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Alternative Energy Series Cheap, Clean Energy Everywhere Now!
by Ed Howes
I had sincerely hoped to profit from the things I have learned
about energy over the past 20 years. Much time has passed without
progress. I never found anyone to help or encourage me to bring
these not so new technologies to market, so here I will offer
them to the world and see if anyone might find value in free information.
The combustion process 19th Century engineering gave us, I call
slow burn. Over the past century this technology has been retained
because it provided great profits to Big Oil, Big Energy, Big
Banking and Big Government, through fuel taxes; a very big conspiracy
to rip off global consumers. All have agreed on the desirability
of using more than twenty times the fossil fuel needed for inferior
performance that poisons the worlds air, soil and water.
Indeed, it may be demonstrated in the near future that liquid
fuel technology has squandered fifty times more fuel than needed
per developed horsepower.
Fast burn technology, developed by Canadian, Charles Pogue, in
the late nineteen forties, bought and suppressed by automakers,
is a fifty five year old solution.
Charles had easily solvable power problems with his hot vapor,
fast burn, gasoline fuel system. But he refused to address the
performance problem in his quest to achieve 300 mile per gallon
fuel economy, after successfully surpassing 200 miles per gallon
with a 1937 Ford V-8 sedan. This at a time when fuel was relatively
cheap in North America and few would trade power for economy.
I solved these problems in a simple fashion and never built a
conversion to demonstrate the solutions. This was due partly to
fear of the opposition and an unreliable sense of market timing.
The old slow burn technology makes just enough vapor in a combustion
chamber to light the mixture with a spark or compression heat
in a diesel engine. At the same time heat begins to vaporize liquid
fuel to a combustible state, pressures build to great heights
and prevent rapid vaporization of the remaining fuel. In addition,
the unvaporized fuel absorbs great amounts of heat that cannot
contribute to combustion pressure, which creates power. This rich
or fuel heavy mixture serves to lower and regulate the peak and
average combustion temperatures throughout an unnecessarily long
combustion cycle. This process uses a surplus of fuel that passes
out to atmosphere unburned. The catalytic converter was the industry
response to cleaning this unburned fuel.
Fast burn technology does just the opposite of slow burn. In a
slow burn four stroke combustion engine there is fire in the cylinder
for more than one complete crankshaft revolution. That is, somewhere
between 360 and 420 degrees of rotation. The power stroke is a
180 degree event and if we use a bicycle crank for comparison,
we can see that most of the power is delivered in half of the
full stroke, centered on the mid point. That is, cylinder pressure
creates the greatest torque when the piston is half way through
the power stroke. The engine will easily provide all the power
needed for cruise and moderate acceleration if there is only enough
fuel available to make cylinder pressure fifteen or twenty degrees
before and after the midpoint of the power stroke; a controlled
power stroke of thirty to forty degrees. This is controlled by
metering fuel so all fuel is burned up in an oxygen rich environment
and the emissions will now be hot air and trace amounts of oxides
of nitrogen.
Most children learn at a young age, they can pass their finger
through a candle flame without pain or injury by moving their
finger through the flame quickly. Such is the secret of fast burn
technology. Temperatures that would melt engine parts like valves
and pistons if maintained for four hundred degrees of crankshaft
rotation are no problem if the burn cycle only lasts for a maximum
of one hundred degrees in the case of maximum power. Performance
enthusiasts looking for that extra 50 horsepower by adding fuel,
are the ones most likely to melt parts. For these people - racers,
hot rodders; engines likely to melt at high power outputs and
too much fuel can and should be assembled with readily available
thermal barrier coatings to prevent melt downs.
About ten years ago I read that the slow burn performance engine
developed peak cylinder pressure at 15 to 18 degrees after top
dead center, early in the power stroke. What if we could develop
just twice that amount of cylinder pressure, three times as late
in the power stroke? That is, at 45 - 54 degrees after top dead
center. The answer is we would have more than three times the
power at the point of greatest mechanical advantage in the power
stroke as we do with the bicycle crank in the middle of its down
stroke.
