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Highly Efficient Hybrid

This is an idea I made of a highly efficient driveline and engine configuration.
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*Sorry, the document isn't complete, working while at school* Basically, I have been looking into the emissions of on- road vehicles, their cost, fuel efficiency, etc. I figured that I should try to make a system that is highly efficient and in some aspects if not put into a whole production vehicle, some do-dads could be retrofitted to improve late model and early model vehicles alike. Things included and discussed are: emissions, fuel efficiency, friction, electric motors, batteries, hydrogen injection, water injection, egr, bio fuels, engine theory and design, etc. There are also other things about this vehicle that are unique and unrelated to the drivetrain and powerplant, such as suspension.

1st - vehicles | The automobile is an outstanding invention that has affected our society to the point where it's odd if you didn't have one of these miracles. The problem that occurs more often today however is emissions and economy of these production vehicles, it would be nice to see an automobile manufacturer produce a vehicle that gets 100+ mpg, and puts out nearly zero pollutants. However, this is more of fantasy than reality for anybody knows that they wouldn't do that unless their company is in jeopardy, which I find that it's not always what the people running and working at/for these places want to do but it would be extremely risky to go above what's standard and invest a bunch of money into making a slightly more economical car. At this rate, the only people who are making standards for pollution is the EPA, which so far hasn't been the biggest help as far as I understand.

*Note: I am 14 so please don't criticize me too much for not being the most reliable source of information or if I have something wrong here.*

2nd - Engines & Power ---> Wheels | There are very many basic drivetrain and engine configurations, first, how does an engine work? Well, if you're reading this you already know that, and you would suspect that if we were going to use any engine that it would be a four-stroke engine, well, have you ever heard of a 4+2 (6) stroke engine? These are typically opposed piston engines which have one piston working half the revolutions of the other piston and can use the 2 stoke piston to open and close valves as seen in the Beare head 6 stroke engine. These engines have 2 power strokes out of 6 strokes which means that every three strokes, 1 power stroke occurs. The 2 power strokes are different however, for one uses the fuel/air mixture and the second uses water injection, this is by far the most common design I have witnessed. The second power stroke that uses water injection works by either having a water injector in the intake or a separate intake and valve altogether, when it sucks in air to ready the second power stroke, no fuel is sprayed, only a fine mist of water, which then adsorbs heat and turns into steam which, obviously, means that it is not going to be as powerful of a stroke as the fuel/air power stroke but the power output is relative - meaning that it makes a sufficient amount of power, especially talking torque maybe? Anyways, this engine has variants -some up to, 40% reduction fuel consumption, 65% reduction in carbon monoxide. They overall have low build costs since you eliminate the camshaft, valves, and the head altogether. Water injection too can be added to the fuel/air mix to further reduce Heat, NOx, and other things that are discussable. One more note on the water injection is that we can further cool down exhaust gas temperatures to start condensing the steam into water. We can filter this water and use it through a system of filters, pumps, reservoirs, injectors, and lines.

3rd - Hydrogen Injection, Lean Burning, Emissions, Hemi | So we will pick up one more thing that will refresh us but familiarize us, Water Injection, the main reason that water injection was ever used was actually to control pre-detonation, (Just a thought.) Alright, now hydrogen injection is pretty basic, and this is where the water recollection system will also come in handy for we don't want to have people riding around with an unstable bomb in the back, we can use h20 to produce hydrogen on demand and feeding it through a vacuum tube that leads to the manifold, or a specific series of strategically placed hydrogen vacuum tubes in the manifold to ensure steady hydrogen/petrol ratio in each cylinder. Hydrogen burns 7-9X faster than petrol, it also ignites extremely easy. This is because of the nature of hydrogen, by definition, explodes vs petrol, which burns. This enrichment of hydrogen can also help ignite engine that runs extremely lean. The leaner you can run an engine, the more fuel efficient it becomes, and despite usual rumors, it actually makes the engine run cooler running lean, at least to a certain extent. The matter is not running anything lean is always making it better, it's all about how well the fuel can ignite, if the fuel is not spread out enough with the air, it won't burn properly, it the fuel is spread out to far across the bore it may have problems running, with hydrogen injection, no problem, and the production of hydrogen can be directly related to engine rpm by using the alternator on the engine. There are two different types of hydrogen cells (Cells/blocks that produce hydrogen/oxygen using hho) if you want to learn more about the hydrogen cells google them. Hydrogen Injection is not producing more fuel than its burning despite it being able to improve power, it takes a small amount of hydrogen, which is basic and easy to produce especially with as much wattage as an alternator can produce. One more thing, Hydrogen injection can reduce emissions because it burns the fuel more efficiently, less hydrocarbons are left un-burnt and also means less carbon buildup. So we are done right? Wrong. I'm losing my mind... ? ...I mean lets make this thing a d*mn hemi for better thermal efficiency? It's known that the surface area of a hemispherical object is less than one with sides, this means less walls for heat to be adsorbed in, and more power to the wheels, one more thing -you're think "Hey wait a minute, I thought this d*mn thing was opposed piston or something, so how are you to make the combustion chamber hemispherical? Well, it's easy, I can groove out the middle of the pistons so that each half forms half of the oval that makes the combustion chamber. Oval is not hemispherical I know, but it would definitely offer more thermal efficiency while keeping a usable compression ratio.

