Sustainability, NASCAR style
In stock-car country, a concern for matters like fuel efficiency and automotive emissions can be considered a sign of deviant sexual preference. Just one airbrushed #24 Jeff Gordon t-shirt can have carbon emissions exceeding most municipal airports. Nonetheless, when you’re an racecar engine builder like Bruce Crower (Man of the Future), you spend a lot of time thinking about the properties of the internal combustion engine and how to make it better.
The 4-stroke combustion cycle of the traditional gasoline engine is: Suck, Squeeze, Bang, and Blow. And while this all sounds very exciting, most of the energy ends up as heat dissipated by exhaust and colling systems (think all Blow, no Bang). Crower (Man of the Future)’s engine injects water into the cylinder, using the heat from the power stroke (Bang) to expand the water and push the piston back down for another power stroke (new, more efficient and ecologically friendly Bang), adding two strokes to the process (making it now Suck, Squeeze, Bang, Steam Squeeze, Steam Bang, Blow) for a total of six.
The main advantage to this is fuel efficiency. The car is able to convert more combustion heat into energy on the same amount of gas. The use of water eliminates issues of heat dissipation, which means that the engine needs no radiator, no antifreeze, and no water pump (which is also drain on power). Better cooling means higher cylinder compression, which means different and lower grade fuels can also combust efficiently. And and and! Unlike most other alternate-fuel proposals, a country of six-stroke cars would require little or no change to existing infrastructure. There would just be a tank of water in each car.
While this technology is still oil-dependent and not entirely carbon-neutral, it’s a vast improvement over what’s commercially available now. And with a little investment and R&D, it could be commercially available now, which is more than can be said for a lot of the messiah-technologies currently on the horizon. AUTOWEEK
About The Author - Ben is a formerly aspiring icthyologist, musician, and theologian. He is now a advertising copywriter living in Brooklyn, where he resides with his wife, two cats, and a basement full of bicycle parts. - Visit Ben's site.
Great post. Efficiency is far to frequently left out when we talk about things being “green”. Although I would love to see everyone driving bamboo cars that run on soy milk, we need to think about how to make the technology we all use work better for us.