the engine, not the other way around.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Kerosine, not fuel oil. Diesel engines run on kerosine, and kerosine for motor fuel is called "diesel" because that's what kind engine it burns in. The fuel is named for the engine, not the other way around.
No, you were right the first time. Most diesel engines run on processed fuel oil [wikipedia.org], i.e. very heavy petroleum distillates. Kerosene is a very light distillate, used by jet engines in planes or rockets.
Mr Diesel (Score:2)
BTW: Funny sig.
It's probably just lab figures but (Score:2)
That sounds damned impressive.
Re: (Score:2)
I think I'd like to invest in them. If you want, we could put all our money together and stake a more substantial claim in them. I'd be willing to collect.
Those "up to" words again. (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate "up to". Anything that claims an improvement of "up to" something is a essentially misleading. You won't get a real world improvement anywhere close.
Re: (Score:2)
Congratulations. (Score:2)
You've just invented direct injection, again.
Re: (Score:2)
Let me have doubts... (Score:2)
I'd like it to be real, but please, have some critical thought before posting a story like this...
No, didn't RTFA.
Re: (Score:2)
oh boy! (Score:2)
magnets? (Score:2, Funny)
Also, if you put rare earth magnets on your fuel lines, it streamlines the molecules as they go into the engine.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They were proven to slow down the flow and cluster the explosive molecules around the magnet, slowing the combustion down.
(the magnet trick is snakeoil.)
As a former mechanic, I have a few questions (Score:2)
How much are replacement injectors using this technology going to cost? How much are other various parts going to cost (wiring harness that connects to the injectors, etc.)? How big will the heating and pressurizing mechanism be? (although based on the pic in TFA, it looks like it may piggy back right on the injector...which would raise the cost to replace them by a LOT) How much would that cost to replace? Would it be available only through the OEM company, or will other companies be able to build thei
Not a Diesel (Score:4, Informative)
People keep saying this is a diesel engine, but it is not. In a diesel engine, the air in the chamber is heated by compresssion up to something hot enough to ignite the fuel. In this design they are heating the fuel and pressurizing it before they inject it into the chamber, so that it turns to vapor as soon as it is injected into the chamber. Someone seemed to be making fun of the term 'supercritical' but that is the word for vapor that has completely transformed from a liquid and has excess internal energy. This is very different from spraying the gas with an atomizer.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, I have the definition of supercritical wrong. I had confounded it with superheated. Supercritical is a substance that is above its critical point, where the liquid and gas phases combine.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, I have the definition of supercritical wrong. I had confounded it with superheated. Supercritical is a substance that is above its critical point, where the liquid and gas phases combine.
Supercritical temp for toluene is only about 600 degrees F... not a heck of a lot hotter than a kitchen oven. I wonder how hot this thing gets. Your typo may inadvertently be correct. I'm curious how this technology handles different gasoline mixes over time and location. For example, in some states, "old gas magically turns into varnish" but that never happens in Wisconsin, probably because we get a different mix.
Admittedly I've never heard a good explanation of why, if some brands/mixes of gas magical
I am a secret Beta Tester..... (Score:2, Funny)
1974 called - they want their hoax back. (Score:2)
During the first oil crisis, we heard the exact same claims. "Heating the fuel ahead of time gives more miles per gallon". Sure - and more detonation, which is what you get when you ignite ALL the fuel at once. So to suppress detonation, you have to go to higher octane - and higher octane fuels contain more energy, which translates to more mpg. The difference between regular and premium on my car is 5% (yes, I keep track of my mpg on every fill-up - I can tell the difference between the seasons, or when
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Umm, you're right about ethanol blending (which is going to become increasingly hard to avoid). Ethanol has a significantly lower energy density of gasoline. Notice that I didn't say regular or premium. Despite your claims of 5% increase in gas mileage, there is no energy density difference between 87 and 92/93 octane fuels. The only thing that octane (and the difference between regular and premium gasoline) is in the knock resistance. If your engine doesn't knock with regular fuel, you gain exactly 0
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The difference between regular and premium on my car is 5%
be careful using premium fuel, because if the engine is tuned for a lower octaine, running a higher octaine will damage the exhaust valves. Higher octaine burns more slowly (which prevents detonation at higher compression ratios), and too high of an octaine and it's still burning when the exhust valves open. By the same token, too low an octaine and it will knock, damaging the heads, pistons, or (most likely) piston rings.
