Combustion Models -- Getting the Most Bang for the Fuel Buck! -- Part I

September 27, 2002

In our last article we mentioned that our main focus in the next edition is combustion -- getting more bang for the buck. During the summer months we've been busy building equipment and testing it with a variety of fuels & blends of fuels to determine how we can get more power at a lower overall cost. Some of the experiments and subsequent demonstrations involved piston engines & new burner designs. We used a V6 3.8-liter Buick engine to determine a baseline to compare other experiments to. 

By pre-processing hydrocarbon fuels through pyrocatalytic devices into a vapor state and directly introducing the vapor into the engine, we were able to run this standard spark ignition engine on a multitude of fuels -- including alcohol, crankcase oil, and soybean oil.

No matter what temperatures we subjected the hydrocarbons to, no matter what we did to pre-mix the fuel and air, the result was the same: fuel consumption remained at 14.7:1. 

One of our goals was to determine if we could in fact double or triple an automobile's mileage using techniques similar to those used by high mileage carburetor experimenters & advocates. Even though we didn't achieve a drastic improvement in fuel economy, the experimentation proved essential to our developments in ultra-clean burner technology.

Now some of you may ask why we are concerned with ultra-clean combustion. Well, there are several good reasons. First of all, our main goal in working with boundary layer turbines is to replace the 100-year old I. C. piston gas and diesel engines with a new engine that delivers more power with less pollution, and a lower cost to produce & maintain.

As environmental scientists it is our responsibility to provide key solutions to the global pollution problems facing the entire world today, and to drive these solutions into widespread use before the near-sighted industrialists can completely destroy natural ecological systems that are now on their way down.

We've determined that no matter what you do to improve a gasoline or diesel piston engine, by nature they must pollute -- the basic chemistry and mathematics of their combustion cycles cannot be altered, or the engines simply would not work!

Since fool cells will not be ready for widespread use for another 10-20 years, the only real solution to the global pollution problem is a low-cost disk-type turbine with improved efficiency and ultra-clean combustion.

We are actually working with two combustion models to fill all of the applications of motive power. One model uses pulse direct combustion and the other uses a closed-loop steam (or other vapor) cycle. Both systems have their good points and bad points, so both are viable solutions -- depending on the application.

Pulse Direct Combustion

While not quite as clean burning as steam generator burners, pulse combustors are much cleaner than piston combustion cycles, and their simplicity makes them excellent candidates for automotive and other vehicular applications.

Traditional pulse combustors use natural tube length frequencies to compress and detonate combustible mixtures. Our methods use valving, low pressure air compression, and spark timing to shape the "envelope of detonation", allowing us to create reliable pulse burn at much lower frequencies per tube length. The results, compared to continuous burn, are: more of the potential energy of the combustible mixture is transformed into kinetic gas energy, less into useless heat -- which transforms into higher overall engine efficiencies and lower NO_x production.

As the global fuel infrastructure migrates toward hydrogen gas, using pulse direct combustion will result in zero emissions. Even migrating to growable fuels results in zero net gain emissions! Also, by employing heat recovery systems on this design, overall efficiencies of 90% - 98% can be achieved.

Closed Loop Steam/Vapor Cycle

For applications where lowest possible emissions from fossil fuels must be realized, our second approach using our ultra-clean burner technology is the best choice. As mentioned earlier, our experiments with fuel processing for gas and diesel piston engines laid the ground work for our ultra-clean burner.

Now a lot of people may say that they can get ultra-clean burn from natural gas or propane -- that's true. What we are talking about is getting ultra-clean burn from a mixture of crankcase oil and industrial solvents -- normally waste products from automotive & manufacturing industries. Some of you may have heard about these waste oil burners people are buying to burn-off waste oils in their shops. Claims of extremely clean burn are common -- but look at the color of the flame.

Hydrogen burns with a yellow flame, carbon burns with a blue flame. If you turn on your gas stove and view the flame, you will see regions of colors -- blue near the burner head, yellow near the flame tips, white between. A typical waste oil burner that produces a yellow flame is only burning the hydrogen content of the fuel. Our burner flames are identical to a gas stove flame -- complete combustion of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen -- from heavy waste oils!

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