4th - Alternative Fuels and EGR | Alternative fuels are nothing new, but there are some I would like to discuss, and they all have similar properties. Kerosene, Vegetable Oil, and Gumweed Oil, if your not sure which one is then I highly recommend researching them. Anyways, it seems they all work really well as bio-diesel, but they seem to have an octane rating around 20, not much. At that rate I would have to run about 6.5:1 compression and still it would have a high likeliness that it starts dieseling since 6.5:1 is about when Kerosene, Gumweed Oil, and Veggie Oil start to self detonate from compression. So not a big success there but sometime in the future I could possibly look into useful biofuels for diesel generators or something. Another Biofuel is Wood Gas, wood gas is not nearly as dense as gasoline so engines naturally aspirated mostly will be affected with less overall engine torque and horsepower, but wood gas has about %14 hydrogen, which helps a lot when it burns and is probably the sole reason why running wood gas produces low emissions and a lot less carbon building and getting into the oil. But wood gas is something not very useful in a production vehicle. So lets stick to gasoline, for now at least. Egr is Exhaust Gas Recirculation, some may argue that R doesn't mean recirculation but in the end I couldn't give a sh*t, what matters is what its capable of doing, and egr can reduce NOx and peak cylinder temperatures. This is useful but causes rough idle which some systems disable egr at idle and peak loads. Regenerative braking can also be used to reduce heat caused by traditional brakes and make useful work most likely using an electric generator that is connected to the drivetrain to slow down the rotating mass. This is essentially hybrid technology which already exists on vehicles such as the Toyota Prius, but it instead uses an electric motor to drive the car under low loads and to regenerate electricity when available, and we can see just by the Toyota's Gas Millage alone that they must be on to something.

5. The Design | So I was thinking for a production car, that this was going to be pretty expensive, but It's a concept not a reality, yet. I wanted two different models, one a hatchback with fwd vehicle with a 1000cc (1.0l) six stroke. And another perhaps a truck or a sport coupe with rwd and a 2,000cc (2.0l) six stroke engine. There will be another design but I want to get to these two first. There is one more thing, which is the Stirling Engine, which uses the difference in temperature to make power. We can use these in cars on items such as the exhaust and coolant which tend to be where a lot of the heat energy goes. Knowing this we can configure a way to dump all the heat in a stirling generator somewhere within the car to use that waste heat and turn it into electricity, the other side of the stirling engine needs to be cool for max power out of the stirling generator, this can be achieved by routing conductors to fins somewhere on top or the the sides of the car, or have vents like the vw beetles that push the air in and through a heatsink on the stirling so that you can effectively maximize the amount of power being regenerated. One thing about running lean is that not all the air and fuel can sometimes be mixed properly, to overcome this issue, we could make the air/fuel mixture swirl into the cylinder as it draws the mix, just as the hcci engines do.

Transmissions: So I also was looking into transmissions and thought that a cvt setup with a gearbox connected to its output shaft would be marvelous, what this does is it creates numerous amounts of gearing throughout each gear, and as the engine rpm increases, the cvt gearing gets taller. This essentially is a basic hi and low gear for every gear but it works better because of its auto transitioning of the gears which can save power by not loading the engine as much and create smoother acceleration, high low end power and higher top end speed. I've seen numerous power sport manufactures use this, commonly with a v- twin efi motor with a cvt coming out and going into a manual transmission behind the v-twin, making it really compact, yet extremely powerful. No I'm not telling you that you can only use manual trannys, you can also automatic transmissions as well.

