I guess if someone wants to pay for the liposuction, I have some extra fuel

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Chris'
Autobody
Restoration
Service

I've played with water injection, and really found it to be a dead end. It does work by lowering the combustion temp and can control detonation. It goes in water, and comes out water in the form of vapour. I never found it to increase power or mileage to the level that proper octane or tuning would, but rather lower both. It does clean the chambers!

It makes sense that adding a charge of expanding steam could help with efficiency, but I never saw that result. Maybe if it could be injected late in the burn. Mostly it does not seem to stop the detonation until you add enough water to really kill power.

I think the problem is that you need to keep the fuel / air charge stable until it is fired by the spark plug. But then you need it to burn with a controlled burn. Enough water can do the first phase, but when it is time to burn it is too much and slows the burn down way too much. At that point the water is along for the ride and not helping, it is in the way. Adding more timing will not fix it, everything is just way out of wack at that point.

The water also turns to vapour in the intake tract and as it is heated in the chamber. I don't remember the exact expansion rate for water going from liquid to vapour, but it is high. This vapour displaces a good percentage of what could be fuel / air instead. So now your high performance, deep breathing engine is choking on water vapour. So while it may not be detonating, it's not making much power either.

So you can limp around with water injection on an engine that needs more octane, but getting more out of it is a pipe dream. It has been around for so long that it would have a solid track record if it actually worked well.

On the other hand using alcohol, to control detonation and as part of the fuel charge can really make some power. This has been done over and over again on many street turbo cars. They are able to drive around on normal pump gas with the alcohol only coming in under boost, making the kind of power that would otherwise need racing fuel.

I appreciate your comments. The tech support forum for Devils Own suggests straight denatured alchohol in their injection. They don;t go into any detailed anlaysis as you just did. They simply say, ditch the water, and go with denatured. It is nice to have a second opinion that agrees. I willtry it myself when the weather gets better.

Sam

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I agree that denatured is probably the best choice for alcohol. It is mostly ethanol and easy to get. I think it will make the most power, aside from maybe methanol, which has other issues.

With a street turbo that is otherwise dialed in, you can add the alcohol in somewhere below your present max boost and then turn up the boost a psi or two and check things out. You can proceed in steps like this without really having to touch your fuel systems program. It is real easy to add another 5 psi or more and however many horsepower that amounts to with your engine combo.

The one issue. If you run out of alcohol or your alcohol system fails during a full throttle, max boost run, your engine might be in real trouble before you can get your foot out of it. Keep the bottle full!

Matt Cramer's blog was recently updated with this topical link debunking Brown's gas generators for fuel economy improvement.

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一期一会
Too many people who were born on third base actually believe they've hit a triple.

Sorry for the double post. Something wierd popped up, and I thought it did not take.

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Hi Dan. I am glad you posted somthing that got my attention. I had been away too long. I've read that one, and others like it. I've seen similar web sites debunking global warming. You know, I am in a positition now to actually check this out. If I ever have an opportunity to drive a steady trip over relatively similar topography, I can run one tank of gas with the Browns gas supplied, and one with it turned off. It would be easy to do. The goal hasn;t been to make it cheaper to run the car. The goal was simply to experiment with this stuff. Priorities shifted a bit when I decided to focus on really fundamental things first, such as the electrical system, and getting the under hood temps down. Now I am really, really deep into my home renovation, and just am not thinking much about cars.


For the record, I create the hydrolized water on the workbench with a wall wart, and then a vacuum line draws air through this water, which is stored under the hood in a standard Ball jar, and into the TB. Does it work? I don;t know. It doesn;t seem to hurt anything. The gas mileage I have gotten with it in the system is pretty good. It is always in the low to mid 20's. Trouble is, I haven't turned it off to check it. This would be possible by just closing the little valve that controls how much air can flow.

The problem is, I drive the car such short, and varried distances, over quite varied terrain, with constantly changing weather conditions. . I just think getting any reliable numbers would be very hard.