A cheaper way to stop spark
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Heptane = C7H16 + 11 * O2 = 7 * CO2 + 8 * H2O
Octane = C8H18 + 02 = 8 * CO2 + 9 * H2O
When cracked at the refinery, the oil companies try to get as much heptane as possible while still being able to keep the RON (Research Octane Number) within th
Fascinating... (Score:5, Funny)
Does the exhaust also smell like bullshit?
Like totally bogus, man (Score:2)
Go to Google books and look up a book "Internal combustion", circa 1910.
In there you'll find the basic equations of IC engine efficiency.
Clue: They haven't changed a bit since then.
It all depends on the Carnot cycle, which is basically immutable. A proper gas-air mixture burns at a certain well-defined temperature, and then with expansion, generates a certain amount of work. There's nothing you can do in the way of injection that makes any difference.
You can come up with minor tweaks, like stratifie
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
NO2 injection is not without its own costs and risks. It will add to the performance of the vehicle, but adds to the risk of predetonation, or worse. Plus you need a steady, cheap source of the gas, which is not really viable as an mass marketable additive.
That and NO2 is a contributor to climate change, reacting with ozone to the atmosphere when it burns.
So much for that.
NOx and emissions? (Score:3, Interesting)
This reminds me of articles in Popular Science during the 70's touting columnist (and notable mechanic) Smokey Yunick and his super efficient engine that also used pre-heating of the intake charge, but I think the technology of fuel injection hadn't moved far enough to get to this level of direct injection.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Sounds like something else... (Score:4, Interesting)
This article [technologyreview.com] describes a very similar process from a New York company that uses supercritical diesel fuel -- and they report much more sensible efficiency gains of up to 10%. They've only tested in a lab setting so far though.
I found the article because I was looking for the supercritical points of gasoline, which is a complex mixture of many different hydrocarbons, making the critical points very tricky to estimate. Turns out they are 720K and 60Mpa, from the article above. Their system achieves temperatures this high (almost 400 degrees higher than normal fuel system operations) using exhaust heat. Given that higher temperatures mean improved efficiency, I'd buy the 10% they propose -- though I remain very skeptical abut the 50% proposed in this article.
Diesel? (Score:3, Insightful)
I naturally didn't RTFA but it sounds like a diesel to me. Diesel engine already have greater economy from less volatile fuel. The fuel itself isn't heated, the cylinders are heated via glow plugs at start, and then by the combustion itself afterwards. More gas engine should go to direct injection first.
Or just skip all these "inventions" and keep refining the diesel engine. The latest iteration of the Mercedes diesel is very smooth and incredibly quiet (rivaling gas engines in the same model car) with greater output.
-m
Efficient or Green? You choose. (Score:4, Informative)
As any (mechanical) engineer knows, to get an efficient internal combustion engine you want compression pressures as high as possible and combustion temperatures as high as possible (an oversimplification, to be sure) because an internal combustion engine is a heat engine, and the greater the temperature and pressure difference between the combustion event in the cylinder, and ambient conditions at the end of the exhaust system, the more efficient it is.
UNFORTUNATELY, some three quarters of the gas that the internal combustion engine draws in from the atmosphere is Nitrogen, and when you expose Nitrogen to the high pressures and temperatures of a combustion chamber, what happens next is simple, and unavoidable, chemistry, you get oxides of nitrogen out the exhaust pipe.
