I’ve heard there’s a new technology on the market which easily enables a gas engine to use diesel fuel with greater efficiency and cleaner exhaust. Is this true? Where can more information about this technology be found? :dubious:
If this is true, such a technology could bring about a switch to a diesel economy…even biodiesel economy, thus allowing us to produce our own energy instead of importing oil from countries where terrorists come from.
Maybe the moderators of this forum can better serve us all by exposing the truth about this.
Is this technology just a myth, or is it for real? What’s the straight dope???
You just don’t learn, do you? Well, no actual spamming so I can’t report it…
Okay, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are asking an honest question that should have been asked before you invested in The Company Which Shall Not Be Named. And I cannot answer it, lacking the tech background.
By the way, your article said that The Piston Which Cannot Be Named was “positively evaluated by the world-famous laboratory, Ricardo Consulting Engineers in England.” Is a copy of that evaluation available? As a fan of 20th century racing cars and motorcycles I know that Sir Harry Ricardo did not die but was assumed into Heaven so his company does carry some weight with me.
This is a little confusing. Are you advocating retrofit of a conventional SI gasoline engine, or creation of a different type of diesel engine? I think you mean the latter; I can’t think why there’d be much interest in converting a gasoline engine in the modern economy, as I believe it would cost far more than making a new diesel engine in bulk.
Links to the actual technical papers would be helpful. I’ve searched around a bit and not seen the technical papers, only web generalizations.
It would be interesting too if the testing had been conducted with actual biodiesel fuels, as the combustion characteristics of those fuels are somewhat different than conventional diesels, and sometimes fuel NOx production can be surprisingly high (or low).
The company’s stock is now selling at 4 cents/share, after a long decline from 26 cents/share. It also has a gross margin of -55.3%. Therefore, I’m not sure anyone is really at risk for investing in the company unless they consult eenie, meenie, minee, and moe for stock choices.
Now…at 4 cents per share, that equates (using my prior formula of 2.2 cents/squeak, which Mr. Kennedy may dispute based on my enthronement of the farthing in a decimalized system) to roughly 1.8 squeaks a share. I’m willing to pay a commission fee of 0.2 squeaks, so let’s call it a nice round 2 squeaks/share. Just FYI.
More benefit of the doubt: I think what he’s getting at is “Can this piston actually make it so that an Otto-cycle engine can use just about any fuel I dump in its tank?”
In answer to your question, no, unfortunately there is no such technology. There were some early reports of such, but they were just taken from Internet spam. The whole thing turns out to be a huge scam.
I’m reasonably sure what JamesB is slyly alluding to is Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) – that was mentioned, as I recall, in the press release posted earlier. HCCI, with some exceptions, matches the “new technology on the market which easily enables a gas engine to use diesel fuel with greater efficiency and cleaner exhaust.” The exceptions being the “on the market” part and the “easily” part.
This is really a research-level technology. It’s promising, but has obstacles that need to be overcome. That being said, I’m not aware of any commercial HCCI application, other than the rumor of a specialty small engine (mmmm… leaf blower? chainsaw? something like that) available in Japan. So “on the market” would be a bit of an overstatement.
And “easily” would be a bit of an overstatement, too. In order to adopt a commercial engine to HCCI combustion, you’d need to overhaul not only the physical engine, but also the entire engine control strategy – boost, EGR, fuel ratios, speed transitions, everything. And even then (like I said, a research topic!) it’s unlikely the performance would be similar.
Here’s the two-paragraph overview of HCCI from Sandia (you can Google up more information on this, including peer-reviewed papers, but I didn’t feel like investing the effort given my current skepticism of the OP’s motives). You could characterize this as “using diesel fuel in a gasoline engine” (given the right compression ratio, among other things, you can port inject diesel fuel into a baseline gasoline engine) and it might very well give you “greater efficiency with cleaner exhaust” (for some definitions of “greater” and “cleaner”). But it ain’t a backyard mechanic retrofit.
Upon request, the Sonex company sent me a file with the report from Ricardo Consulting. It’s a pdf file, so I wasn’t able to post it here. If anyone is interested, they can either request a copy from the company, or me.
Ah. Sure, I’m interested; my email’s in my profile. Although I must admit that your question in the OP of this thread seems a bit disingenuous to me, given your previous postings, I’m still curious.