When there is absolutely no liquid fuel in our air/fuel mixture,
the rate of combustion is many times greater than when there is
an abundance of liquid fuel, as in the 19th century slow burn
technology. This means we can supply spark much later and burn
all the fuel in thirty degrees or less crankshaft rotation. An
engine that can burn all its fuel in twenty degrees of crankshaft
rotation will deliver twenty times the fuel economy of an engine
that does not burn all its fuel in 400 degrees of rotation. Although
the fast burn engine might generate peak temperatures and cylinder
pressures three times higher than a slow burn engine, the burn
time is so dramatically shortened that the engine will actually
run cooler than slow burn engines. Smaller cooling systems will
do the job at lower water temperatures, like the 160 degrees of
old days.
It has never been the case that piston engines are inefficient
and they could serve us very well into the Twenty Second Century
as soon as we deep six their liquid, slow burn fuel systems. The
reasons Charles Pogue never realized the tremendous power potential
of his fast burn, 200 mile per gallon Ford sedan, was likely two
things. The hot gasoline vapor made with exhaust system heat and
inappropriate spark timing for an engine that required the spark
to come about eighty crank degrees later than the timing it had
as a slow burn factory engine. Combustion performance enthusiasts
the world over, know the coldest, densest air/fuel mixture makes
the best power. These people can also understand that making peak
cylinder pressures when the piston is near the top of the power
stroke, only tries to push the crankshaft out of the engine, onto
the ground - wasted energy like standing on the bicycle pedal
at the very top.
What we want is cold vapor fuel which is much more easily created
than Charles exhaust heated fuel. The secret is the vaporizing
power of vacuum. Success in cold vaporizing has been demonstrated
by radio frequency vaporizing chambers. But the piston engine
operates on a vacuum system. In the days of carburetors, vacuum
drew in the air to the engines cylinders and metered the
fuel fairly accurately by means of that same vacuum and simple
mechanical adjustments to fuel flow.
Modern electronic fuel injection is perhaps the most expensive
incremental improvement to slow burn technology in the Twentieth
Century. It served multiple purposes. It exchanged a good, simple
system, with a slightly better complex system. Computer controls
took auto repair out of the realm of backyard mechanics and restricted
it to $50 - 70 per hour service centers - a great big bonus for
the auto service industry and a big expense to the do -it -yourselfer.
I am no combustion engineer, nor do I wish to become one. I can
only say I intuitively expect two horsepower per cubic inch displacement
on any four stroke spark engine modified for cold vapor fuel,
using an appropriately sized carburetor as would be done on a
slow burn engine.
I further expect that a performance modification that would increase
the power of a slow burn engine by fifty percent, will increase
the power of a fast burn engine by sixty to one hundred per cent.
All the common power boosting practices work on fast burn engines
better than slow burn. Compression ratios are not critical as
the octane of pure vapor is up around 110. A 12 to one compression
ratio would be about 9 to 1 at 45 degrees after top dead center,
when the spark would occur at full power. While misfire can occur
as often as 3 - 4 cycles per hundred on a new V-8 engine, misfires
would be very rare with fast burn engines due to the lower compression
at ignition and the evenness of a lean air/vapor mixture. The
fast burn engine may be supercharged with a draw through carburetor
producing the vacuum to operate a fresh air bubbler at the bottom
of the fuel tank. If a richer vapor is desired in the bubbler,
a racing fuel cell can be used, packed with fuel cell foam, greatly
increasing the surface area exposed to liquid fuel, vacuum will
readily vaporize. Large metal fuel tanks should be reinforced
top and bottom by epoxying bar stock or angle stock, so they do
not collapse under vacuum.
Lastly, I would like to mention that fast burn technology is a
multi fuel system. With a little experimenting and fine tuning
of mixture and spark, a fast burn engine can burn gasoline, alcohol,
diesel, kerosene, vegetable oil, propane and liquefied natural
gas. The fuel with the greatest latent energy per pound will deliver
the best performance and the least powerful fuel will deliver
very adequate performance. If you are anxious to try a fast burn
conversion, please read my Fast Burn Conversion essay for tips
and details for a safe conversion. Heres to big, clean,
cheap power for the new age!
About the Author
Freelance writer published on many websites and newspapers. |