400hp, 500ft/lbs...and 110+ MPG?!

[c1ue]

Re: 400hp, 500ft/lbs...and 110+ MPG?!

Drop a horse and an ant off a 3 story building and see if "mass wins".

Efficient dissipation of kinetic energy wins.

Um, try dropping the horse on the ant.

Then the reverse.

That is a more correct analogy.

Collisions are momentum dependent; twice the mass = half the exit velocity.

If a horse and ant aren't convenient, try instead bowling balls and billiard balls.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: 400hp, 500ft/lbs...and 110+ MPG?!

As was I talking CNG (not LPG). Frank L had LPG a little wrong, its a mixture of butane and propane (no methane). In the US most people just call it propane. Propane would actually be my first choice to run a vehicle. It's stored at lower pressures of around 200 psi in simple reliable steel tanks, and it's a liquid at those pressures so it's easier to get acceptable range. No cost of compression, and it still burns very clean. You can obtain it easily in most places , ready-to-use without compressing it.

[Chris Coles]

Re: 400hp, 500ft/lbs...and 110+ MPG?!

The big advantage of LPG is no carbon deposits in the lube oil and I have heard of truck companies getting more than 1 million miles from an engine.

[Guest]

Re: 400hp, 500ft/lbs...and 110+ MPG?!

I drove a methane converted Alfa Romeo Giulietta in Italy for five years. They are totally standard gear in Italy and I understand also in other EU meditteranean countries. Fantastic fuel mileage - cheap as all get out to run - I mean really, really cheap. Hardly noticed any power degradation on the vehicle, and I lived at 1000 meters and commuted up and down the mountain daily.

Methane conversion in Italy is regulated, but with a real minimum of red tape. The mechanic shops licensed to convert a car to methane are everywhere, and the methane refueling stations were entirely common - at least in Tuscany and Umbria, where I lived and worked. In the countryside the methane converted car is almost de rigeur, everyone has one.

We are being so royally scammed in America as regards our driving options. Many types of vehicles in the EU are far more fuel efficient than we see over here - they have to be - their fuel taxes are far higher than ours so the vehicles have adapted to this constraint. If we were to import EU style driving and fuel options here to the US overnight, IMO we'd instantly chop a massive portion off our energy budget.

It's good to know the options are out there.

BTW - the Alfa was an older car. Interesting anecdote. A year before leaving Italy, in 1997, I was lunching with some friends at a restaurant high up on a mountaintop near where I lived. I guess we were at 1000 meters. My car's old electrical systems caught fire, and the fire was too far along to put out when I discovered it. The entire restaurant's clientele went outside to watch the spectacle in this semi deserted parking lot right at the peak of the mountain.

Flames leapt from the hood of the car, as the engine grew into a massive bonfire. I had four brand new, incredibly expensive thermal snow tires on the car, and they blew out one by one as we awaited the fire department truck that was weaving it's way up the mountain. There was an oversize (I think it was a 20 gallon) methane tank in the trunk of the car, with the methane lines running up to the engine at the front? Nothing. The blaze wound up with flames reaching 15 feet into the air, and the tank never blew.

I do not believe the statistics in Italy for accidents using such converted vehicles are exceptional to the general vehicle accident rate. Fiat has some car models which are actually designed to run on gasoline or methane (dual tanks designed in). There may be a significant issue with direct rear end impact, but I had not heard anything about that. Methan conversions work really well. Huge fuel savings for long distance commuters.

They exist and they run well. Most major cities in the US have them in fleets ( gas utilities, transit buses, city vehicles) We ran a small fleet in package delivery service at FEDEX in the early 90's. The problems with CNG are fuel storage and cost of compression. No matter how much pressure you use, the molecules of a gas are far apart compared to a liquid. Our test vehicles ran at 3500 psi to 5000 psi tank pressures. The natural gas industry has videos showing how safe the tanks are, but it's still a practical challenge, and even at 5000 psi you can’t carry much fuel on the vehicle, so range is low. And it costs a ton of electrical energy to compress pipeline gas to that pressure. The fuel stations were enormous and costly, and the advocates never want to count the electric bill for the fuel compressor in the fuel economy. The fuel burns cleanly and emissions are good. The fuel cost is super low simply because there’s no road taxes on it. Gasoline and diesel carry huge taxes. The National renewable Energy Lab was one of our sponsors / partners, check this link for legitimate info on alternative fuels. http://www.nrel.gov/vehiclesandfuels/ Bottom line: there is no free lunch and no magic engine, but we can easily live without oil if we want to , and even get cleaner air.fficeffice" />

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: 400hp, 500ft/lbs...and 110+ MPG?!