Hatchback: The hatchback has a 1000cc six stroke engine that alone produces ~150 bhp, with the addition of hydrogen injection and extreme lean running conditions and also the quality and other factors of the engine we will be conservative and say it makes about 120 bhp with water injection (There will be little water mixed in with the fuel/air mixture to help with emissions but we actually want the engine to warm up some so that we can efficiently use water injection on every second power stroke.) So here's what it comes down to: Six Stroke - 1000cc (~120 bhp) (Inline 4) -Hydrogen Injection -Water Injection -EGR -Vacuum Advance ignition timing -Hybrid Configuration (Similar to Prius) -FWD -Decent Flow Exhaust and Intake -Baffled Muffler(s) -Stirling Engines (Attached strategically to the exhaust and coolant systems) - cvt + (automatic/manual) transmission - less than or equal to 2,500 lbs - ~28:1 a/f (Lean Mixture)

Truck: Basically the same thing as before except it is either a 2.0 liter six stroke inline 4 or a 2.4 liter six stroke inline six and it's all rear wheel drive instead of fwd, or it can be 4x4 but it is supposed to be a smaller truck and I like the simplicity of the rwd configuration, one thing not discussed is the type of wheels, and really, just some medium compound radials will do fine, basically some standard tires, though I'm not certain on the size of the tires or rims. The engine of the truck is going to not only be bigger but will also be tuned for more torque, I haven't decided on the bore and stroke yet but I'm sure when I do it will work for both applications. One more thing is the truck's weight, and well say that with a 2.4 liter inline six - six stroke engine tuned to make ~200 hp and ~280 ft/lbs of torque. These numbers don't sound like a lot but the engine would be purposely tuned to output said amounts of power which relatively would be enough to propel with ease these vehicles in mind. I'm not worried about the power output as I am to fuel consumption of the engine. Not to say that I don't care about horsepower and torque, h*ll, you know that I want power but that is not what this article is about, it is about efficiency overall of the vehicle and overall of the engine.

One more thing, which I had only thought little about until Beanangel brought it to my attention, is the production of the vehicle itself, sometimes, selling a vehicle to the masses isn't about how you can only make a car for this amount of money, it's also about the machinery and costs to manufacture and ship vehicles and other units. If we can find ingenuitive ways to mass produce vehicles like the ones I stated, we could potentially save fortunes. And with that savings you could potentially lower the price of each vehicle and sell even more. A lot of times success isn't limited by the company's creativity, but rather it's skills to produce that product. Honda's machining factories have become so skilled and advanced that they can almost cut something say a crankcase right in half and the two surfaces would mesh almost perfectly when put back together. Absolutely amazing what they are able to to.

Questions and Answers | A lot of people I assume want actual results and specific information that has not been fully discussed. For example, pertinax asked about the weight of the engines and how much I was hoping to scavenge. It's hard to say how much I can scavenge, but it is sort of relative to say that the stirling engine is quite bulky and may only decrease the power to weight ratio, I was thinking maybe having one that weighs about 100 lbs and produces around say 70 hp? It is not so much the hp I'm looking for unless the stirling was connected to the drivetrain which is a possibility but I was going towards the direction of making it an electric generator that gets rid of the need for an alternator and it directly dumps the power into the battery and other components in the vehicle. Of course there might be a backup alternator or something simple and cheap that can be used if something happens to the stirling engine than you can still receive enough power for the ignition system so that your car doesn't have to rely on that single component for it to run. The weight of the stirling engine may not be that high at all since I'm sure with the lack of research in the subject that there is room for improvement.

If you're still reading this you are one h*ll of a guy, but don't think that I don't know that adding all these different components comes with a lot a conflicts, such as weight, reliability, production costs, etc. I too know that throwing on a bunch of stuff onto a combustion engine doesn't always make it better.

