The ever-popular water engine!
#31
01-17-2008, 11:33 AM
"The following links to test papers and testimonials are provided as certification of the chemical, mechanical and operational viability of TECTANE's H2O Injection system. "
.gif images of COVER PAGES are not content. Nice trick though, carrying with it the implication that all the studies are of their particular system and not of various other water injection systems. Their City of Hollywood testimonial does not contain substantiating DATA. It's a question of verifiable, scientific proof.
One must evaluate such claims very critically, because sophisticated presentations and sales pitches are common.
"So why has such a clean technology not been adopted yet by the car companies? There have been many reasons over the years... market pressures, inertia, lack of emissions laws, lobbying by special interest groups, etc."
Note that nothing SPECIFIC is mentioned. Lobbying against water injection? I defy anyone to find proof of that. In fact, CAFE regs create great pressure on companies to find ways to improve economy and emissions performance. Water injection is absent on new vehicles, and would be easy to implement with modern fuel management systems.
Water and alcohol injection has uses suppressing detonation in piston engines, but modern fuel management takes care of that using knock sensors, etc.
http://www.carkb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/...ine-Conspiracy
"Bard Man - 29 May 2004 11:12 GMT
Careful Ron.... looks enticing in the sales ads, but...
They are right, sort of. Water Injection has been used and tried many
different times. The first actual use I have ever read was on experimental
P-51 Mustangs late in WWII. Also, their premise on being capable of running
low octane fuels with water injection is correct, in fact that is why water
injection was originally experimented with. At the time (WWII), airplane
engines were really pushing the state of the art in internal combustion,
PISTON engines. Engineers were trying everything to obtain more power, at
greater altitudes, with cheaper fuels. They came up with lots of the stuff
hot-rodders of today mistake for new technology. Superchargers,
Turbochargers, Intercoolers, Nitrous Oxide, Water Injection, and more. Then
the JET engines came along and pretty much stole the show after that.
Without going into too much of the physics of the Otto-cycle engine, (your
basic four stroke) essentially the power created is from a gas pressure
pushing down onto the pistons ... the more gas pressure, the more power. In
an internal combustion engine (ICE) the gas pressure is created by burning
of a fuel inside a combustion chamber. (area above a piston) When the fuel
burns in an enclosed area, obviously the pressure goes up tremendously and
you have your power stroke. In the search for more power (from the same
engine) logically you would want to burn as much fuel as you possibly could
inside that combustion chamber, right? However, the more fuel you add you
must also add a matching quantity of oxygen (air). Now we go back to
Turbo/super-charging... these are ways of actually cramming more air into an
engine, so you may then add more fuel, for more burn in chamber, for more
pressure, and ultimately more power.
But, here is the problem ... at least with spark ignition (spark plugs) and
gasoline engines. Gasoline ignites at a certain pressure/temperature. If you
force too much of your air/fuel mixture into the cylinder, or if it is too
hot going into the cylinder, or if you squeeze it too much on the
compression stroke (high compression ratio) the air/fuel mixture will ignite
by itself and burn before the spark plug can ignite it. You have probably
heard the terms preignition or detonation.
OCTANE is merely the measure of a certain batch of gasoline to resist this
early ignition. A higher octane number means that gasoline has a higher
temp/press threshold before it ignites itself. Early on the most widely used
method of increasing the octane rating of gasoline was to add lead to it.
The lead in the fuel would literally inhibit the fuels ability to ignite.
This was cheap, you could get huge octane numbers (100-110 or better) until
they realized how poisonous lead was. Enter un-leaded gasoline.('70's)
Octane numbers dropped like a rock. Many people were stuck with cars that
had engines designed ONLY to run on very high octane gasoline.
Re-enter Water Injection. The theory was, by adding a limited amount of
water to the air/fuel intake stream you could lower the temprature in the
cylinder. It worked to a certain extent, but cost power. It lowered the
temp, therefore the pressure in the chamber, therefore the pressure on the
piston. It always seemed to create some mis-fire problems also, but it did
help those people stuck with the high octane cars.
So if they were to run a modern day engine on low-octane (70) fuel, such as
the one in this Pueguot, that is designed for an Octane of 87-90, they
would need to add a lot of water. This does not help with mileage or power.
