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Can I help you out. It was great.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw6NFmcnW-8

Thanks dirtstrip, I'm a steam engine fenatic...maybe after I retire, a project..I do have some experience with compound expansion of steam.
HC

Me too. Steam packs power. My neighbor here got married twenty years ago and they drove away from the church in Andover,SD on a restored Case steam engine. They have an annual threshing bee there now.
I also have a friend who is an inventor in Sand Point, Idaho who I helped with an internal combustion steam engine that I convinced him to demonstrate here at Watertown,SD in Sept. of 2006. It was a diesel engine converted to run on a mixture of 65% ethanol/35% water. A catalytic igniter (glow plug) was in place of the fuel injector and a multiport fuel injection system was installed on the manifold. The high energy igniter, called a SmartPlug ignited the ethanol in the mix and the heat generated causes the water portion to turn to steam within the cylinder. Its not the energy of the ethanol, but the expansion of the steam that drives the piston downward resulting in 40% more power than when the same engine ran on diesel. It pushes a cumulus puff of water vapor out with each exhaust stroke and the emissions are so cool you can put your hand on the muffler. It also meets all the new Tier 4 emission standard.
He also has installed his injectors in 100LL aircraft engines and can then burn jet A in them. He now has a military contract to make Honda powered generators run on jet A so the military does not have to haul gasoline to them. The goal was one fuel on the front line. They are in use now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Neat dirtstrip! If I owned my own steam tractor or steam railroad engine I wounldn't be fooling around with these flying machines..this is definitely something I'm going to do when I retire. The process of compund steam expansion just facinates me. I even have some engineering books from the turn of the 19th century on the design of these engines when Sam Vauclain perfected this type of engine for use in Baldwin locomotives in this period. Steam threshing bee...sounds like something I would fly in to! Also a big one in Bird City Kansas. Two things I could spend all day doing...watching airplanes or watching steam engines...or operating them. Thanks again dirtstrip. HC

A little town near Salem, Oregon has a "Steam Up" each summer. It is a neat way to spend a few hours looking at all the stuff that was high tech in it's day. You can learn more about it here:

http://www.antiquepowerland.com/info/annual.html

Regarding SmartPlugs, here's the website:

http://www.smartplugs.com/about.htm


It looks like the activity dropped off a few years ago. In spite of all the claims, I doubt this engine is as efficient as a diesel. The links to the University of Idaho all seem to be broken. This is too bad, because I could put some merit in their testing of the van converted to "aquanol". Still, like many specialty engines, this one may have some unique attributes that lead to niche applications, such as the military. If someone has more technical details, I'd love to read the material.

tom

Savannah-Tom,
The University of Idaho was requested to do the testing on the converted engines so that there would be no proprietary slant to the results. It is their testing that established the 40% power rise with zero particulates. After their testing the ethanol/diesel was shelved in one of those wharehouses you saw when some government agency stored the ark at the end of Indiana Jones movie. Their work was done. The SmartPlug had so many applications on engines that they chose to pursue the defense development contracts for converting gasoline engines to jet A. That is the direct application of the Ford van gas engine conversion and so the rest disappeared from commercial radar. Remember at that time there was no commercial demand for anything ethanol (pre 2001) so it remained one of those novelty engines until the development of ethanol here in the midwest when I convinced the inventor that we needed this engine to come out of storage. He said if I could prove to him that it had commercial application in ethanol fueled engines he would bring it out of mothballs to do the demonstration. He had previously tried and given up in getting across the hurdles with a vehicle manufacturer to build an engine for use of fuel on the road when the refueling infrastructure for it does not exist. He said, " Who would buy a vehicle when you can't refuel it somewhere down the road." And he was right, oil companies and car companies developed this national infrastructure together and one relys on the other. A new approach has to build both the engine and the infrastructure to be successful and has to do it cheaper on a shoe string scale than existing companies do on a large scale in order to compete.

I took the approach that my grandfather's generation did when no diesel/distallate road stations existed for their tractors and the fuel had to be bulk delivered to the farm. The tractor came back to the farm each night and was fueled there from a bulk tank. I suggested we could have bulk delivery from ethanol plants to the farm with the 65% ethanol/35% water mix, which is what is called wet ethanol or hydrous ethanol and is the form produced before the energy intensive drying phase begins within the plant. It is much cheaper to produce and it would allow the use of the fuel on the farm by by-passing all the major fuel distribution problems that every competing fuel runs into in the market place. He liked the idea and then expanded it to include any route based trucking that returns to its starting point at the end of each day, such as postal, UPS, and city buses. They all could fuel from bulk fueling tanks at their point of origin. Since the fuel is not ignitable with a match it could be stored easily on the farm in a poly tank. At present no EPA number is required, it only carries a usda label the way It is presently stored on the shelf in C stores along side of groceries as window washer fluid. He has already run the engine on that even though it is a lower concentration of alcohol. Picture in your mind the price of a one gallon jug of washer fluid that has to be individually packaged and hand placed on that shelf. Now consider how much cheaper it could be delivered in a tanker without the packaging and hand labor. Huge fuel savings for the farmer would create the demand. Projections showed fuel savings would save the price of buying the tractor over it a 10 year life. The tractor would sell itself and we had their attention.
Since the demonstration in the fall of '06, test engines have been developed in partnership with several major ag tractor companies and financing from one major ethanol company. Unfortunately after successful demonstrations of the test engine, R&D money to proceed has just about dried up due to the lack of sales of all equipment in this economic downturn, combined with competition from the lower price of fuel, it has left the project in limbo and so defense contracts still continue to be the lifeline of the company. The company's own website will not reflect what has happened in the last five years because of proprietary agreements with the participating companies. I cannot provide more details than that, other than the tractor companies were not targeting the US market, but were to release this engine as an option in the Brazillian ag market where there is no opposition to overcome where ethanol use is concerned. The project still has very much potential.

