New "Shockwave" Engine Design Solves Energy Crisis

[Darkauthor81]

Sweet so make a working engine that produces some HP and Torque numbers and compare it to an existing engine and see how the figures stack up.

otherwise color me uninterested in theorycrafting.

It's not for HP and Torque. It's to turn a generator which powers an electric engine. Turning a generator doesn't require hp and torque. The great thing about this is: that it turns that generator with amazing efficiency and doesn't need several big, heavy car parts that a traditional combustion engine needs.

In the end it still needs gas. But it uses gas much more efficiently and allows the car to be 20% lighter. The end result is a car with an electric motor that runs on gas. 1/3 to 1/4 as much gas as what a normal car needs to run. No having to plug it in and no severe limitations on how far it can go like what battery run electric cars have.

It says all this plainly in the article so I really doubt you actually read it.

Color me interested in a car that can go 90 miles on a gallon of gas.

 

[Alar]

This will never see mass production. Someone will buy it and shelve it. Don't get your hopes up, it's not going to happen.

 

[Darkauthor81]

Ok, that's pretty cool. Why hasn't this idea been come up with before - I mean, where are the car companies' research funds going?! If it works well enough, it could be pretty sweet, and might even make alternative fuels easier to deploy - hydrogen, for example.

This doesn't make any sense... how do they direct the force of the ignited gas to only one direction? Wouldn't the explosion provide an equal torque clockwise and counterclockwise thus keeping the turning stationary?

No, the curves in the channels create vectored emissions. Think of how a wind-turbine works, or a water turbine. Similar idea.

I'm not a mechanical engineer, but I suppose it's possible that a drive shaft could also be attached to this engine to eventually transfer the energy to the wheels of a car. What's not clear is whether this shockwave engine will produce enough torque to start a heavy car moving from 0 mph, but hopefully the reduced weight of the vehicle would make that possible.

It's about powering hybrid vehicles - the idea being you use it as a generator (he says 25kW, apparently suitable for a utility or goods vehicle though I'm not sure of that) to burn your fuel more efficiently than a traditional engine does, for the purposes of generating electricity that would then be used to drive the electric motors that actually make the vehicle go. Not as a direct driver of the wheels itself. I think an aspect of this system is that it generates little torque - problematic if you're trying to shift a heavy vehicle, but fine for spinning magnets in coils!

But a wind turbine is hit by wind perpendicularly to the turbine, from what I read in the article it sounds like this ignites gas while it's sitting between two of the raised ridges.

The gas in the middle of the device, simply, explodes. Those spiraling curves turn that outward push into a forward push which makes the turbine spin.

And it doesn't move the car, it moves an electric generator that powers an electric motor. That electric motor moves the car. This device doesn't produce more torque, certainly not enough to get a car moving, but you don't need much torque to get a generator moving and electric engines produce plenty of torque. So you're using gas to move a generator, the generator powers and electric engine, the electric engine moves the car.

It's strange and confusing, I know, but it's a much better system than what we're using now and will result in cars that run on gas like any normal car but can go 90 miles or more on a single gallon of fuel.

 

[BENZOOKA]

That's interesting. Hearing about new inventions like this one always cheers me up a bit.

 

[rsvp42]

Reduces petrol consumption by 90%? IE, 10 times most efficient than what we have now?

According to this article, current engines are only 15% efficient...doesn't this mean that this engine is 150% effective? Um...

If one engine design gets 50mpg and a new one gets 125mpg, that's a 150% increase in fuel-efficiency. Math.

 

[derektheviking]

Reduces petrol consumption by 90%? IE, 10 times most efficient than what we have now?

According to this article, current engines are only 15% efficient...doesn't this mean that this engine is 150% effective? Um...

If one engine design gets 50mpg and a new one gets 125mpg, that's a 150% increase in fuel-efficiency. Math.

There's a point being missed here - or a couple, actually. Firstly, in the video it doesn't mention a reduction in petrol of consumption of 90% - he actually quotes a reduction of 80%.

I remain skeptical of this.

The actual efficiency of automobile IC engines can be up to about 25%, and just about the most efficient thermal technologies available (Combined Cycle Gas Turbines - you wouldn't want one of them in your car!) are only about 60% efficient, because any thermal engine has the Carnot limit to worry about (Short story - unless you can raise the temperature of the working fluid high enough so that the condenser reservoir looks like near enough absolute zero, you won't get 100% efficiency). So we could maybe get twice the fuel economy of a good IC engine through other forms of combustion.

That leaves a heck of a lot of weight reduction.

[EDIT} - I just realised what this technology actually is - it's a centrifugal Ramjet. SO I'd be surprised it the efficiencies are actually that high anyway (Not saying it's not worth it for weight reduction, but now I'm thinking it's going to be a materials challenge. There's a reason why gas turbines have separate combustion chambers, and there's a reason why their first stage turbine blades are made of precision engineered, actively cooled nickel superalloys!)

