Why your automobile or vehicle has poor fuel efficiency.....

[Jumoschwanz]

Why your automobile or vehicle has poor fuel efficiency.....

Ninety years ago, you could travel in your Model T Ford at the rate of 25 miles per gallon of fuel. In the late forties, your Nash four-door sedan could better that by a few on the highway when it's overdrive was engaged.

Today, in 2009, most of the people you know who own automobiles travel at a rate of fuel consumption no better than they or their ancestors did fifty or one-hundred years ago.

Why should this be an issue?

First, if it is possible to use less of our countries resources to get a job done then the country will be better off for sure, that is common sense. If anyone could provide their country with all the power it needed in a thousand years on one gallon of gasoline, that country would be the greatest in the world, so logically, any movement in that direction is an advantage if in fact the country desires longevity and security.

If the efficient use of natural resources is very smart and intelligent and beneficial to any party, then the unnecessary waste of resources could very well be dangerous to any party.

There are endless arguments for conservation, good arguments. It is also easy to find arguments against conservation, but there are none based in logic, fact or reality.

Anyway, back to why your vehicle is no more efficient in it's use of fuel than it's predecessors of 100 years previous:

The answer is that it is profitable to have them use a lot of fuel and resources, because the world economy is based on the use of a lot of resources, and it's growth is dependent on the consumption rate of natural resources increasing.

This is consumerism. Our society is dependent on the accelerating use of non-renewable or non-renewed natural resources. This includes all fossil fuels, oxygen, wood etc. and human lives.
The lynch-pins of our society, the centers of wealth and power, know all this of course, and do all they can to see that consumerism stays on course.

So that is one reason. You can say it is political or philosophical or some better word, but whatever it is called it originates in and from the mind of men.

Now, the technical reason for your vehicles poor fuel economy:

Most all vehicles use what is called and internal combustion engine burning gasoline, diesel or some petroleum gas or petroleum derivative.

Most all internal combustion engines are of the piston-type, and they are all made of materials which can be destroyed at the temperatures their burning fuel creates.

Cast iron and aluminum have been the two major materials in the last hundred years for manufacturing these engines, both of which can be melted by burning their fuel with oxygen and igniting it in the right way.

The only thing that keeps the engine in your vehicle from melting and destroying itself is the fact that eighty percent of the energy produced by the fuel it burns is carried away from the engine by liquid or gas coolant and is ejected from the vehicle and is not used.

This means that if your engine WAS designed to use all the energy produced by it's burning fuel, it would instantly increase it's efficiency and fuel economy/mileage by five times, and our 25 mpg car would now get 125 miles per gallon.

Then, also, that is if the vehicle burned it's fuel in a conventional manner, and in this conventional manner, only a fraction of the fuel is actually turned into chemical energy, a large part of it, more than half is ejected out the tailpipe of the vehicle, out of it's exhaust into the atmosphere. It would be easy to design and engine to run on your vehicles exhaust fumes, really. In fact most automobiles do return part of their exhaust gases to the engine and they are burned again, but since the engine is not designed to use them primarily, it cannot use but a fraction of what is ejected out the tailpipe.

If your vehicle could burn a gallon of fuel completely and use all the energy that chemical reaction created, it would be easy for it to travel one thousand or more miles on that gallon of fuel, no problem.

This engine would be completely different than any now in use, but it's technology is here now. The engine would have to be made of materials that would not be destroyed at the temperature of the fuel it burns, and it would be of multiple stages each of which would extract the different kinds of energy produced by a burning pertroleum fuel, heat and mechanical energy.

So, from the ground up, we could have a 1000 mpg automobile. No one that is part of the system of our current society will build it, and in fact they may actually try to discourage the production of such a vehicle, as it's existence would quickly make whatever they are obsolete and even obscene.

Some of our dream engines technology COULD be applied to our current, disgraceful piston engines to make them much better than they are now by a multiple of three or four times.

It would be child's play to have a 100mpg vehicle with piston-engine technology. This would require absolutely not one bit of the hybrid technology used in vehicles like the Toyota Prius, etc., all that is required is a simple piston engine, with a very simple transmission to couple it to the drive wheels of the vehicle.

This engine's design would contradict the design of most all current piston engines in production. Current engine designs are not efficient because they are not made to be! They are made to be inefficient on purpose to satisfy the needs of consumerism.

For the last hundred years, mainstream engine designers and manufacturers have been concentrating on increasing the power output of engines against their size, which means that where one hundred years ago a Ford Model T engine produced twenty horsepower, today the same horsepower can be produced by and engine that is roughly one/twentieth the size!

