Another new engine design

[Agent]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42460541...ce-innovation/

Seems to have some backing to in terms of finance.

Look forward to them building a proper scale one

[[GSV]Trig]

Looks interesting, I cant see much in the way actually happening yet until were out of petrol or as near as damn it, there are a lot of comapnies out there that are patenting stuff just to make sure that they keep buying fuel from them and stifling the competition...

[Lucio]

Whilst I don't expect the technology to become mainstream for another 5 years, this isn't something car companies can afford to ignore. The idea of being able to offer a "super hybrid" car, with more space, better fuel efficiancy and lower emissions than your rivals is something that'd sell, and sell well.

I don't think it'll translate into cheaper prices for car buyers though, because it still links into a hybrid design of needing an electric drive train to actually make use of the power.

One question I do have though, is just how big can you scale this? If, for example, you could apply this design to an industrial sized power plant, and if it could work with natural gas, would it help the power industry?

[Funkstar]

With this kind of turbine or generator, I can see a new kind of hybrid system being used from what we have today. At the moment we have cars with a regular petrol or diesel engine, a large motor and a bunch of batteries all stuffed into a regular vehicle, this has always seemed pointless to me.

With this kind of power unit, you can run it at peek efficiency to charge the batteries, or better yet some capacitors, once you have enough power, the turbine shuts down and you run off that stored power. After some time, the turbine can be spun back up and more power generated as efficiently as possible, and the cycle repeats.

That is a hybrid system I can believe in. Combine this with wheel hub motors and you have much more flexibility with your design (no need for the drive train and that big lump in the front). Or look at it another way, and the space and weight you save on the internal combustion engine, you just replace with your hybrid system, so on some vehicles you might be able to just drop in a new power train without altering anything else on the vehicle.

[mikerr]

I saw this a few years ago:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/emergingte...efficient/1887

[in conventional piston engines] nearly 85 percent of automobile fuel is wasted. Only 15 percent of fuel is actually used for propulsion. The new generator will make better use of automobile fuel. It is projected that the generator will use 60 percent of fuel for propulsion, thus significantly reducing the percentage of fuel that is wasted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_disk_engine

What's news is they've made the first prototype.

Pity noone managed to get a fuel efficient rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishel rotary engine - only Mazda spent any money on it to produce their 250 HP 1.3litre engine in RX8s

[kalniel]

With this kind of turbine or generator, I can see a new kind of hybrid system being used from what we have today. At the moment we have cars with a regular petrol or diesel engine, a large motor and a bunch of batteries all stuffed into a regular vehicle, this has always seemed pointless to me.

With this kind of power unit, you can run it at peek efficiency to charge the batteries, or better yet some capacitors, once you have enough power, the turbine shuts down and you run off that stored power. After some time, the turbine can be spun back up and more power generated as efficiently as possible, and the cycle repeats.

That is a hybrid system I can believe in. Combine this with wheel hub motors and you have much more flexibility with your design (no need for the drive train and that big lump in the front). Or look at it another way, and the space and weight you save on the internal combustion engine, you just replace with your hybrid system, so on some vehicles you might be able to just drop in a new power train without altering anything else on the vehicle.

That's already the way things are going. The Chevy volt is electric with a petrol engine just to generate electricity. Lotus? have developed a one cylinder engine to perform the same role. Someone (Jaguar I think) was already talking about a gas turbine for the same thing, and on the rather larger scale, Rolls have been making electricity generating turbines based on their aircraft engines for years.

[Funkstar]

I see this as a logical progression of the rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishel engine. One of the problems with rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishel engines is lubrication and the very small seals between the separate compartments of the engine. You also have most of the same supporting equipment that you have in a regular internal combustion engine. Apparently this wave design doesn't need that.

[Funkstar]

That's already the way things are going. The Chevy volt is electric with a petrol engine just to generate electricity. Lotus? have developed a one cylinder engine to perform the same role. Someone (Jaguar I think) was already talking about a gas turbine for the same thing, and on the rather larger scale, Rolls have been making electricity generating turbines based on their aircraft engines for years.

It's also how diesel electric trains operate, but that's because you can't build a clutch big enough to handle the power of the diesel generators in them

I didn't know that's what the Volt was doing. This is a good thing and a step in the right direction. I do think we need engines/turbines like the one in the OP to really see the benefits of hybrid electric vehicles though. Especially if they can be made to run on more than just petrol, I don't know if this is possible with these new designs, but a system that can use petrol or diesel, but can also use something more unusual if it is available would be great. Makes use of existing infrastructure while we have it and allows a gradual introduction of new fuels as the market allows.