Why can’t you post it online somewhere? Free webspaces abound. Or, alternately, why doesn’t the Sonex company or Ricardo Consulting put it on their web servers? It seems like something they would get asked for fairly frequently.
Yeah, and while you’re at it, why don’t you cover up The Truth about Black Light Power and Dr. (M.D) Randy Mills’ amazing new discoveries in quantum physics that will revolutionize all of physical science and cosmology!
Man, you’re just ruining all the fun. I bet you don’t believe anything you hear on Coast To Coast AM.
All right, JamesB emailed me the Ricardo paper (thanks, James!). For those of you following along at home, what I received was SAE paper 2002-01-1682, The Reduction of Soot Emissions by the Use of a Piston with Micro-Chambers on a Medium Duty Diesel Engine, by B J Rogers, G Li and C H Such (from Ricardo Consulting Engineers Ltd). If you’ve got access to the SAE database, you can find it yourself, should you so desire.
Anyhow, it’s an experimental and computational review of a piston with small chambers drilled around the periphery of the bowl:
The implication is that these particular pistons are strictly for soot reduction in diesel engines, and not for incorporation in gasoline engines. The results are reasonably favorable, although not as favorable as the numbers mentioned on the manufacturer’s Web site:
There are a number of other caveats and so forth, should you wish to read them.
So. Soot reduction in diesels is a bit far afield from the Staff Report, no?
Well it sure ain’t new technology and it ain’t a myth but my 1945 Farmall H tractor has the duel fuel carburator on it. They ran gasoline and distillate-kerosene- as fuel. You started the engine with gasoline and then switched to distillate.
We have The Big Red Tractor show (read Farmall-International definately NOT John Deere)here in Mt Pleasant every few years. Since I’ve never ran the old tractor with distillate I keep asking the old tractor owners about the duel fuel engines.
They just look at me and say that guy over there may know.
Zut wrote:
Anyhow, it’s an experimental and computational review of a piston with small chambers drilled around the periphery of the bowl:
Quote:
The Sonex principle relies on a set of ‘micro-chambers’ embedded around the piston and connected to the combustion bowl by small passages. The transport of air and fuel to and from these micro-chambers is said to be responsible for soot reduction compared with a conventional piston bowl. This type of piston is referred to by Sonex as the ‘low soot’ design and should not be confused with the Stratified Charge Radical Ignition (SCRI) pistons which are intended for Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) engines.
The implication is that these particular pistons are strictly for soot reduction in diesel engines, and not for incorporation in gasoline engines. The results are reasonably favorable, although not as favorable as the numbers mentioned on the manufacturer’s Web site:
Quote:
At standard injection timing, significant soot reductions were observed with the Sonex pistons, principally at the peak torque speed, which amounted to a 33% soot reduction over the R49 cycle. Cycle NOx was increased by 4% and cycle fuel consumption remained at a similar level to the baseline.
There are a number of other caveats and so forth, should you wish to read them.
So. Soot reduction in diesels is a bit far afield from the Staff Report, no?
Ricardo Consulting merely confirmed the soot reduction in a diesel engine brought about by the Sonex piston. However, as stated, the piston with micro chambers allows spontaneous combustion at much lower compression ratios than those of a diesel engine. So the question is, why bother to manufacture a heavy weighted engine to accommodate high compression ignition to burn diesel fuel if you can achieve the same result with a much lighter engine?? Such is the beauty of Sonex.
PS. Sonex is already in use by the Marine Corps in their unmanned avaition vehicles. So, it also works outside of the lab. Read the article:
Well, there’s nothing inherently wrong with high compression ratios – you might actually prefer the higher volumetric efficiency gained with higher compression ratios. That’s neither here nor there, though.
I’m actually a bit intrigued by the microchamber jet idea. However, I should point out that the Ricardo paper was specifically focused on soot reduction (no “spontaneous combustion at much lower compression ratios”) and the paper specifically mentioned that they were not testing Sonex’s SCRI pistons. So that particular aspect is still interesting, but apparently not independently verified.
And your link only mentions Marine Corps application in passing. Given that the same link also overstates the soot reduction benefit (at least in comparison to the Ricardo test data), I’d prefer to see some real numbers. Is there another SAE paper, by any chance? [Oh my; I just checked – apparently there may be: SAE2004-01-1846. Well, I’ll check it out tomorrow.]