This path of research manufacturers of piston engines have been on the last century has been successful, but it has been at the direct cost of efficiency. If they had instead focused on the efficiency of the engine instead of it's specific output per a given size, history may have gone like this:


The ford Model T engine has a size of 177 cubic inches. That is for every two revolutions it makes, it theoretically will draw in 177 cubic inches of the air/fuel mixture it burns. The twenty horsepower maximum it can produce would not be enough to satisfy the performance demands of modern traffic, with very slow acceleration and a top speed of about forty miles per hour. The engine is producing only a little more than 1/10th of a horsepower for each cubic inch.

Now, a 2007 Corvette, with a 427 cubic inch engine producing 550 horsepower, ten times the maximum power per cubic inch of the Model T can( over 1.2 hp per cubic inch), gets better mileage at cruising speed than the model T. Do you see something here that is out of whack?

Now if we had an engine with four or five times the power of the Ford Model T, we WOULD have a car that would be competent in modern traffic as far as acceleration and top speed. In fact many average automobiles in production today have right around 100 horsepower, or five times the power of the model T of 100 years ago.

So, if you took a that Corvette, which gets over 25mpg on the highway at 70 miles per hour, and cut three fourths of it's engine off, six of it's eight cylinders, so that you had a 125 cubic inch engine of well over 100 horsepower you would increase it's highway mileage by around three times. If you optimized that engine for economy instead of performance, then you would have a corvette that got 100mpg on the highway. YOu could do this right now, today, no problem.

The Corvette engine would work for this experiment because it is in fact designed for great efficiency, it's problem is that it is just over four times larger than it has to be for practical use because it is meant to be a "sports" car.

Lets call a device with moving parts a mechanical device ok? And lets call a mechanical device that converts energy from one form to another an engine.

A mechanical device, with parts that move in contact with each other produces heat, and a piston engine has all of it's parts moving against one another, producing a lot of heat. Rolling element and plain bearings, consisting of moving metal parts and an oil film convert some of their kinetic energy to heat energy, and surely the piston and it's rings, the poppet valves and their guides, and other parts all produce heat energy through friction.
The kinetic energy a mechanical element or machine loses to friction increases exponentially with it's operating speed in at least a square. So if you double the speed of your piston engine, it loses four times the energy to friction that it was losing before the speed increase.

So if we are designing an engine for maximum efficiency, we want it to have as low an operating speed as possible to combat this loss.

Another fabulous benefit of running an engine that burns fuel for power, is that the lower the speed of operation, the more time the engine has to burn it's charge of fuel, and the more energy it will get out of it before it ejects it into the atmosphere.

Present-day automobile engines are not designed for low speed operation. Almost 100 years ago, because racing automobiles and motorcycles were put into classes based on and limiting the size of their engines, it became profitable to pursue power output per specific size, instead of efficiency. The general public saw what won races, mistakenly assumed and was told that what was good for racing was good for practical transportation, and have been in effect buying racing engines for their daily transportation ever since!

Current automobile engines, with short strokes, large bores, and large port and valve sizes, optimized to operate at high rpm and speed lose a lot of energy to friction and by ejecting a lot of unburned fuel.

The one good thing that has come out of the design of these racing engines is designs for combustion chambers and ports that accelerate the speed of burning the fuel charge. They had to pursue those because the engines operate at such high speeds the fuel charge has almost no time to burn!

Current engines also have too many cylinders, valves and camshafts, which is another feature they picked up in the pursuit of racing performance. An economical and efficient engine, with only one or two cylinders, would have half to one quarter the bearings and other moving parts that create friction.

So, if we design a one or two cylinder engine just large enough to produce 100 horsepower, with a smaller bore and a longer crankshaft stroke to optimize low speed torque, and size it's ports, valves and cam timing and spark to work best at very low speeds, and we utilize the latest "fast-burn" combustion chamber and port technology of the corvette engine and design it to have as few moving parts as possible, we would have an engine that is three to four times as fuel efficient as the average current vehicle engine, capable of around 100 mpg.

If an engine like the above was utilized in most vehicles for practical transportation, cutting the consumption and demand for petroleum fuels by %75, that alone would transform the world we live in and eliminate most of it's problems and conflicts.
Such a simple thing, discarded in the pursuit of money. How stupid..........

[Crusty]

Im still on my first Coffee, I have no idea why I even took the time to reply to this....