So on the one hand an efficient engine will be running petrol / gasoline at 13:1 compression ratios, or diesel at 25:1 compression ratios, and polluting the crap out of everything.
On the other hand, a "green" engine will be running petrol / gasoline at 9:1 compression ratios, or diesel at 17:1, and wasting energy efficiency like an ice rink in Dubai.
You can't have it both ways.
Does not contradict itself (Score:2)
From the article:
> If it works as promised, the new technology would improve fuel economy by
> far more than these other options, some of which can improve efficiency on
> the order of 20 percent.
Thus the 20% number refers to other technologies (which not to say that the article may not be hype for other reasons).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sceptical (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, by the end of TFA (which I'll assume _you_ have read before making a RTFA demand of others) they get even more generous with the claims, and say it gets 98 MPG at 50 mph. (I.e., in a range where, sorry, but it's not _that_ aerodynamic.) I.e., basically 2.4l per 100 km on the highway.
I'm sceptical of anything which proposes to simply double the amount of energy extracted from that gasoline, because, well, physics is physics. The efficiency of the cycle is capped the hard way by the max and ambient temperature difference, and short of inventing an engine which runs at thousands of degrees, the alternative would be that conventional engines were spewing out half the gas unburned. Which just isn't the case.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
there's plenty of safety risks in partially oxidizing the gasoline prior to injection for combustion, too. That's like asking for a higher risk of gas fire from a frontal collision.
Partially oxidizing? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't even understand what it means to "partially oxidize" the fuel ahead of time. Isn't oxidizing fuel, by definition, burning it, since fire is an oxidation reaction? If so, why isn't "pre-oxidized fuel" like "pre-eaten food?" In other words, wouldn't it mean wasting fuel?
Surely my pathetic chemistry knowledge is at fault here, right?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Throttle body fuel injection sucks. If you want to be efficient, you either inject it directly in the cylinder or you inject it just ahead of the valve.
The efficiency claims sound preposterous initially, until you sit down and think through the theoretical energy capacity of gasoline and then consider how much of that power really reaches the tires in an IC engine. Drivetrain losses are pretty much unavoidable, but the engine itself is wildly inefficient.
There was another new idea that came out a couple of
Re:I'm sceptical (Score:4, Informative)
Y'know, I don't really have a hard time believing that it could get 100mpg at 50mph... 50mph isn't *that* fast, for one, and for two, there's cars on the market today which are able to get 70mpg at those speeds. Even my 3-year old Chev aveo is able to pull about 50mpg at those speeds if I do it right. (arrow-straight, flat road, a/c off, windows closed, manual transmission) And I'm not talking about EPA posted results, I'm talking about real-world testing that I've done in my own car with me driving.
There's even an amatuer sport of sorts that comes from this, called hypermiling [wikipedia.org]. Some of the better hypermilers are able to get over 100mpg out of a car like mine, and the world record is over 200mpg out of a Honda Insight. So no, 100mpg out of a production car isn't that astonishing or out to lunch to me.
Re:I'm sceptical (Score:5, Informative)
They claimed 50% increase of efficiency.
The efficiency of combustion engines are ~20% so you could say that more than half is lost (80% actually). An increase with 50% would but it in the 30% range which seems reasonable to me.
Re:I'm sceptical (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'm sceptical (Score:4, Interesting)
Modern gasoline engines running at their peak thermal efficiency points are at about 35%. Diesels are typically in the 40% range. But those thermal efficiency numbers are a bit tricky ... it's not even theoretically possible to get any work out of an engine using a thermodynamic cycle that's 100% efficient - the ideal Carnot cycle would be on the order of 70-80% across the same temperature difference. In the real world, something on the order of 50% thermal efficiency is probably attainable. Right now, we're working to push Diesels towards 45%, and it's requiring things like waste heat recovery systems - running a bottoming cycle to recover some of the wasted exhaust energy. There are a variety of more advanced cycles and combustion modes being actively researched too.
