The news report below says it all. The man in the story “cryogenically tempers” car engines, tools, golf clubs and even razors to purportedly vastly extend life and performance. Even dunked his auto brakes in liquid nitrogen and suggests they might last decades.
Lots of “huh?” factor going on here. Care to refute or corroborate? :rolleyes:
David Hutchison is a Cryogenics expert. He built this Cryo-Process himself. He runs a business out of his garage where he cryogenically tempers all kinds of metals. He submerges them in a frozen tank of nitrogen vapor that is 300 degrees below zero.
David says, “During that time, at minus 300 degrees, the molecules slow down. Then they reorganize themselves. That’s when the actual chemical change happens.”
Hutchison cryogenically tempers machine parts, tools, golf clubs and even razors. He says it makes them last three to five times longer.
A few years ago he began an experiment on his hybrid Honda, freezing the engine components. The results were a fuel-efficiency dream.
David Hutchison says, “You should expect a “Cryo’d” engine to last anywhere from 600,000 to 1 million miles without wearing out.”
A hybrid Honda typically gets really great gas mileage anyway, around 50 miles to the gallon, but David Hutchison’s cryogenically tempered engine has been known to get close to 120 miles a gallon.
Part of the story sounds reasonable. Heating and cooling metals can affect the properties of the metal, that’s been known for a long time. Whether cryogenic freezing can do the same thing as heating/quenching, is a matter for experimentation, but I see no reason to discount it out of hand.
Now, 120mpg in a production vehicle that has only been altered by cryogenically freezing engine parts, that I don’t think is reasonable. How does changing the physical properties of the metal engine part make the engine twice as efficient? All the metal does is contain the burning fuel and move back and forth/around when pushed by the expansion of gasses. There is no way I can see a simple change in molecular alignment changing how much fuel it takes to make a piston go up and down.
As an analogy, one could easily see how changing a brake rotor from one steel alloy to a different steel will change how long it lasts. Changing a piston from one steel to another (of the same weight and dimension) couldn’t possibly have a noticeable effect on efficiency. Durability? Maybe. Efficiency? No way.
This makes no sense, even if I am not a physicist. You temper thing with heat. By defition, molecules (outside of particularly odd concotions) don’t make a checmical change at extremely low temperatures (for that molecule). They don’t have any energy to change or shift.
I think this is actually above the theoretical upper limit (as in, it can’t be breahced without violating the laws of physics) for that car model. Nor can I see how tempering the metals would do this anyway. I can certainly see it having some effect, but I don’t see it doing the things its claimed for.
Then again, I Am Not An Engineer Or Phsyicist.
Unless he proposes a mechanism by which the mileage is improved, I’m not buying that part of it. But curiously, there might actually be somescience behind the claims of enhanced durability.
A quick skimming of the cited article makes it seem that there are actual measurable changes in the crystalline structure of tool steels that have been subjected to cryogenic treatment. Their key conclusion: “cryogenic treatment improves the preferential precipitation of fine n-carbides instead of e-carbides. These fine carbide particles enhance the strength and toughness of the martensite matrix and then increase the wear resistance.”
Of course, one scientific paper does not a summer make. So draw your own conclusions…
The milage claim is bogus but the cryogenic treatment has been popular for firearms for a few years now. I doubt if he actually submerges parts in liquid nitrogen as the rapid contraction might actually deform parts slightly. One of the companies that treats firearm parts say they control the cooling and warming to ambient temperature process so it takes over 24 hours.
Doing a search via Google for “Cryogenic Treatment Auto Parts” and similar items will result in many organizations offering such processing. The professional scientific community is doubtful of the claims made.
Caveat Emptor!
I’m surprised that our resident toolmaker Tuckerfan hasn’t arrived in this thread. One issue of Job Shop magazine was devoted to cryo treatment of metals, and in some applications, it is better and more controllable than traditional heat treating, IIRC.