[Juha]

The only thing that keeps the engine in your vehicle from melting and destroying itself is the fact that eighty percent of the energy produced by the fuel it burns is carried away from the engine by liquid or gas coolant and is ejected from the vehicle and is not used.

Combustion based (piston) engines have their efficiency limited by physics to an average of approx. 19%. The optimum they can achieve is 37%, but this is only on the perfect case, with fixed rpm and load and.... etc.

So while the statement quoted is correct about 80% of the energy wasted, it's not because of conspiracy. It's just the way thermodynamics are.

The true reason why modern cars burn fuel almost as much as the old ones are following:
-current (average) cars weight more (safety requirements, AC, all the electrionic extras etc.)
-the speeds are higher than 100years ago (resistance of air)
-most driving takes place in urban stop-wait-go traffic

In order to get even near 100% efficiency, we'll have to figure out the direct mass to energy conversion...

[Jumoschwanz]

Juha, did you ever read someone's reply to something you wrote and you could tell right off the bat they either did not read it well, did not understand it all, or skipped over parts of it?

[Crusty]

I read it....all of it........


"This means that if your engine WAS designed to use all the energy produced by it's burning fuel, it would instantly increase it's efficiency and fuel economy/mileage by five times, and our 25 mpg car would now get 125 miles per gallon."

then 4 paragraphs later

"from the ground up, we could have a 1000 mpg automobile. "

Now the first statement is not exactly going to surprise anyone ...and the second?, well its Bollox isnt it, petrol just doesnt have that many calories in it, that burning it could propel an actual practical 1/2 ton plus real world car 1000 miles no matter how efficient the engine

[ruggbutt]

Jumo, give it up. You're clueless about basic physics in relation to automobiles. Stick to whatever it is you really do for a living.

[callmeslick]

Jumo, give it up. You're clueless about basic physics in relation to automobiles. Stick to whatever it is you really do for a living.

....GM marketing dept??

(just a guess)

[CUDA]

that burning it could propel an actual practical 1/2 ton plus real world car 1000 miles no matter how efficient the engine

Drop Tanks???

[Jumoschwanz]

Now the first statement is not exactly going to surprise anyone ...and the second?, well its Bollox isnt it, petrol just doesnt have that many calories in it, that burning it could propel an actual practical 1/2 ton plus real world car 1000 miles no matter how efficient the engine

No, it isn't Bollox, here is why:

Current petrol piston engines only burn a fraction of the liquid fuel they take in. Most of the gasoline drawn into or injected into a piston engine never vaporizes or is burned, it is ejected out the tailpipe of the vehicle. This is because the fuel only has small fractions of a second from the time it is sprayed into the intake manifold to the time it is ejected into the exhaust.

If gasoline is pre-heated to 3-400 degrees and completely vaporized before it is introduced to an engine's intake manifold, the volume of liquid you start with to obtain enough fuel-gas to fill the cylinder is reduced several times. This technique alone can increase the fuel mileage of a conventional piston engine several fold, BUT, if it was used in a multi-stage engine that utilized most of the heat energy produced, then you can double or more that figure.

A multi-stage engine might be something like the following: It would be a two cylinder, long stroke piston engine. It's exhaust would run a turbine that would run either a generator or torque converter to convert that usually wasted energy. A gas similar to Freon would be injected into the engines cooling jackets, vaporize while cooling the engine, and this pressurized gas would either drive another turbine, or another bank of cylinders.

All this has been done before, but it has never been put together in one package.


YOu can look at it another way to. If you concede that you can build a conventional piston engine automobile that can get 100mpg, which is wasting 80% of it's heat energy, simply decreasing this loss to zero would put you at 500mpg.

YOu can get close to 100% efficiency on a piston engine if it is a STERLING cycle engine, which is an external combusion engine which can use a small amount of completely burned fuel, held in an insulated area around the cylinder, thus allowing almost NO heat energy to exit before it has been converted to kinetic energy.

So, by optimizing current engine and fuel system designs, 100mpg is easy. By using a vapor fuel system you can be in the 3-400mpg range, by burning vapor in a completely new, multi-stage engine that does not ignore half or more of it's fuels heat energy, you can multiply that by two or more, so you are then around 1000 mpg.

The first step to realizing this goal, and also in realizing a world that is paradise, freeing your mind from it's box and proceeding to work towards it.

If you think from what is already established, then you will doom your society to exist as it has until it destroys itself.

[Yellow77]

If any automaker could produce a large SUV that got 125 mpg with gasoline, it would devastate all the other car makers.