Generally speaking, a gasoline engine's peak efficiency is achieved when it's wide-open and running at peak load. At other operating conditions, the efficiency is lower due to a variety of factors. One of the ways we're looking at improving low-load operation is by using what's called HCCI (homogeneous charge, compression ignition) combustion - like diesel, compression ignition is used, but like gasoline engines, the fuel and air are premixed. It sounds like that's what they're probably using here, with the supercritical injection being used to help enhance and control the ignition process (a big difficulty with HCCI).
I don't buy that they could increase the peak thermal efficiency by anywhere near 50%, or that they could increase the thermal efficiency at a given operating condition by that much through supercritical injection alone. If they're comparing HCCI to traditional stoichiometric SI combustion, though, it could get close to that at low-load points where the throttled SI engine is at its worst efficiency points. The supercritical injection isn't the direct cause of that gain, but an enabling technology to help facilitate HCCI operation. All else being equal (i.e. same combustion regimes, etc.), the injection technology could only have an impact on the fuel/air mixing and thus the combustion efficiency (i.e. how much of the fuel is burned completely), which is already well over 90%; there's just not much room for improvement there.
Even if it doesn't increase the peak thermal efficiency of the engine at all, though, it could make a significant difference in vehicle fuel economy by increasing the efficiency at low-load, off-peak conditions. Most of the FTP and NEDC drive cycles (US and Europe, respectively) are at low speed conditions, with quite a bit of idling and cruising, but very little hard acceleration. Increasing the low-load efficiency of the engine will have a disproportionate effect even if the peak efficiency remains unaffected.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I'm sceptical (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not use km/l?
This is strictly a usability issue, and if you carefully and realistically consider user needs you'll see that l/100 km is better. Consider a car-buying couple:
"Hey, this one gets 10 mpg!"
"But this one gets 20 mpg! It's twice as good."
"This one gets 30 mpg, that's even better!"
"Yeah, that's as big a difference as between 10 and 20. Let's go for that one!"
Or:
"This one gets 10 l/100 km!"
"The one gets 5 l/100 km! It's twice as good."
"This one gets 3.3 l/100km, that's even better!"
"Hmm... that's not such a big improvement. Maybe the best value is at 5!"
The ratios are the same in the two cases, but the sad fact is that most people can't deal with ratios, and l/100km produces differences that reflect the relative magnitude of improvement, whereas the inverse scaling does not.
100 km is also a nice convenient unit for driving distance, and produces numbers for typical vehicles that can be adequately represented as small integers. But the specific choice of 100 km is less important than having a linear rather than an inverse scale (scaling as x rather than 1/x with fixed driving distance, which is the realistic constraint.)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Miles per Gallon is the silly figure. It's so silly it's practically useless.
The car is built for travel, not fuel use. Knowing how far you can travel on the fuel you're using is the opposite of silly. The word would be 'necessary'.
I'm no so sceptical (Score:2)
This is a novel application of existing ideas. Some of this technology is in use on diesel engines (compression ignition, direct injection, timing direct injection to time ignition) and heat regeneration is in use in all power plants, and some major industrial processes, a lot of ovens and forges use exhaust to preheat combustion air and fuel.
Heat regeneration is already used in cars through exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) technologies.
One of the larger losses in an engine is "pumping" or simply moving air
Actually, that's why one should be skeptical (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, that's exactly why one should be skeptical: at heart it's just a Diesel engine. Using a Diesel engine with gasoline isn't even a new idea, such engines already exist. So exactly what is the magic bullet there?
And improving oxidation doesn't do much, unless your engine ejects a large quantity of fuel unburned. What limits the efficiency of either the Otto or Diesel cycles (either theoretical or in actual cars) isn't their failing to burn most of the gasoline. So pre-oxidizing and catalysts to impro
I did RTFA, and it's more complex, really (Score:3, Informative)
I've read TFA, actually, and it still smells like bullshit to me. Sorry.
For a start, efficiency is not the same as unburnt fuel. I hope you don't think that your car actually dumps 80% of the gasoline unburnt out the back.