I also think it is possible that we don;t know everything, about everything yet. When the French lady scientist first published the idea in the 1750's that energy incresed with the square of the speed, it was 100 years before the general scientific community bought it. Her ideas ran against the theories of Newton, who did not mention the square of the speed in any of his writing. Plus she was a woman. And, those who questioned here were pretty smart folks. After all, they were scientists working with the best, most current, and thought to be correct knowledge of the day.

A healthy scepticism of all ideas, no matter how firmly held by the world at large, can be very healthy. And that includes the idea that hyrodgen can increase gas mileage........ or not. People almost always assume incorrectly, that my open mindedness carries an agenda with it. I am the opposite of trying to prove, or disprove anything. I am just observing, with an open mind.

Sam

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Mmm...no, I disagree. Global-warming debunking sites are based on pseudoscientific handwaving built atop a political agenda. The Brown's-gas debunk is based on plain ol' physics.
This idea is addressed in the link — see the part about 'sample size of one'. It'd be simple to get reliable fuel economy/engine output/emissions results with and without the device...the problem is it would also be very costly.
Well in that case, it can only be a success, in that you have gotten to experimented with it.
Perhaps, but in this case we're not talking about guesses or theories or working models, we're talking about plain old simple arithmetic. No matter how much more we learn, 2 plus 2 will always equal 4, never 5, even for extremely large values of 2. Likewise, energy conversion efficiency is a very simple matter of energy in vs. usable energy out. There's no mystery lurking in the shadows, waiting to spring out at whoever happens to discover it, to explain away the simple fact that there is nothing such as something for nothing.

In any event, I look forward to seeing your renovations next time I'm in DC — maybe in January.

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一期一会
Too many people who were born on third base actually believe they've hit a triple.

The word usable is the key here. Einstein discovered that there is enormous energy in all matter. That matter and energy were interchangeable. I'm not saying we will figure out how to use or,access it safely and efficiently any time soon, but "never say never" is an oxymoron that kind of applies here.

No one has come up with a unified theory yet. And the greatest minds are working on it. Stephen Hawking, and the beautiful and intelligent Lisa Randall are two. But that doesn't mean there is n't one. We just haven't figured it out yet. As a matter of fact, there has to be one. If there were not, the universe would fall into chaos eventually. You have rightly said many, many times, that physical laws must be consistent to govern everything effectively. They have to. So, if no one has formulated a unified theory yet, it is possible that there is a piece of our "truth" that is missing an important element, such as Newton's failure to address the square of the speed in his theories. This may seem far afield from the topic at hand, but I try to apply the same mind set to everything I observe.

There really is no such thing as hard science. The hypothesis is it's downfall. As soon as you formulate a hypothesis, you effect the outcome of the observation. That has been "proven" so many times that it is almost a truism. People tend to see what they expect to see. So where does that leave us? I just enjoy the show. It's pretty entertaining.




Please feel welcome any time. January is such a gloomy month, it would be a great pick-me-up to have a visit from you.

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I agree there may be things we don't understand about how fuel burns in combination with other reactants. However, once you are extracting all the energy from a given amount of fuel (plus whatever else you are adding), there is simply no way to do better without redesigning your engine (higher compression, for example). All any additive can do is help you extract more energy up to the maximum.

Without controlled experiments, regardless of who is operating things, we are lost. Honestly, I don't know the answer here, but until someone shows me some good data, I can only assume people don't really want to know how well it works.


As a practicing scientist, I can tell you that I have hypotheses all the time that end up to be wrong and the experiments tell us something new - we discover new things regardless. Affecting the outcome is sometimes the case, and sometimes not.

Telling me that my hypothesis about far a ball will go if I throw it (Newton's Laws) will affect that result is "only a matter of opinion" to nonscientists. Some things are so well known that our predictions can be essentially perfect. Of course, if we look deeper, then sometimes we discover new things.

All I'm saying is that your above statement is both useful to scientists to be careful, but also "gives up hope" for why to study science - to reveal answers and new questions about the world around us.

