F1technical.net

After the article posted on FIA site, in which Mosley says:

... after our meeting in Nice and then the meeting we held with all the F1 teams... all the issues that did exist between the GPMA, the manufacturers and the FIA have been resolved.

We have complete agreement on all the issues. The engine freeze came forward to 2007...

We want to make the research work done in F1 not just cost-effective but also road relevant... in particular things which are relevant to ... the reduction of the output of CO2. That's why in the shorter term we are looking at energy-recovery and re-use from braking. That will come in 2009. We will come out with a regulation before the end of this year. And then recovery and re-use of the excess heat or waste heat from the engines. We intend to have a regulation for that before 2010. Both those things are currently fundamental to road car research.

I wonder:

how do you recover the heat of the exhaust?

First, a turbo, I guess. Then what? The push-to-pass proposed system can be "charged" with regenerative braking, so what on earth do you do with the heat if your batteries or flywheels or whatever are "full"?

Preheat the fuel? That's nothing and I guess they already do it.

Drive a heat pump, like the one they use in nuclear plants that drives an hydraulic system?

A steam generator like the ones they use on gas turbines?

The more I think about this, the more revolutionary it seems. Excess heat is wasted everywhere energy is used...

With the proposed rules for 2008, another apparently unsurmountable condition is that the heat energy has to be transferred as mechanical energy to the only engine allowed by the rules.

gizmag.com reported on such a system by BMW (for production cars) that improved power -and- consumption. It was even installable on several current models that weren't actually designed for it.
I'm currently too lazy to search for the link though :p.

[edit]
Seems I have nothing better to do:
http://www.gizmag.com/go/4936/

Thanks, bro. A steamer...

Now, another question: what is "an expansion unit linked to the crankshaft of the internal combustion engine"? Bored anyone?

Now I "see" why they forbid another engine or motor besides the "normal one": BMW has developed its system that way. At last, I have another candidate for conspiration theories...

Oh, where is that magazine...I just threw out 26 years of old car mags.

I remember the late, great Smokey Yunick had a Plymouth Horizon fitted with what I recall as an "adiabatic homogenizer," was his term. It would have been in Car & Driver about 1985.

Basically it was a modified draw-through turbo that recovered the the exhaust heat as all turbos do, but mixed and superheated the fuel too, somehow, which is what he referred to as the "homoginization." This put the fuel into the engine vaporized and just below ignition temperature. This created alot of power from a small engine.

I can't remember what he did to the turbo, and I think he didn't exactly spell it out anyway. Hmmmm, gotta look around the net now...

Sorry to dive off-topic but thats a nice new avatar you got there Ted, another Manchild job? I've just been on his site and found about 10 new ones than when I was last there.

removal

Here's a link to a translated Swedish article about Smokey's engine. Damned interesting still. Nice schematic of the assembly. Acceleration of 0-100 km/h in 5.9 sec. and 50+ mpg, 21 km/l!

Might make a nice winter project....

http://schou.dk/hvce/

Yes it is a cool avatar. I asked for a fake Porsche F1 car based on on the RS Spyder. He did it in the original yellow/red DHL livery and since it looked like a Jordan, he redid it in '73 911 RS colors. Three versions in all. Great Job, huh?!

It's too bad Smokey died. Many, many great ideas and alot of know how died with him. He was one of the best along with Lingenfelter, Banks and others at making stupid easy power from the internal combustion engine. He tried things 40 years ago that people think now is brand new technology.

Thanks for Mr. Yunick's reference. It seems like a low-pressure turbo with preheating of fuel, which should increase efficiency. How he avoided pre-ignition is a mistery.

After googlin' a while I find an explanation for the news. What I didn't understand of FIA's proposal in the beginning was the fundament.

Let me put it this way: the efficiency range of engines goes from 25% in a car engine (75% of energy is waste heat) to 60% for a gas turbine with combined cycle (you only "waste" 40 percent of the fuel). It seems awfully hard to improve efficiency by 35% putting gadgets on petrol engines. Why not propose directly gas turbines, specially when more countries are falling back to natural gas? Well, I suppose I can answer myself that gas turbines are not good for racing and are pretty expensive because of the high rotational speed.

However, perhaps, there is another logic behind the proposal: try to build a petrol engine that uses the same principles of a combined cycle engine.

Actually, most thermodynamic cycles get around 30% of the latent fuel heat. The gas turbine by itself has no magic thermodynamic properties: simply, at electric generators driven by gas turbines, the excess heat is so evident and localized that this was used to drive a steam turbine "in parallel" to produce more electricity. You use two cycles to extract double the energy from fuel.

Examples of combined cycles include the Brayton cycle or constant-pressure cycle, that originally used two cilynders, one for compression and another for expansion, or the Rankine cycle, like the one used in steam generators/condensers in nuclear plants. We had a thread on six-stroke engines, which uses a combined cycle.

The most sophisticated generators can reach 85% eficiency, which is triple the efficiency of the petrol engine. They are expensive in capital costs and few have been constructed. Here you have an example:

Coal Gasification and Combined Cycle


You crush the coal and extract oxygen from air to the left, gassify it in the orange thingy in the middle, extract the ashes and sulphur in the brown boxes and the CO2 in the green ones, pass it through a gas turbine and use the excess heat to drive a steam turbine in the blue and red boxes.

IF every electric generator in the world used this technology AND the CO2 scrubbers in the exhausts could work (in the "non-defined" acid chemical plant connected to the yellow box to the right), then I guess we could end switching paradoxically to electric-driven cars powered by these kind of coal plants to avoid CO2 contamination.

So, what I see in FIA/GPMA's proposal is a steam engine driven by the petrol engine.

Anyway, cars use petrol engines and they are not going to disappear tomorrow. At Autoblog there is an article on the BMW (not precissely GPMA ) initiative. It is essentially what the news reported by Principessa say: a steam generator at the end of the exhaust pipe (I wonder why there and lose the heat radiated by the pipe), as shown in the link:



The device has a small steam turbine that drives the crankshaft through a belt. It seems an effort to promote another "gas saver". The problem, like with all gas savers, is the capital cost, as BMW has made all efforts to be able to retrofit the current fleet (perhaps this explains the steam generator at the end of the pipe).

Putting this in F1 is a publicity stunt, if you ask me.

Most people don't know or forgot this from school, but trees absorb massive amounts of CO2. They turn it back into oxygen, so the problem can be solved by planting and not cutting down trees.

Sure, Ray. However, you could cut the trees and build more concrete buildings and reach the same end result (well, this is one of my elaborated and lame jokes or perhaps it's not).

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/22/news/smog.php

That's pretty interesting Ciro. I didn't know anything about that. That said, I like trees better. Conrete doesn't do it for me.

Here's what Smokey filed with the U.S. Patent office. A bit more technical. Yes, this is beating a dead horse but I'm bored...

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Pars ... cle+engine"

No Ted -- Your not beating a dead horse but showing us how to flog extra HP out of the ICE -- looking at these patent abstracts probably horrify's you, me and a lot of other people -- a few of these ideas occurred to all of us over the years -- but I never built any prototypes or applied for a patent, too much brainstorming with friends and scotch over a bar table instead of working over a drafting table -- to much Miller Time instead of milling machine time -- see you on the forum.

i collected all of smokeys books and im working on his tech articles simply amazing man i recomend you all go pick up a copy of Best Damn Garage in Town right now