Water does not burn, nor does it magically split into hydrogen/oxygen only
to burn again. Even if it did, it would be, at best, a zero gain. The energy
taken to split water into hydrogen/oxygen would be equal to energy gained
when recombined, and you have a net energy loss when turning liquid water
into water vapor.
Contrary to what a lot of people think, you can only get so much heat energy
from a gallon of gasoline, no matter how you burn it. Roughly 85,000btu /
gallon for gasoline. Diesel fuel is approx.110,000btu/gal -- that's why a
diesel engine will always get better mileage than gasoline. Ethonal and
methonal are roughly half of gasoline, so you would almost have to burn
twice as many gallons to create the same heat. (heat = pressure = power)
Nowadays they do raise octane of gasoline with nasty things like MTBE or
with further refining. (more expensive) If there is a "green fuel", and that
very well could be true, it is probably very similar to the white gas used
in things like Coleman lanterns, heaters, etc. (Which can be very clean
burning .. no poisonous additives, but cheaper?)
In theory, they could make a modern, 90ish octane engine "run" on 70 octane
gasoline by using water injection... but I doubt it would run very well.
Engines with computerized controls could very well probably pull this off,
as long as the water injection rate/delivery and misfires were also
monitored and controlled. But from the pictures in the ad ... this looks
like the same stuff we tried in the '70s ... extra windshield squirter
bottles/pumps plumbed directly into the air cleaner assembly with basically
an on/off switch set to go on at a certain throttle opening. Low-tech, and
believe me does not work very well at all."
Tectane has been around for a while, but they appear to me as an outfit looking for VC funding rather than one that offers a viable system. If it were workable, they would post details/photos/manuals onsite for customer evaluation instead of pure promotional content.
"It appears you are ahead of me on info so do you have any suggestions?"
Not for hydrogen, since it is only a storage technology. Fuel cells etc require far more resources to develop than a hobbyist can bring to bear.
If I built an economy rig I'd look at optimizing a small diesel engine. The Cummins 4BT is a popular swap and there is a Yahoo group devoted to it. Unlike hydrogen, there are a variety of fuel sources for diesels (farmers often run their engines on self-produced plant oils) that are available now.
.gif images of COVER PAGES are not content. Nice trick though, carrying with it the implication that all the studies are of their particular system and not of various other water injection systems. Their City of Hollywood testimonial does not contain substantiating DATA. It's a question of verifiable, scientific proof.
One must evaluate such claims very critically, because sophisticated presentations and sales pitches are common.
"So why has such a clean technology not been adopted yet by the car companies? There have been many reasons over the years... market pressures, inertia, lack of emissions laws, lobbying by special interest groups, etc."
Note that nothing SPECIFIC is mentioned. Lobbying against water injection? I defy anyone to find proof of that. In fact, CAFE regs create great pressure on companies to find ways to improve economy and emissions performance. Water injection is absent on new vehicles, and would be easy to implement with modern fuel management systems.
Water and alcohol injection has uses suppressing detonation in piston engines, but modern fuel management takes care of that using knock sensors, etc.
http://www.carkb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/...ine-Conspiracy
"Bard Man - 29 May 2004 11:12 GMT
Careful Ron.... looks enticing in the sales ads, but...
They are right, sort of. Water Injection has been used and tried many
different times. The first actual use I have ever read was on experimental
P-51 Mustangs late in WWII. Also, their premise on being capable of running
low octane fuels with water injection is correct, in fact that is why water
injection was originally experimented with. At the time (WWII), airplane
engines were really pushing the state of the art in internal combustion,
PISTON engines. Engineers were trying everything to obtain more power, at
greater altitudes, with cheaper fuels. They came up with lots of the stuff
hot-rodders of today mistake for new technology. Superchargers,
Turbochargers, Intercoolers, Nitrous Oxide, Water Injection, and more. Then
the JET engines came along and pretty much stole the show after that.
Without going into too much of the physics of the Otto-cycle engine, (your
basic four stroke) essentially the power created is from a gas pressure
pushing down onto the pistons ... the more gas pressure, the more power. In
an internal combustion engine (ICE) the gas pressure is created by burning
of a fuel inside a combustion chamber. (area above a piston) When the fuel
burns in an enclosed area, obviously the pressure goes up tremendously and
you have your power stroke. In the search for more power (from the same
engine) logically you would want to burn as much fuel as you possibly could
inside that combustion chamber, right? However, the more fuel you add you
must also add a matching quantity of oxygen (air). Now we go back to
Turbo/super-charging... these are ways of actually cramming more air into an
engine, so you may then add more fuel, for more burn in chamber, for more
pressure, and ultimately more power.