Not wasting energy by heating up the chamber walls, well, it's a noble goal but too bad it's impossible. Regardless of how you time the ignition and how it burns, you still have an expanding chamber full of hot gas. That's mostly why it's higher pressure than before the ignition. That's wh
Re:I'm sceptical (Score:4, Informative)
It is right to be skeptical, but the theoretical efficiency of a typical Diesel is in the 50% range.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/thermo/diesel.html [gsu.edu]
This thing is not a Diesel engine, but it looks like it might be similar to one.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If the fuel is just under the ignition point the ignition will consume all of the fuel more rapidly.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So? Both Volkswagen as well as Fiat have produced cars for years now which can do 100 km on less than 3 liter of diesel at that speed. Don't forget that the efficiency of a diesel stems partly from the high compression ratio and the absense of a throttle valve. It is certainly possible to create a petrol engine which can achieve this level of efficiency, even though the energy density of petrol is slightly lower than that of diesel. As to whether the system thi
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sceptical of anything which proposes to simply double the amount of energy extracted from that gasoline, because, well, physics is physics.
Skepticism is good, but you could have made the same statement about carburation back in the 1970s. But my '02 Concorde is as roomy as my old '74 Le Mans, almost as fast, and gets almost twice the gas mileage the Pontiac did. The secret to extracting more energy out of a gallon of gasoline is to send less of it out the tailpipe.
Re:I'm sceptical (Score:4, Informative)
I'm skeptical because I've heard so many reports like this.
However it's not physically improbable to achieve 30% efficiency with an internal combustion engine. Even an ordinary ICE theoretically can achieve 37%. If the combustion temperature is raised, it is conceivable that higher efficiencies could be achieved.
As far as mileage is concerned, that's not related in a straightforward way to engine efficiency under ideal conditions. Toyota's Prius is rated at 51 MPG highway; that's not the electrical system doing that, it's an engine that's tuned to be very efficient at highway speeds and which doesn't have to deliver torque at low speeds.
It's not out of the question to almost obtain twice that in a ultralight prototype vehicle with an engine that marginally outperforms the Prius engine under those conditions, if the rest of the power train was a little simpler and more efficient. The key to the Prius engine is that it can be tuned for higher peak power because it doesn't have to generate much torque at low speeds.
Re:I'm sceptical (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone can achieve 98mpg given the right conditions (downhill in neutral)
Actually you'd be better to leave it in gear than to leave it in neutral. Modern engine control units will cut off the fuel supply when the engine speed is being maintained by outside factors and your foot is off the gas. If you shift into neutral you take away this option and force the ECU to supply enough gas to keep the engine running at idle.
Re:If you post before this (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, but I'm sure when the technology never quite makes it to market, die hard conspiracy nuts will claim some Oil company bought the technology only to destroy it so they can sell more oil.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
64 mpg isn't that amazing. My car manages about 65 miles per british gallon on diesel. 64 miles per american gallon on petrol is better than that, but within the realms of the possible.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, but I'm sure when the technology never quite makes it to market, die hard conspiracy nuts will claim some Oil company bought the technology only to destroy it so they can sell more oil.
A lesser known fact is that most conspiracy nuts work for oil companies to discredit those who discover the real conspiracies. /ducks
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The VW Bluemotion outperforms the Prius .... it has a conventional engine, but it just loses all the weight possible, has a very efficient engine and is designed to be aerodynamic, and so it uses less fuel, and produces less CO2 than a hybrid ....
I suspect they are "cheating" in the same way ....
Re: (Score:2)
If you post before this ... then you haven't read the damn article!