JamesDB04, Jan 11 2019

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       Welcome to the Halfbakery! First six months free!
MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 11 2019
  

       So, I get the desire to have more efficient, less polluting vehicles, but what's the idea for achieving that?
MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 11 2019
  

       I think the fishbone component of the hb may have to be demonstrated here. (waits to permit poster the opportunity to carry out an edit that results in the generation of an explanation as to how this new vehicle might work)
xenzag, Jan 11 2019
  

       // what's the idea for achieving that? //   

       A Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor ?   

       Welcome to the HB, [James]. In the "meta" section you will find a very useful help file, which gives hints on how to avoid a merciless savaging by the bunch of pedantic, aggressive, intolerant misanthropes that infest this place.   

       A certain amount of leeway is allowed to new members, but only for a short period. The clock is now ticking; your time is limited, use it well.   

       Oh, and beware the one that calls itself [xenzag]. It is a Zillon, from the planet Tharg, and can not be trusted.
8th of 7, Jan 11 2019
  

       //agressive//   

       Sp. aggressive
EnochLives, Jan 11 2019
  

       Bah. Sp. fixed.
8th of 7, Jan 11 2019
  

       //what's the idea for achieving that?// The glutinous paste made from wringing out 8th's bed sheets, has proven to perform well as a type of fuel. (if you can stand the overpowering smell) Be careful when harvesting. He recites the Christmas songs he writes for hideous despots in his sleep, so strong ear defenders are recommended. The HB can be a scary and unpredictable place, then there is the initiation test....(reading all of these is part of it)
xenzag, Jan 11 2019
  

       [Ian] is probably right. However, one of the joys of the Halfbakery is that you can provide elaborate details without actually knowing what you're talking about. I do it all the time. So, feel free to propose an idea for how to make a car super-efficient. I can guarantee your idea will be no worse than some.
MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 11 2019
  

       // solar cells will never recoup the energy //   

       Not just the energy; wafer fabs produce large amounts of very toxic waste products that have to be processed and safely disposed of. They also need inputs like very high purity lacquers and resins, solvents, dangerous compressed gases like Arsine and Phosphine, disposable clothing and vacuum pump oils.   

       It's only economies of scale that make production viable.
8th of 7, Jan 11 2019
  

       Welcome JamesDB04!   

       One thing you might want to add to your idea is optimization for shipping to the developing world and durability. I imagine there might be more than a billion people out there on the verge of having cars that do not yet have one. These people might benefit from a used car, shipped from a more developed country.   

       As a kind of similar example I have heard that unsold thrift store clothes are exported to the third world by the multiton and then people wear them instead of making their own. You could come up with a car that is particularly suited to that, perhaps it has posts [] on the roof and undercarriage at four places so you can stack them without crushing for easier shipping. You could even specify a new standard size of shipping container that neatly fits 8 cars as a rectangular block.   

       Possibly make them out of fewer parts so repairs are less costly. So, as a suggestion make it highly exportable to benefit others.   

       Post another idea soon!
beanangel, Jan 12 2019
  

       Welcome James.   

       I happen to work in the auto industry as an engine engineer, and have worked on a good bit of the downstream components as well as hybrids, and so would be happy to stear you along as you develop this idea further with the few bits and pieces that I know.
RayfordSteele, Jan 12 2019
  

       Hi , nice, but the problems with ideas is that once birthed into the physical, they face all things not thought of. The very clever members that hang around here can truly give some heads up on the thoughts missed.   

       Oh, and if the ribbing gets too much. I find this means I have missed something, need extra reading, or even have to go off and make a change in an aspect of my life.
wjt, Jan 15 2019
  

       I think they should come up with battery technologies, that said I perceive that in the developing world they have lots of motorized minibikes. If you like you could reapply and/or simplify your motor inventions for those. It is possible those users would really value fuel efficiency, but it is also a thinking challenge as you would have to, perhaps, reduce complexity and the number of parts to make reliable, cheap, fuel efficient minibikes.   

       I like cars better as they have less passenger risk, but perhaps computers and driverless vehicles will make minibikes less risky to ride.
beanangel, Jan 15 2019
  

       I like your exuberance. Keep up your research and hopefully you can come up with some improvements to the state of the art someday.   

       And welcome aboard.
doctorremulac3, Jan 16 2019
  

       Oh, I don't know; some parts of Tharg are nice.   

       Anyway, [James], roughly how much weight do your Stirling engines add, and how much energy do you hope they will scavenge?
pertinax, Jan 16 2019
  
      
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