But, here is the problem ... at least with spark ignition (spark plugs) and
gasoline engines. Gasoline ignites at a certain pressure/temperature. If you
force too much of your air/fuel mixture into the cylinder, or if it is too
hot going into the cylinder, or if you squeeze it too much on the
compression stroke (high compression ratio) the air/fuel mixture will ignite
by itself and burn before the spark plug can ignite it. You have probably
heard the terms preignition or detonation.
OCTANE is merely the measure of a certain batch of gasoline to resist this
early ignition. A higher octane number means that gasoline has a higher
temp/press threshold before it ignites itself. Early on the most widely used
method of increasing the octane rating of gasoline was to add lead to it.
The lead in the fuel would literally inhibit the fuels ability to ignite.
This was cheap, you could get huge octane numbers (100-110 or better) until
they realized how poisonous lead was. Enter un-leaded gasoline.('70's)
Octane numbers dropped like a rock. Many people were stuck with cars that
had engines designed ONLY to run on very high octane gasoline.
Re-enter Water Injection. The theory was, by adding a limited amount of
water to the air/fuel intake stream you could lower the temprature in the
cylinder. It worked to a certain extent, but cost power. It lowered the
temp, therefore the pressure in the chamber, therefore the pressure on the
piston. It always seemed to create some mis-fire problems also, but it did
help those people stuck with the high octane cars.
So if they were to run a modern day engine on low-octane (70) fuel, such as
the one in this Pueguot, that is designed for an Octane of 87-90, they
would need to add a lot of water. This does not help with mileage or power.
Water does not burn, nor does it magically split into hydrogen/oxygen only
to burn again. Even if it did, it would be, at best, a zero gain. The energy
taken to split water into hydrogen/oxygen would be equal to energy gained
when recombined, and you have a net energy loss when turning liquid water
into water vapor.
Contrary to what a lot of people think, you can only get so much heat energy
from a gallon of gasoline, no matter how you burn it. Roughly 85,000btu /
gallon for gasoline. Diesel fuel is approx.110,000btu/gal -- that's why a
diesel engine will always get better mileage than gasoline. Ethonal and
methonal are roughly half of gasoline, so you would almost have to burn
twice as many gallons to create the same heat. (heat = pressure = power)
Nowadays they do raise octane of gasoline with nasty things like MTBE or
with further refining. (more expensive) If there is a "green fuel", and that
very well could be true, it is probably very similar to the white gas used
in things like Coleman lanterns, heaters, etc. (Which can be very clean
burning .. no poisonous additives, but cheaper?)
In theory, they could make a modern, 90ish octane engine "run" on 70 octane
gasoline by using water injection... but I doubt it would run very well.
Engines with computerized controls could very well probably pull this off,
as long as the water injection rate/delivery and misfires were also
monitored and controlled. But from the pictures in the ad ... this looks
like the same stuff we tried in the '70s ... extra windshield squirter
bottles/pumps plumbed directly into the air cleaner assembly with basically
an on/off switch set to go on at a certain throttle opening. Low-tech, and
believe me does not work very well at all."
Tectane has been around for a while, but they appear to me as an outfit looking for VC funding rather than one that offers a viable system. If it were workable, they would post details/photos/manuals onsite for customer evaluation instead of pure promotional content.
"It appears you are ahead of me on info so do you have any suggestions?"
Not for hydrogen, since it is only a storage technology. Fuel cells etc require far more resources to develop than a hobbyist can bring to bear.
If I built an economy rig I'd look at optimizing a small diesel engine. The Cummins 4BT is a popular swap and there is a Yahoo group devoted to it. Unlike hydrogen, there are a variety of fuel sources for diesels (farmers often run their engines on self-produced plant oils) that are available now.
Last edited by monckywrench; 01-17-2008 at 12:06 PM.
(what is *not* happening 
)
Thread
Thread Starter
Forum
Replies
Last Post
smurray
Clutch, Transmission, Differential, Axle & Transfer Case
1
01-17-2006 03:26 AM