[badass]

Whilst I am very hopeful for this engine, before people get too excited, 10 year old diesel engines are up to 50% efficient at the right load and RPM.
60% is of course better and this engine looks like it'll weigh a tiny fraction of the weight of a piston engine of equivalent power.

[DanceswithUnix]

Petrol engines are quite efficient, but only at wide open throttle. Shame that

I agree that these "serial hybrid" designs seem the obvious way forward, and yet they seem quite rare and oddly scoffed at. It would also seem to me that spinning a generator fast should make the magnetics more efficient and hence the generator can be smaller, so I think the Jaguar method of using a pair of tiny gas turbines is excellent. But then I also like the idea of a car with exhaust vent warning stickers on it

[Gerrard]

With this kind of turbine or generator, I can see a new kind of hybrid system being used from what we have today. At the moment we have cars with a regular petrol or diesel engine, a large motor and a bunch of batteries all stuffed into a regular vehicle, this has always seemed pointless to me.

With this kind of power unit, you can run it at peek efficiency to charge the batteries, or better yet some capacitors, once you have enough power, the turbine shuts down and you run off that stored power. After some time, the turbine can be spun back up and more power generated as efficiently as possible, and the cycle repeats.

That is a hybrid system I can believe in. Combine this with wheel hub motors and you have much more flexibility with your design (no need for the drive train and that big lump in the front). Or look at it another way, and the space and weight you save on the internal combustion engine, you just replace with your hybrid system, so on some vehicles you might be able to just drop in a new power train without altering anything else on the vehicle.

Isn't that what the Top Gear electric car did?



The thing that seems odd to me is that changing from one form of energy to another (ie, diesel -> electric -> motor vs diesel -> motion) always has a energy drop due to inefficiency; so the more steps there are, the less efficient it should be.

[kalniel]

Electric cuts out the transmittion/clutch stage, so you get some efficiency back from lack of torque conversions. But it's more about improving the efficiency further up the chain - an extra step isn't so bad if your engine is able to be much more efficient because it's designed to run at one speed or whatever. Or better still, electricity generation can be very efficient, so if you only use the petrol power for a 10th of the time etc. then it doesn't matter if it's less efficient.

[jim]

Surely by the time we get around to anything as revolutionary as the complete overhaul of the combustion engine we'll have moved onto hydrogen cells rather than electric batteries anyway?

[peterb]

Quite a lot of interesting engine technology around

http://www.bladonjets.com/ - note the pencil in the foreground!

Efficiency is a tricky one to define meaningfully. It depends what the input and output parameters are. An electric motor is pretty efficient in terms of converting electrical energy in to useful work out (but get less efficient at load because the I^2R losses increase (the effects can be reduced by using high voltage motors, technology used in electric trains and ship propulsion systems for example). However thermodynamic efficiency of an internal combustion engine is limited to a theoretical maximum of about 37%, and in practice is about 18 to 20%.

So looking at the overall efficiency depends on where you measure the energy input.

Ref http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine

[Biscuit]

Surely by the time we get around to anything as revolutionary as the complete overhaul of the combustion engine we'll have moved onto hydrogen cells rather than electric batteries anyway?

I doubt it, hydrogen cells as a fuel will still be difficult to produce in usable amounts for many many years without some SERIOUS funding. This engine still uses regular fuel that we use day to day its just whats under the bonnet which is different, no infrastructure changes at all. I would have though once this starts to seep into the public market it will explode, much more so than current hybrids which offer little over a good diesel for motorway miles or small engined petrol for town driving.

Might sound a bit daft but, i really wanna know what it sounds like when its going.

[jim]

I doubt it, hydrogen cells as a fuel will still be difficult to produce in usable amounts for many many years without some SERIOUS funding. This engine still uses regular fuel that we use day to day its just whats under the bonnet which is different, no infrastructure changes at all. I would have though once this starts to seep into the public market it will explode, much more so than current hybrids which offer little over a good diesel for motorway miles or small engined petrol for town driving.

I purely mean on the battery front. I don't expect hydrogen to replace petrol in the same way that I don't expect batteries to replace petrol.

What I'm really getting at is that if batteries and hydrogen are both effectively electrical storage mechanisms, then by the time this engine comes into being, will we still be worrying about storing electrical charge and hybrids?