There is a long and sordid history of miracle improvements to the automobile
engine that for some reason never came to pass. Over on the joke list
someone posted a link to all the issues of Popular Science the other day. I
would be willing to bet that if you name any year between say 1950 and now,
I can find at least 2 stories of some marvelous new wrinkle to the
automotive engine that never made it into production by any car maker. With
this history, there is no reason not to be leery of the linked article.
My BS is in detecting BS and there are several things in the linked article
that should have any half way skeptical reader's bullshit meter beeping and
flashing a red light.
for example the name of company "Transonic Engineering" Wow sounds fast.
"improve the efficiency of gasoline engines by more than 50 percent." OK
from burning fuel you get heat and power. To get 50% more power from a unit
volume of fuel, you need to produce a lot less heat. How do you burn
gasoline with out heat?
"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" first off why are we
hearing from a VP of business development, and not an engineer? Secondly if
you are running a diesel direct injection engine, you have to pressurize the
fuel in order to inject it. On a normally aspirated diesel you are talking
about 30-55 bar of pressure. The heating is new, but I doubt it is anything
but fluff. A supercritical state? WTF is that? You will have to excuse
me, but the needle on my bullshit meter just hit the pin so hard it sheared
the pin off spun around twice more before it flew off hit the glass face and
broke it.
"The company also treats the gasoline with a catalyst that "activates" it,
partially oxidizing it to enhance combustion." Oh Jesus Christ that
sentence just blew my back up meter into a hundred pieces. What next? A
magnet for the fuel line? (Something that was sold to car owner about 20
years ago to align the gas molecules before they went into the engine. I
shit you not.
Want to go on?
I got $50 bucks that says no 2014 cars have this engine in them (claim in
the article). Hell I will will sweeten the deal, I bet no 2015 cars have
it. Any takers?
Rick
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Healeys@autox.team.net
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