 

[harvz]

theres no way that is getting put to use anytime soon, the petrol companies wont let it...doesn't this sound like oh so many games?

 

[ObsessiveSketch]

Well, even though they got DESTROYED by Alabama in their bowl game, Go Sparty!

Also, the inventor of an engine to replace the internal combustion engine WOULD be German XD

 

[Johnnyallstar]

Being a bit of a grease monkey, I want to see some power/torque ratios first. I mean, I'm all for making cars more efficient in terms of gas mileage and power transfer, but I'm still a fan of the old internal combustion engine because of the raw power it makes.

But the biggest issue I have is that most people think that electric cars don't burn nearly as much fuel as what an IC engine does. It does, but just not in the same way, and not always from the same sources.

Unless you have the majority of your electric power being sourced from a nuclear facility, or hydro-electrical dams, you probably have either a natural gas or coal fueled power plant. The additional burden placed onto the electric companies for electric cars means they have to burn more fuel. You get that as electricity, instead of as gasoline in your car. Lets face it, in physics, there's no such thing as a free lunch. To move something so far you have to have a set amount of energy put into the system.

I can't remember the source off the top of my head, but I remember the numbers. If you get energy from a natural gas, or coal based electric company in America, and you drive a Nissan Leaf or Chevy Volt, you get 99 or 96 miles per gallon of gasoline respectively, but the excess pollution produced by the electric company is equivalent to roughly 3 gallons of gasoline burned. The Volt only averages 23.5 mpg total fuel displacement, and the Leaf 26 mpg.

Long story, short and ugly, hybrids really make people feel better because they unload the "pollution" burden onto their electric companies which makes them feel like they're saving the world, but it's really just a shell game of pollution production.

 

[whaleswiththumbs]

I'm sorry, but I'm getting more annoyed about every little invention that 'solves the X crisis' while still using oil.

No people, recycling or Shockwaving isn't saving the world, its just not screwing it up as fast. End of!

Well, if i read this right, it could really use any combustable liquids... Let's run them on vodka... Then if you break down in the complete middle of nowhere, well, you got one solution...

OT:
I can see how heavily they took a Tesla(i believe it is tesla's idea) engine and altered it alittle for their purpose. I'm sure Tesla would have been fine with it, but we could give him some credit for it.

 

[(LK)]

There is really no good reason to attach this motor directly to a drive shaft. Hybrid technology has a number of inherent benefits in efficiency, one of the most obvious being the ability to maintain a fixed, optimal RPM range constantly.

Once you've redesigned a car such that you're using a totally different engine, there is zero reason to continue using the same old driveshaft technology to transfer power.

Hybrid technology has a certain inherent superiority for fuel efficiency and this is part of the reason why it's been used in railroad locomotives for nearly a century. The real developments that brought about practical hybrid cars were in battery and electric motor engineering that made a hybrid power source in a compact space feasible.

With those advances now being made, there isn't really any good reason for a car already using a new type of engine to continue using an older, suboptimal way of transferring power to the wheels. You're always going to get more efficiency out of an engine if you can keep it constantly within an optimal RPM range, where it operates most effectively. A direct mechanical linkage to the wheels makes doing that complicated, and you end up wasting a huge amount of mass on transmissions and differentials whose weight you have to burn fuel to drag along with you, which just compounds all the efficiency losses that are already inherent in their design (friction losses, etc.)

tl;dr - connecting the engine to the wheels is part of why reciprocating engine cars are inefficient.

 

[Frozen Donkey Wheel2]

Well, assuming it works, I'll say it again:

WE ARE IN. THE FUCKING. FUTURE.

 

[ace_of_something]

It does kinda look like the 'chantry' symbol from the Dragon Age series.

 

[murphy7801]

Of course he has a German accent... As any real American scientist...

American industry is suffering a little maybe they need to steal some more nazi scientists!

 

[murphy7801]

It does kinda look like the 'chantry' symbol from the Dragon Age series.

They made the engine tranquil!

 

[faefrost]

Ok, that's pretty cool. Why hasn't this idea been come up with before - I mean, where are the car companies' research funds going?! If it works well enough, it could be pretty sweet, and might even make alternative fuels easier to deploy - hydrogen, for example.

This doesn't make any sense... how do they direct the force of the ignited gas to only one direction? Wouldn't the explosion provide an equal torque clockwise and counterclockwise thus keeping the turning stationary?

No, the curves in the channels create vectored emissions. Think of how a wind-turbine works, or a water turbine. Similar idea.

But a wind turbine is hit by wind perpendicularly to the turbine, from what I read in the article it sounds like this ignites gas while it's sitting between two of the raised ridges.

No, the gas is in the centre of a spiral of channels, so its expansion out through the parallel spirals generates angular motion.

So you're saying the expansion forces it to hit the turbine perpendicularly at a high speed? That actually makes a lot of sense, I'm sure pistons waste a lot of energy by traveling in two different directions, so this might really be a major breakthrough.