Unless you believe in supporting the media you enjoy, and therefore subscribe. Then you've had a good 10 or 15 minutes to read the article before it got Slashdotted.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I mean, really, if they can get this kind of car (0-60mph in 3.2 seconds) then there is no excuse for ALL cards to get such great ratings. The whole "hybrids are slow" is ridiculous.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Porsche 918 Spyder gets 58mpg and this is a freaken scream machine. Porsche
If they were all made of paper-light materials with low-drag-cof. surfaces and one-weather tires, and had specialized components - all with a budget 3x the cost of a normal auto manufacturer, then HEY! You could be right!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You could drive 100km on a jug of milk
I once went over 200km with a gallon of milk.
I think it was bad by the time I got home cuz the wife was real mad.
Re:Same old snake oil (Score:5, Insightful)
Same snake oil that was being pitched at county fairs in the 1970s. Nothing to see here, please move along.
Well, I don't understand how their scam is supposed to work if you're right. From the article
The company has demonstrated the technology in its own test engine, and says it is currently testing it with three automakers. One key question is the impact the high pressures and temperatures will have on how long the engine lasts, Rocke says. The company, which is supported by venture-capital investments from Venrock and Khosla Ventures, plans to manufacture its system itself, rather than licensing the technology. It plans to build its first factory in 2013, and to introduce the technology into production cars by 2014.
So pretty much I just have to sit back and wait for the major automakers to offer these cars? Sounds like the fresh country rube is insulated from the snake oil salesman by the car manufacturers who apparently are prepared to buy into it. On top of that, it looks like they're not looking to license this technology to these companies but instead build a plant to manufacture them. So, they're at quite a bit of risk and are probably pretty interested in seeing this thing through if they want a piece of the manufacturing action. If you're selling snake oil, you usually just want to be selling it and not heavily invested in it.
If you have a citation of high pressure transonic combustion in the 1970s, I'd love to read about it.
A lot of snake oil is sold to the investors (Score:4, Insightful)
The age where the country rube was the only mark of the snake oil salesmen... well, probably never even existed. A lot of snake oil is sold to the investor who wants to pay for that manufacturing, or subsidize the research or whatever. See the Phantom console, or several cars supposed to run on water or even urine, etc. And it's not even a new thing. If you go back as far as the middle ages or even antiquity, you'll find the likes of the alchemist who sold the promise of endless gold or eternal youth to whoever just invests in his research, or mis-haps like the South Sea Bubble where you were supposed to get endless riches if you just invest in someone's expedition there.
Basically "but they plan to built it" is no reassurance and never was. It can simply mean they have a rube with deeper pockets in mind.
Re:Same old snake oil (Score:5, Insightful)
On top of that, it looks like they're not looking to license this technology to these companies but instead build a plant to manufacture them.
That alone should be a red flag, for several reasons.
1) They are an engine technology company, not a manufacturer. How much experience to they have in mass production, supply-chain management, etc? Not a small learning curve.
2) Tooling costs are high, increasing their capital needs, which is a convenient way of pulling more money out of their investors and therefore creating more opportunities to skim.
3) By manufacturing themselves they don't have to reveal the "secret secret", just the "secret". Any attempt to independently verify their claims will be made vastly more difficult by not having a full and public disclosure of their trade secrets in patent documents or under NDA to a licensed manufacture. So this approach puts off the day of reckoning for a good long while, and during that time company insiders can happily pay themselves big fat bonuses. It will also be much harder to prove they were lying about the technology's potential when the house of cards falls.
An engine technology company that's going to manufacture rather than license? Sounds too good to be true. Because it probably is.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_Direct_Injection [wikipedia.org] - GDI goes back to 1925, and this "high pressure transonic combustion" is just some buzzwordy gobbledygook used to try and hide the fact that it's just GDI plus some snakeoil claims (nearly any claims of major improvements from fuel preprocessing are snakeoil and have been for decades...) if you actually read the description of what they claim to be doing.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There are factories (with investors) that also make things like Homeopathy supplies, and special magnets to reduce joint inflamation. Just because the claims of a product's utility are lies doesn't mean you can manufacture the product without a factory.
