High MPG

[Raymond C Drouillard]

On Tue, 05 May 1998 16:39:00 -0500 dave.williams at chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave
Williams) writes:
>
>-> Yes, I agree. In fact, I think that if as much time, effort, and
>-> money was put into the development of a turbine engine (like the
>-> Chrysler one) as has been put into the engines we currently run, the
>-> "200 MPG carb" type idea would be a case of "so what!" In the case of
>-> the Chrysler turbine, it had a
>
> Chrysler spent tens of millions of dollars on their turbine, and two
>generations of Chrysler engineers tried to make it workable in a car.
>Rover, General Motors, and Fiat also poured pounds, dollars, and lira
>down the turbine drain.
>
> There are three problems with turbines.  One is scale; smaller car-size
>turbines are less efficient than truck-size or airplane-size turbines.
>Another problem is problem is output; the turbine has a high
>speed output shaft with a relatively narrow RPM band.  Various schemes
>of variable pitch blades, hydraulic couplings, and whatnot were used by
>the prototypes.  The third problem is the turbine runs essentially wide
>open all the time.  For a 200hp motor the efficiency would be
>acceptable; but throttling a turbine back to 25hp for cruise resulted in
>dramatic loss of efficiency compared to a conventional engine.
>
> Chrysler and Rover built driveable prototypes, but throttle response
>and fuel consumption were unacceptable.  None of the advances in
>computer-aided design, metallurgy, or exotic materials have been enough
>to overcome the turbines' problems.
>
> Fiat and GM built turbine powered trucks for a while, but even scaled
>up to that size they were not able to beat the Diesels' lower cost.
>
>==dave.williams at chaos.lrk.ar.us======================================
>I've got a secret / I've been hiding / under my skin / | Who are you?
>my heart is human / my blood is boiling / my brain IBM |   who, who?
>====================================http://home1.gte.net/42/index.htm

If you can get them to run efficiently at power levels of around 100 KW,
they might be useful in automobiles with the appropriate transmission.

Use the turbine at the most efficient throttle and speed to run a
hydraulic pump.  Use this pump to turn hydraulic motors in each wheel,
and to pump up an accumulater.  If you can store 10 - 20 gallons of
hydraulic oil at 3000 - 5000 PSI, you can store a lot of energy (I
calculated it out when I was in tenth grade - a looooong time ago).  Once
the accumulater is filled, throttle the turbine down to a level that'll
just barely keep it hot enough.  This can be a trivial amount of fuel
flow if the housing is well insulated and the exhaust pipe is mostly
closed off (sort of like idling a diesel).

Some research will be necessary to optomize the size of the engine.  A
big engine will be more efficient, but will have more idle (fuel wasting)
time compared to the time it is actually producing power.

You can use the same princable with a generater, battery, and motors.  If
you want to get with a researcher named Bitterly, you can use a flywheel
as the power storage device.

You could, of course, run this thing on anything from natural gas to
caster oil.


Ray Drouillard

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