3 ms·

With the direction this seems to be moving in with ever bigger turbos on smaller engines, I wonder how long it will take before we simply remove the piston engi

by hencq 11y ago

With the direction this seems to be moving in with ever bigger turbos on smaller engines, I wonder how long it will take before we simply remove the piston engine altogether and just switch to (turbine) generators. It seems this would work quite well as part of a hybrid setup.

Gravityloss 11y ago
Large industrial processes can be analyzed by looking at flows of hot, warm and cold fluids etc. They can then be optimized mathematically so you lose the least energy while producing the same useful output. Often people with already basic knowledge of thermodynamics can spot the large inefficiency sources in many of the currently common processes. This stuff has been known since the 1800s. It's just that the implementation has been too expensive (payoff is too slow), or politically inconvenient (the technology is in another department/company). There might be some reliability or emissions or noise issues etc... The world is full of massive technical inefficiencies and thus, great business opportunities. You can look at the car as an industrial process as well. Intercoolers, capacitor energy recovery, heat pumps for heating (and not just for air conditioning). Most of the mechanical technology is 100+ years old. The turbocharger was patented in 1905. With batteries and capacitors and control electronics there's some fairly new stuff. You could for example skip the piston engine and instead have just a turbine and then a bottoming engine with CO2 cycle recovering the waste heat. Ships run with turbocharged diesel engines, but GE is championing precisely this turbine + bottoming for them. So why not cars? There are some big operational differences of course (heating the working fluid in an external combustion engine takes a while). But there could be some big benefits too, like if you don't have reciprocating machinery at all, the noise is different and there's no vibration.

by hencq 11y ago

Gravityloss 11y ago

Large industrial processes can be analyzed by looking at flows of hot, warm and cold fluids etc. They can then be optimized mathematically so you lose the least energy while producing the same useful output. Often people with already basic knowledge of thermodynamics can spot the large inefficiency sources in many of the currently common processes. This stuff has been known since the 1800s. It's just that the implementation has been too expensive (payoff is too slow), or politically inconvenient (the technology is in another department/company). There might be some reliability or emissions or noise issues etc... The world is full of massive technical inefficiencies and thus, great business opportunities. You can look at the car as an industrial process as well. Intercoolers, capacitor energy recovery, heat pumps for heating (and not just for air conditioning). Most of the mechanical technology is 100+ years old. The turbocharger was patented in 1905. With batteries and capacitors and control electronics there's some fairly new stuff. You could for example skip the piston engine and instead have just a turbine and then a bottoming engine with CO2 cycle recovering the waste heat. Ships run with turbocharged diesel engines, but GE is championing precisely this turbine + bottoming for them. So why not cars? There are some big operational differences of course (heating the working fluid in an external combustion engine takes a while). But there could be some big benefits too, like if you don't have reciprocating machinery at all, the noise is different and there's no vibration.