A million miles for a large over-the-road truck or city bus is not unusual. We used to asuume a major rebuild every 250,000 miles, and four or five rebuilds before scrapping the engine. Diesel and gasoline are great fuels (except for the wars, the pollution, and the limited supply). Tens of thousands of smart engineers at great companies have worked on them for a hundred years now, and they have the bugs all worked out. They are the best over-all fuels today. The real reason to change to alternative fuels are the wars, the pollution and the limited supply. But you are correct, they work just as well, and maybe just a tiny bit better in one regard or another.

Much as i love the technical deatails of engines and fuels, I fear this thread has wandered far away from iTulip's contrarian economic mission.

[Starving Steve]

Re: 400hp, 500ft/lbs...and 110+ MPG?!

I need to correct myself. They're not in production yet. They opened the facility yesterday, but haven't started production yet.

It could be a scam, but it looks legit at this point. We'll certainly know more over the next few months. It's worth following, IMO.

Ofcourse this is a scam. "110+ mpg with 400hp" --- this is the same dreamland, la la land, blue sky, pot-head thinking witnessed in the eco-frauds to-day. It's the same mental disease: not being able to think clearly and critically, nor practically and realistically.

In the 1970s, there were pot-heads saying that they could build solar-powered cars. This is the same bullsh*t.

A solar powered car was actually run in the Mojave Desert. It was a piece of crap about the weight of a bicycle, but not as sturdy as a good bike.

Meanwhile, while the Americans wasted their time with dreams of solar power, windmills, 120 mpg engines, battery filling-stations, and electric plug-in cars, the Japanese have made significant (like a few more miles per gallon) improvements in the fuel efficiency of drive-trains in conventional four-cylinder motor-cars..... Improvements like the 6-speed manual transmission, variable-speed automatic transmission, regenerative braking, not to mention the electric hybrid have first appeared in Japanese cars, not American cars.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: 400hp, 500ft/lbs...and 110+ MPG?!

My car's old electrical systems caught fire, and the fire was too far along to put out when I discovered it. The entire restaurant's clientele went outside to watch the spectacle in this semi deserted parking lot right at the peak of the mountain.

Flames leapt from the hood of the car, as the engine grew into a massive bonfire. I had four brand new, incredibly expensive thermal snow tires on the car, and they blew out one by one as we awaited the fire department truck that was weaving it's way up the mountain.

LOL! Though not as dramatic, I had similar with a 1966 jaguar running on gasoline -at least I was alone watching my auto burn itself to the ground - a cheering section would have been too much.
BTW, it's gasoline fuel tank didn't explode either.

[charliebrown]

Re: 400hp, 500ft/lbs...and 110+ MPG?!

From Wikipedia:

The maximum theoretical efficiency of a heat engine (which no engine ever obtains) is equal to the temperature difference between the hot and cold ends divided by the temperature at the hot end, all expressed in absolute temperature or kelvins.
The efficiency of various heat engines proposed or used today ranges from 3 percent^{[citation needed]}(97 percent waste heat) for the OTEC ocean power proposal through 25 percent for most automotive engines, to 45 percent for a supercritical coal plant, to about 60 percent for a steam-cooled combined cycle gas turbine. All of these processes gain their efficiency (or lack thereof) due to the temperature drop across them.

Now to compute MPG one needs to calculate the energy in a gallon of ethanol, Figure out the theoretical heat engine efficiency from above. (One would need to determine the operating tempeture of the engine)
Then figure out how much energy the car must expend to travel one mile.

These calculations are beyond my heavily degraded engineering degree allows. But since this engine appears to be be comparable in power to a standard gasoline engine, and the car is a typical car, then its operating temp must be much higher than a "standard engine"

In its heyday my ford escort 1.9L 5spd manual trans would get 41 MPG at 60MPH over long distances. I suppose if I could put on some super wheels and wheel bearings, change the gearing to get the engine to operate in its peak power band at 60MPH, and lower its aero drag a little, we might be able to squeeze 50MPG out it? This is about the smallest car I would consider owning.

[ASH]

Re: 400hp, 500ft/lbs...and 110+ MPG?!

Are cold fusion and/or perpetual motion somehow involved in the project?

Hydrinos. :eek:

[Starving Steve]

Re: 400hp, 500ft/lbs...and 110+ MPG?!

I drove a methane converted Alfa Romeo Giulietta in Italy for five years. They are totally standard gear in Italy and I understand also in other EU meditteranean countries. Fantastic fuel mileage - cheap as all get out to run - I mean really, really cheap. Hardly noticed any power degradation on the vehicle, and I lived at 1000 meters and commuted up and down the mountain daily.

Methane conversion in Italy is regulated, but with a real minimum of red tape. The mechanic shops licensed to convert a car to methane are everywhere, and the methane refueling stations were entirely common - at least in Tuscany and Umbria, where I lived and worked. In the countryside the methane converted car is almost de rigeur, everyone has one.