Re: (Score:2)
...of course the downside to supercharged fuel is the tendency of the car to explode upon the slightest impact... ...which is no downside, if you're in the movie business where everything explodes upon the slightest impact...
Re:Same old snake oil (Score:4, Funny)
Running Very Lean Re:Same old snake oil (Score:5, Interesting)
So, yes, it will get great miles/gallon, but probably not very many miles/engine.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Just watched The Core a few nights ago, so one of the eight people who got that reference.
Unobtainium [wikipedia.org] isn't specific to The Core.
Re:Same old snake oil (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuel injection wasn't very widespread in the 1970s. The snake oil then was a carburator, not fuel injector. I knew a mechanic who actually got hold of the plans and built one; it increased his gasoline mileage slightly (it was supposed to triple it), but the car performed like a dog. It did NOT actually increase efficiency.
If an engine's efficiency is increased, not only will you get better mileage but better performance as well, although you can increase mileage without increasing efficiency (back in the old days it simply took a smaller carburator). There have been a LOT of engineering enhancements since the '70s. I had a '74 Pontiac with a four barrel carb, dual exhaust, milled heads on a 350 CI V8, it got 19 mpg tops on the highway (stick shift). That car was fast, would burn rubber in all gears. The car I'm driving now is an '02 Concorde. It's as roomy as the Pontiac, nearly as fast (automatic tranny, will burn rubber without a clutch to dump), but has a far smaller V6. At 50 mph I get 35 mpg, 28-30 at 68 mph (that's 100 kph for those of you in more civilized parts of the world; 1 km = .6 m iirc), and gets up to 20 mpg in the city, depending on traffic lights, etc.
THAT'S increased efficiencey. Today's automotive engineers are awesome.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Same old snake oil (Score:5, Funny)
No no they don't propose using a different oil ... just preprocessing the gasoline ... I mean, who can imagine a car running one snake oil? How many snakes to the mile would that take?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
the right snake can go many many miles, my car's snake injection system only unspooled and used half an anaconda yesterday.
Re: (Score:2)
And now what people will do is take this technology and replace Hybrid technology and not actually be smart with it and use it with hybrid technology to get even better gains.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I think we all know how a Diesel engine works.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In all fairness though, the renewable plans for transportation do include combustion engines.
The world seems to be aiming at two or three concepts:
1. Biofuels. Same old engine, sustainable fuel.
2. Electric engines. Sustainable electricity, new fuel tank, and (for cars at least) new engine.
3. Fuel cells. New fuel, new tank, and (for cars at least) new engine. Still in research stage it seems.
It seems that option 1 is the easiest to implement, because most of the existing infrastructure will be needed.
In the
Re: (Score:2)
Number 2 and 3 are the same. Fuel Cells are electrical generators that can use a liquid power source. Batteries are electrical power storage mediums. They are both electric cars, and so is the Chevy volt (it just has a petrol generator on it).
And bio-fuels are well a bad idea. They are in essence very very low efficiency solar power. Their only benefit is that they fit in (almost perfectly) into our current fossil fuel based transportation system.
The versat
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The technology (assuming it works, which is a big if at this point) may be applicable to renewable fuels as well, particularly if those biomass-based gasoline/diesel analogs ever work out.
The thing is, you're never going to really get away from some kind of combustible fuel for some methods of transportation. Yeah, trains can be electrified, everyday commuter cars equipped with batteries, and large enough ships equipped with nuclear power... but large trucks, construction equipment, "traveling" cars used f
Re: (Score:2)
New combustion engines aren't the future; renewable energy is.
Like biodiesel/biofuel, which gets leaps and bounds closer to break-even as fuel efficiency increases?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
"50% Efficiency Boost"
"promises increased efficiency of up to 50%. "
Please, /., learn the difference between "50% efficiency" and "a 50% increase in efficiency". I come here to get away from the slapdash treatment of science in the mainstream press.
What the fuck are you talking about? The "X times more than is not the same as X times as many" fallacy does not apply here.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)