@FarrahDay Sounds like you had to spend a lot of time and money on modifications to that VW, AC - given the cost of fuel as it currently is, are you not still employing this tactic nowadays? I didn't spend a great deal of money as I had little at that age and most of the money I had was from hauling hay bales all summer and other chores. As well we were on the farm and had piles of old machinery and parts and old vehicles to scavenge from. I miss those days, when a person was young and could let their imagination run wild and had the time to fabricate things from almost nothing but piles of junk, lol, I made wind generators, co-generators, go-carts, motorcycles, hovercraft, iceboats, power boats from plywood and a 5hp B&S etc... . Sometimes we don't know how good we had it until it is gone, sigh.... time is not on our side. The problem with this conversion in this day and age is all the darn electronics which are designed to operate a certain way and when a parameter is changed the computer starts correcting in the wrong direction or shuts down. In the good old days things were easy and when something went wrong I knew how to fix it on the spot, all I needed was my tool box and there was a very good chance it could be made to work. If you are interested I can go through the exact process and answer any questions you may have as this system and the HHO system are similar. In themselves I think HHO and water mean little as you say they are not a fuel and I agree because there is always an issue of energy state and conversion losses. However there is no rule saying we cannot use them to make something already present better. I used water injected as a fine mist to moderate the combustion temperature since the latent heat of vaporization is 2257KJ/Kg and if the internal temperature can be moderated initially then pre-detonation can be controlled. My thoughts were that the combustion temp must remain high to produce a high power to weight ratio however not high during the entire cycle. We add enough water to get past the pre-detonation stage yet not so much it can carry a great deal of heat in the form of steam out the exhaust pipe which has not performed real work. There is also another benefit if the EGT is monitored because an engine could quite literally be impossible to overheat at any power level, we should remember that damage is a result of a high "average temperature" which is not to say the beginning can be cool and the end very hot. I remember the fact that I could run that darn little engine hard all day long at high revs and I wanted it to blow up to determine it's limitations but I never could, heat may make it work but in the same light it is too much heat which will destroy it. In this respect water is the perfect fluid because it can absorb a huge amount of energy during it's phase change to steam and do so in a very short span of time. Here is an analogy, we are in a closed room full of fuel/air then in the corner a spark is initiated, next we see a wall of flame advancing towards us in slow motion. However since the room is closed the pressure starts rising and a wall of pressure is also advancing ahead of the wall of flames. Next this pressure wave ahead of the wall of flame hits the corners and fires break out at that point due to the heat from the last wall of flame. There is also radiant heat and while the wall of flame is a ways away from us we can feel the heat just as we feel the heat from a fireplace without being in it. We now have individual fires confined by a wave of pressure which generate their own pressure waves due to expansion at which point the pressure and heat causes the area around the flames to instantly combust all at once. These confined explosions are pre-detonations which limit the compression ratio and the fuel/air mixture. Now we are in the same room full of fuel/air but there is also more water vapor present. The fuel/air is ignited and our wall of flame advances however this time the flame is obscured because there is a white mist in front of it which is from the water vapor flashing into steam. This limits the radiant heat from the wall of flame we felt before acting like a blanket of steam around it and the pressure wave which caused the individual fires to pre-ignite in the corners also are covered in a blanket of steam which appears the moment a flame appears. The heat is still present and the pressure is still present however the energy absorbed by the water vapor in it's transition from water to steam has moderated the speed at which the reactions occur, it causes the fuel/air burn to act like a true burn even when the pressure and heat would normally cause it to explode all at once. It is like taking a single stick of dynamite and spreading it out over a very large area and while the total energy may be the same the speed at which the reactions occur is not because the surface area is larger. I believe the electronics issues has negated mainstream use of this technology today however tomorrow is another issue. Vehicles are starting to use a technology we should have been using 50 years ago which is hybrid technology. A small super efficient engine running very lean at constant RPM to turn a generator which charges a battery bank or capacitors which carries the variable load of an electric motor, that is the future in my opinion. AC
---------------------------
Comprehend and Copy Nature... Viktor Schauberger
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”― Richard P. Feynman
|