We are being so royally scammed in America as regards our driving options. Many types of vehicles in the EU are far more fuel efficient than we see over here - they have to be - their fuel taxes are far higher than ours so the vehicles have adapted to this constraint. If we were to import EU style driving and fuel options here to the US overnight, IMO we'd instantly chop a massive portion off our energy budget.

It's good to know the options are out there.

BTW - the Alfa was an older car. Interesting anecdote. A year before leaving Italy, in 1997, I was lunching with some friends at a restaurant high up on a mountaintop near where I lived. I guess we were at 1000 meters. My car's old electrical systems caught fire, and the fire was too far along to put out when I discovered it. The entire restaurant's clientele went outside to watch the spectacle in this semi deserted parking lot right at the peak of the mountain.

Flames leapt from the hood of the car, as the engine grew into a massive bonfire. I had four brand new, incredibly expensive thermal snow tires on the car, and they blew out one by one as we awaited the fire department truck that was weaving it's way up the mountain. There was an oversize (I think it was a 20 gallon) methane tank in the trunk of the car, with the methane lines running up to the engine at the front? Nothing. The blaze wound up with flames reaching 15 feet into the air, and the tank never blew.

I do not believe the statistics in Italy for accidents using such converted vehicles are exceptional to the general vehicle accident rate. Fiat has some car models which are actually designed to run on gasoline or methane (dual tanks designed in). There may be a significant issue with direct rear end impact, but I had not heard anything about that. Methan conversions work really well. Huge fuel savings for long distance commuters.

My parents owned a Fiat in the early 1970s. It was truly a "Fix it again, Tony".

I don't buy Italian cars, nor any European cars, no matter what people say about their supposedly "superior engineering".

Just reading your story about some engineering difficulties with methane in Italy, it reminded me of issues with European cars and my parents' old Fiat. The entire Fiat's electrical system was designed by a mental midget; a ten year old kid might have done a better engineering job.

[FrankL]

Re: 400hp, 500ft/lbs...and 110+ MPG?!

I'd say that German cars are (or at least were) on a different level of reliability compared to French, Italian and British built cars.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: 400hp, 500ft/lbs...and 110+ MPG?!

From Wikipedia:

The maximum theoretical efficiency of a heat engine (which no engine ever obtains) is equal to the temperature difference ...

Now to compute MPG one needs to calculate the energy in a gallon of ethanol, Figure out the theoretical heat engine efficiency...

..., then its operating temp must be much higher than a "standard engine"....

You present the textbook classic Carnot's Theorem, which is true and can be exploited. In the 1970's, Smokey Yunik of Popular Science Magazine built a high temperature engine with ceramic parts and low internal bearing drag (as I recall he eliminated camshaft power loss by using rotating ceramic valves). He got great performance and economy, though conveniently ignored cost and reliability. Ethanol has no special ability to operate at high temps, though no disadvantage either. Almost all alternative fuel engines are not truly optimized to exploit the new fuel with the details of compression ratio, shape of piston crown, inlet manifold shapes, etc. They are gasoline engines converted to new fuels.

In our published research, we coined the term "MPEQ" for "Miles Per Equivalent Gallon" to compare different fuels on a BTU basis as you suggest, using the lower heat value of the fuels. In reality, heat content is the wrong unit of measure for an engine fuel altogether. "Lower heating Value" (LHV) is the ability of a fuel to warm things up (ignoring the potential recoverable heat in the condensable vapors in the combustion products). The ability of a fuel to produce useful work is actually the "Gibbs Free Energy" (GFE), which is only available for pure chemicals, not hydrocarbon mixtures like gasoline and diesel. We compared LHV to GFE for propane, ethanol, methanol, and octane, and found an inherent error of about 5%. Bottom line – today’s engines can be more efficient, but at a price many people won’t pay. And if you are comparing different fuels in an engine for efficiency, if they are the same within about 5% you should call them equal unless you’re willing to establish Gibbs free energies for them. I really did serious scientific research on this stuff years ago, actually got paid for the work!

[santafe2]

Re: 400hp, 500ft/lbs...and 110+ MPG?!