Actually the core tech behind this has been around for years. Just no one has applied it this way. This type of design has been used as a more efficient way to pump water (essentially this engine concept working backwards) for almost 30 years now. The best example of this is Fire Trucks. Up to the 70's many trucks used a traditional Piston pump to pump water. Since the 1980's most new trucks were built to use a centripetal pump (almost exactly what this shockwave is,). The old piston pumps could at most get about 1000 gallons per minute (maybe, on a good day). and that was using complex mechanisms to get power off of both strokes of the piston (something modern engines don't do.) The centripetal pumps will do 4500 to 6000 gallons per minute. They are just that much more efficient. I can easily see how the same concept can be used to leverage a gas powered engine. (heck I think the C&O railroad experimented with a coal powered turbine engine right at the end of the steam era that worked somewhat similarly).

So this probably is a valid concept.

 

[DanDeFool]

I'm sorry, but I'm getting more annoyed about every little invention that 'solves the X crisis' while still using oil.

No people, recycling or Shockwaving isn't saving the world, its just not screwing it up as fast. End of!

Alright, stop using anything petroleum and oil-based this instant, and see how things work out for you. If you think its so easy to go cold-turkey off of oil, then put your money where your mouth is.

And while you are busy not doing that, it proves a point. Alternative energy isn't quite at the level to be completely effective for us. It can be expensive as sin, and would require a large shift to even get started. We would be lucky to be running Alternative-only after several years of getting it competitive, because that's just how things are.

And on top of that, there isn't any energy storage system that's as functional as fossil fuels; in terms of cost, weight, and volume per unit of energy.

I'm not a mechanical engineer, but I suppose it's possible that a drive shaft could also be attached to this engine to eventually transfer the energy to the wheels of a car. What's not clear is whether this shockwave engine will produce enough torque to start a heavy car moving from 0 mph, but hopefully the reduced weight of the vehicle would make that possible.

The motor wouldn't need to produce a lot of torque if it's used to produce electricity. If you have existing battery storage (you wouldn't need as much as you do for current hybrid vehicles), you can use your batteries to get the car moving while the motor spins up. Once the motor's at operating speed, it can keep running at a constant rate, producing electricity to charge batteries or capacitors from which the electric motors can draw power.

This is how gas turbines are used to produce electricity, but a turbine isn't a very effective solution for a small vehicle. This motor could do the same thing at the small scale, assuming it's practical.

Pshh, like OPEC would let that thing go into mass-production without a fight. I think we are still years away from something that will truly solve the energy crisis.

Conspiracy theories aside, the biggest obstacle to the adoption of this type of system would be that automakers will have to scrap a tremendous amount of infrastructure if they were to go from producing the ridiculously complex internal combustion engines we have today to a simpler system like the one shown here. That's a big change, and it's going to have to happen slowly. Not to mention that a lot of people are going to lose their jobs when the parts they're involved in making suddenly become obsolete. Forget OPEC, the unions are going to be a bigger obstacle to the adoption of any kind of new engine technology.

And of course, as we gamers have seen with SEGA, being the quickest to innovate doesn't necessarily make you the biggest winner in business.

But as for solving the energy crisis, the substantial majority of our current petroleum usage comes from transportation, and a big chunk of that is cars and trucks. Considering how wasteful current engines are, if we could double or triple the fuel efficiency of all the new vehicles produced, we could take a big chunk out of the demand for gas and diesel. It won't solve the energy crisis per se, but it'll certainly help make fuel prices more manageable for the foreseeable future.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Reduces petrol consumption by 90%? IE, 10 times most efficient than what we have now?

According to this article, current engines are only 15% efficient...doesn't this mean that this engine is 150% effective? Um...

If one engine design gets 50mpg and a new one gets 125mpg, that's a 150% increase in fuel-efficiency. Math.

Which, is all very well, except it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

According to the article, current engines are 15% efficient, that is, they use only 15% of the total energy present in the fuel they consume. For each unit of total energy, they only get 0.15 units of energy they actually use, the rest being wasted. From 10 units, you get 1.5 in usuable energy, and so on.

For this engine to cut fuel consumption by 90%, it has to be able to get the same energy output from 1 unit of fuel the old one did with 10, that is, it has to be 10 times more efficient than the old sort of engines.

So, instead of needing 10 units of total energy to get 1.5 units of usable energy, you only need 1, given you an efficiency of 150%.

 

[Catalyst6]

I'm sorry, but I'm getting more annoyed about every little invention that 'solves the X crisis' while still using oil.

No people, recycling or Shockwaving isn't saving the world, its just not screwing it up as fast. End of!

Every energy innovation since the dawn of time has been based around inventing a source of energy, then improving upon it until it's practical, then improving until something better is created. "Alternative sources" are still in step two, meanwhile scientists are making positive progress with what they have. Even the smallest improvement is postive progress, and this is a pretty good one.

If it really bothers you then feel free to get a degree in physics/chemistry and get on the issue yourself!

 

[RicoADF]

It looks like a good step in the right direction