The Brazilian market would be an ideal place to use this technology, as you point out. They already have an ethanol economy and it could fit right in. I'd really like to see this utilized on a large enough scale to shake out problems and better define the sweet spot.

Thinking about this system a little further, I can see some interesting points.

First, in any heat engine, the efficiency is directly related to the temperature source. High compression engines are more efficient than low compression engines because they produce higher cylinder temperatures. Given the 35% water content, the combustion process is probably cooler and therefore less efficient.

The standard steam engine is modeled by the Rankine cycle, which is less efficient than the "ideal cycle", the Carnot cycle. However the concept of heating the water in the cylinder directly means that the heat can be added at the same time the steam is expanding. This drives the model more to the Carnot cycle rather than the Rankine cycle. If we knew the peak temperatures, we could calculate this improvement.

The puffing of water vapor to the atmosphere indicates the water is being wasted. While this might be an advantage for an airplane, (for simplicity) it might be interesting to condense this water and recycle it. Then you would only have to add ethanol and you would be ready for another cycle. Potentially you would not need to carry any more than a small quantity of water, and pure ethanol for fuel, mixing recycled water and ethanol as needed. Since the products of combustion of ethanol are water and carbon dioxide, and the CO2 won't condense, you would be making excess water as you go.

A regular steam engine is nicely reversible, and does not require a starter, but it seems that this engine would require a starter, and it would not be easy to reverse. Not a big deal in almost all applications.

Thanks for an interesting topic,
tom

Savannah-Tom,
The University of Idaho testing is available at this link. http://itd.idaho.gov/planning/research/ ... bution.pdf
It is public information. The increased thermal efficiency is the key. Nearly all the heat of the ethanol combustion was absorbed by the water portion and captured to produce steam energy. That is why there is little or no heat at the exhaust.

The steam was visible on initial startup in the Watertown demonstration until operating temperatures were reached, then it disappeared. In Sand Point when we demonstrated for the OEM who flew in their VP's of engineering for the show, it continued to exhaust steam even after warmup. Considering the relative humidities and temperatures in Sand Point it was suspected that the cooler and more humid air was preventing immediate evaporation. A dew point issue.


As far as running backwards like a regular steam engine, that is only limited by the type of engine that is converted. General motors ported two stroke diesels can be run backwards. We had one in a Michigan payloader that would run in reverse if killed on a hard uphill push. Unfortunately it would intake through the muffler and exhaust through the air filter. It sooted up the air filter and if you didn't shut it down you could ruin the engine because the oil pump did not provide pressure in that direction. I understand that large maritime diesels can run in reverse to eliminate transmissions that cause efficiency losses.

In the steam powered plane video the thing that I wondered about was the possibility of icing up your own wing or elevator. Now that could be a problem.

Dirtstrip

Thanks for providing the link to the schools paper. I read the whole thing with great interest. Seeing this article makes me wish I had kept my enrollment in SAE. It is quite impressive that engine was able to increase efficiency over the stock diesel in most of the operating envelope. It is also impressive that the technique works with both compression ignition engines and spark ignition engines. This covers a wide span of compression ratios. I don't think this engine can be characterized as a steam engine, but rather an enhanced ignition engine. What ever, it's really neat.

It sounds like they still have work to do, timing being one of the more difficult, but I hope they are able to continue, and get units into the field in a big way. Engines for narrow rpm range operation would have the least timing issues.

I wonder if they played with trying to condense the exhaust water vapor.

tom

There are converted diesel engines running wet ethanol with the SmartPlug ignition on irrigation systems in Nebraska. As you suggest it is more easily adapted to constant speed engines. Only the correct length of a tubular shield (precombustion chamber) around the catalytic element is needed to provide for holding the exhaust cloud from the previous combustion to delay the ignition event to TDC for an engine to maintain constant rpms. The combustion heat of that ignition is all that is needed to keep the catalyst hot for the next ignition cycle. To advance the timing quickly, for acceleration, such as in the gasoline converted van the 12 volt lead wire at the top of the igniter is energized burning away the exhaust cloud more quickly causing a more rapid ignition of fuel. A computer ignition system is used for this degree of control. In the case of ag diesels which do not need the rapid acceleration the 12 volt lead is only used to preheat the element at start up and the heat of combustion maintains the element temp. The top lead wire can be removed and each cylinder of the engine becomes self timed and self sustained by its own compression event. It becomes self sustaining and each cylinder then has its own separate ignition system There is no way to shut the engine down unless fuel is shut off.
What is interesting is that Mark,the inventor and a good friend, conceived this idea as a boy playing with an RC gas powered glow plug airplane. He wondered why big engines don't use that system, his father, a highly educated and accomplished engineer explained that the timing of each cylinder would need to be mechanically linked to each other and not done individually as the glow plug worked. It is the idea you stated that timing of multiple cylinders could not be controlled well enough without a timing device. Mark devoted his post high school years to developing a way to make that timing work and in essence to prove that what his father said was wrong. All the patents he holds have to do with the timing mechanism used to control the ignition timing with the catalytic igniter. He has no formal college training except what he has self taught himself and learned from others in the field. His father now works for him. ( And is also quite proud of his son's accomplishments.)