You present the textbook classic Carnot's Theorem, which is true and can be exploited. In the 1970's, Smokey Yunik of Popular Science Magazine built a high temperature engine with ceramic parts and low internal bearing drag (as I recall he eliminated camshaft power loss by using rotating ceramic valves). He got great performance and economy, though conveniently ignored cost and reliability. Ethanol has no special ability to operate at high temps, though no disadvantage either. Almost all alternative fuel engines are not truly optimized to exploit the new fuel with the details of compression ratio, shape of piston crown, inlet manifold shapes, etc. They are gasoline engines converted to new fuels.
:p
In our published research, we coined the term "MPEQ" for "Miles Per Equivalent Gallon" to compare different fuels on a BTU basis as you suggest, using the lower heat value of the fuels. In reality, heat content is the wrong unit of measure for an engine fuel altogether. "Lower heating Value" (LHV) is the ability of a fuel to warm things up (ignoring the potential recoverable heat in the condensable vapors in the combustion products). The ability of a fuel to produce useful work is actually the "Gibbs Free Energy" (GFE), which is only available for pure chemicals, not hydrocarbon mixtures like gasoline and diesel. We compared LHV to GFE for propane, ethanol, methanol, and octane, and found an inherent error of about 5%. Bottom line – today’s engines can be more efficient, but at a price many people won’t pay. And if you are comparing different fuels in an engine for efficiency, if they are the same within about 5% you should call them equal unless you’re willing to establish Gibbs free energies for them. I really did serious scientific research on this stuff years ago, actually got paid for the work!:p:p

Maybe thrifty but not boring, thanks. It was nice to see this thread bring out the scientists and engineers. Maybe Ash will start a "Promise of the Hydrino", thread after this one finally dies out...or maybe we need a whole section devoted to crackpot physics...:rolleyes:

[santafe2]

Re: 400hp, 500ft/lbs...and 110+ MPG?!

And just in case someone has a crackpot theory they'd like to take public, an index and scoring methodology have already been developed. My personal favorite: 30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an extraterrestrial civilization (without good evidence).

The Crackpot Index

John Baez

A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics:

1. A -5 point starting credit.
2. 1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.
3. 2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.
4. 3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.
5. 5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction.
6. 5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment.
7. 5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those with defective keyboards).
8. 5 points for each mention of "Einstien", "Hawkins" or "Feynmann".
9. 10 points for each claim that quantum mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
10. 10 points for pointing out that you have gone to school, as if this were evidence of sanity.
11. 10 points for beginning the description of your theory by saying how long you have been working on it. (10 more for emphasizing that you worked on your own.)
12. 10 points for mailing your theory to someone you don't know personally and asking them not to tell anyone else about it, for fear that your ideas will be stolen.
13. 10 points for offering prize money to anyone who proves and/or finds any flaws in your theory.
14. 10 points for each new term you invent and use without properly defining it.
15. 10 points for each statement along the lines of "I'm not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to express it in terms of equations".
16. 10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is "only a theory", as if this were somehow a point against it.
17. 10 points for arguing that while a current well-established theory predicts phenomena correctly, it doesn't explain "why" they occur, or fails to provide a "mechanism".
18. 10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Einstein, or claim that special or general relativity are fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
19. 10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a "paradigm shift".
20. 20 points for emailing me and complaining about the crackpot index. (E.g., saying that it "suppresses original thinkers" or saying that I misspelled "Einstein" in item 8.)
21. 20 points for suggesting that you deserve a Nobel prize.
22. 20 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Newton or claim that classical mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
23. 20 points for every use of science fiction works or myths as if they were fact.
24. 20 points for defending yourself by bringing up (real or imagined) ridicule accorded to your past theories.
25. 20 points for naming something after yourself. (E.g., talking about the "The Evans Field Equation" when your name happens to be Evans.)
26. 20 points for talking about how great your theory is, but never actually explaining it.
27. 20 points for each use of the phrase "hidebound reactionary".
28. 20 points for each use of the phrase "self-appointed defender of the orthodoxy".
29. 30 points for suggesting that a famous figure secretly disbelieved in a theory which he or she publicly supported. (E.g., that Feynman was a closet opponent of special relativity, as deduced by reading between the lines in his freshman physics textbooks.)
30. 30 points for suggesting that Einstein, in his later years, was groping his way towards the ideas you now advocate.
31. 30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an extraterrestrial civilization (without good evidence).
32. 30 points for allusions to a delay in your work while you spent time in an asylum, or references to the psychiatrist who tried to talk you out of your theory.
33. 40 points for comparing those who argue against your ideas to Nazis, stormtroopers, or brownshirts.
34. 40 points for claiming that the "scientific establishment" is engaged in a "conspiracy" to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike.
35. 40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo, suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is hard at work on your case, and so on.
36. 40 points for claiming that when your theory is finally appreciated, present-day science will be seen for the sham it truly is. (30 more points for fantasizing about show trials in which scientists who mocked your theories will be forced to recant.)
37. 50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

[mikedev10]

Re: 400hp, 500ft/lbs...and 110+ MPG?!

We looked perfection in the eye. Perfection blinked.

-BMW regarding the e46 m3, 2001