If it's all subjective, then why bother? How do these computers work that we are all using? They were invented only through predictions and controlled experiments of many dedicated scientists. This is distinct from fire, which we discovered empirically and didn't know how it worked for 50,000 years.

My feeling is that almost everything now worth inventing will require substantial scientific knowledge and input. We are past the time of "garage inventors" dreaming up new devices and discovering phenomena that will affect our lives in profound ways. This is why we need young people interested in science.

Lou

BTW, the best argument I've heard for water injection is that it can allow you to run VERY high compression with regular fuel. This would in fact increase the thermodynamic efficiency of the engine (uses more fuel energy to make mechanical work rather than just waste heat). If you can run at 15:1 comp or higher, then you might get gains of 20-30% in mileage and power.

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Home of Slant6-powered fun machines since 1988

In a further defense of hypothesises, there are really too many ideas one could try out, and having a theory and an idea about what may be worth testing can save you a lot of trouble pursuing ideas which are completely pointless. An extreme and somewhat comical example: Is there any reason why "A small coil of copper wire in a plastic enclosure which is positioned over the negative terminal of the vehicle battery" should have any effect? But somebody actually tried it to improve mileage.Predictably, it failed.

The "Brown's gas" systems are not as patently absurd as the Fuel Maximiser in the above link, but if you look at the theory, is there any reason it's more likely to work than mixing your gasoline with water, sawing your intake manifold in half to put dimples in the inner surface and welding it back together, milling a starfish shape into the piston crowns, blocking half your intake ports with a redesigned gasket, adding chlorine to your fuel, or chrome plating your combustion chambers. Several of these were things people really tried and some were ideas I just made up on the spot, but it's easy to see how randomly trying random ideas just to see what happens without a good theory of why it should work could get, well, pretty time consuming with a low chance of a payoff.

Still, I'd like to repeat an offer I made on another forum: If anyone's willing to bring a car with one of the typical onboard hydrogen generators down to the Atlanta area, I'll see if I can arrange a dyno test, and if possible meter the fuel consumption during the test as well to see if this really does produce a measurable effect on vehicle efficiency. I don't intend to build such a test car myself, simply because I know I'd go all Mythbusters with it, sit down and calculate just how much hydrogen I'd need to be certain it would have a measurable effect, and then try to construct a generator capable of producing at least 300 liters per minute. (As you can see, I already did a lot of the calculations.)

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"Mad Scientist" Matt Cramer
'66 Dart - turbocharged 225
My blog - Mad Scientist Matt's Lair

I hope we did not scare Sam off... I was a bit "ranty"

Lou

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Home of Slant6-powered fun machines since 1988

I find hypothesis useful to prove something but I prefer empirical discovery for solving problems.

When I designed the device I hold a patent on I just kept making the device over and over until I blundered into a solution ...then refined it.

When I wanted to patent this invention I had to form a hypothesis .....get the engineering done and submit it.

I always work from the point of wanting to accomplish something....then looking at all the options . Sometimes you can buy the solution at Walmart.....sometimes it requires original thought.

Ten years after I invented a childs bike seat that put the child between the rider and the handlebars ,.....somebody patented it.

Its true......Sandy would rather thrash than do math......

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Yeah....Im the one who destroyed this rare, vintage automobile.....

"Wanting to accomplish something" involves little hypotheses throughout. The "something" is essentially a hypothesis.

A hypothesis has nothing to do with math, it is simply an idea for what might work. However, it is usually useful to know or consult some theory or past experiments to guide your thinking.

The word hypothesis is overly defined and formalized, in general. Most practicing scientists don't write down a bunch of things or do math before they test a hypothesis (new idea), they just do it and don't formalize it.

Lou

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Home of Slant6-powered fun machines since 1988

You mean the we did all that Science Fair paperwork for nothing?

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"When you find a big kettle of crazy, it's best not to stir it." - Pointy-haired Boss

1964 Valiant V200, 225/Pushbutton 904
BBD, CAI, HEI, LBP, AC, AM/FM/USB, EIEIO