Heat2power sucks on exhaust gases for extra mileage
By Paul Miller 
posted May 4th 2009 9:43PM
posted May 4th 2009 9:43PM
[Via Autoblog Green]
posted May 4th 2009 9:43PM
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regeneration is old and been done to death. nothing to see here.
That is pretty much the opening statement of the post you fucking dork.
Congratulations on being astutely aware of the obvious.
eat shit and die.
the point is that reusing rejected heat to heat the incoming air has been used in power cycles for a long ass time if plugging one into car engine was feasible then it would have been done a long ass time ago.
I would do some analysis to see the merits of the design if engadget pays my consultation fee.
You don't want to preheat air in the Otto cycle, hence why intercoolers exist in turbocharger applications. This is used to extract the excess heat in the system rather than just dumping it.
yeah, ass.
dont fucking knock it man. i am trying to make money here.
heat the incoming air?!?!?!?!?!?! are you wanting to lose power/mpg, or gain it? better compressions is achieved with colder air. pumping warm air into your intake would be counterproductive.
A cold air intake increases horse power with dense air it produces higher combustion. On the other end Hot air intakes ( HIA which already exist in many 80's in 90's asian cars) use less air and less fuel so its more economical as far as fuel usage.
HIA isnt as popular any more with fuel injection but ive seen it on tons of carburerated vehicles including my own.
A turbo already does this, and much better...and yes a turbo recovers heat energy just like a steam engine does.
From Wikipedia (and confirmed by my engineering classes)...
Working principle
A turbocharger is a small radial fan pump driven by the energy of the exhaust gases of an engine. A turbocharger consists of a turbine and a compressor on a shared shaft. The turbine section of a turbocharger is a heat engine in itself. It converts the heat energy from the exhaust to power, which then drives the compressor, compressing ambient air and delivering it to the air intake manifold of the engine at higher pressure, resulting in a greater mass of air entering each cylinder. In some instances, compressed air is routed through an intercooler before introduction to the intake manifold. Because a turbocharger is a heat engine, and is converting otherwise wasted exhaust heat to power, it compresses the inlet air to the engine more efficiently than a supercharger.
ill buy one if this can be pulled off
they didn't say how much the device would cost, just how much it costs to install.
based on the 20% saving promise this product suggests, you'll need to spend over $2500 worth of gas before you break even.
of course thats provided that estimate is correct.
at best, this isn't a product for everyone.
Why is this stuff landing on Engadget without proof? I thought we learned our lesson already.
Apparently Heat2power thinks it can overcome conservation of energy. Everyone has tossed this waste heat -> energy idea around, but often the problem is that a temperature differential is often the potential that makes the system *work* in the first place.
Imagine trying to capture energy from the waste heat from your AC. All seems fine until you realize that it will take more energy to pump heat across a (now smaller) thermal gradient.
Unless they're doing something marvelous here or simply equipping it with a turbine, it's another snakeoil solution.
Using a heat exchanger doesn't mean much really, could be for just about anything. While it could be used to increase the temperature of the engine (and therefore thermal efficiency), I wouldn't want to see what happens to the cooling system when the engine revs up to 8k. As others have mentioned, using it for a combined power and heat cycle is much more plausible, though if you really wanted to I bet you could get a few watts worth of power from a second power cycle (though nowhere near the 100-150kW most engines put out).
http://www.heat2power.net/en__principle.php
Took a look, they are clearly going for an external combustion cycle along side your internal combustion. They don't have any specifics, but assuming carnot cycle (yea right, if they found a way to make a carnot engine I'm sure every major power company would be throwing money in their faces just about now), and 100L/s in a perfect heat exchanger (again, not possible), with max temp of 1200K and min of 300K, you could theoretically get about 50kW out of it... Of couse, rather than 75% efficiency you're looking at about 25%, and instead of a perfect heat exchanger you'll likely get less than 1000K and more than 300K, so we're looking at 10 or less kW added, which means we won't be seeing those really high efficiency gains of 20-35% any time soon.
nerdtalker,
Wow, you couldn't be more wrong. Waste heat from an engine (like waste heat from brakes) is something you work hard to get rid of -- cooling ducts for brakes, and complicated liquid-cooling systems for cars.
Saying that you can't convert waste heat into motive power is to say that hybrids cannot exist. Today's parallel hybrids use regenerative braking to convert what WOULD have been waste heat lost in braking into electrical power stored in batteries. An engine heat-to-power exchanger could take many forms -- a boiler that drives a steam propulsion system, for example.
The "temperature differential" that you say they're not going to find is in fact very real -- the difference between the outside air (say, 70 degrees) and the engine itself, which is many hundreds of degrees. Even though liquid cooling systems are quite effective, the oil in your engine is probably well in excess of 200 degrees and can break 300+ in stressful situations. The coolant is probably under 200 most of the time, but the system is pressurized to avoid boilover which would certainly occur under stressful conditions as well.
Saying you can't convert your car's waste heat into propulsion is like saying you can't use your computer's waste heat to warm the room.
The only question is whether the extra power/economy (two sides of the same coin) is worth it given the expected lifetime cost of the system (in every sense of the word "cost", as we see in weight penalties that make hybrids handle poorly).
This doesn't need "proof"... the company is introducing a very simple idea of having a steam engine (basically) running of the exhaust heat.
Yes, it will work.
Now whether it will be practical, simple and otherwise viable is a different question.
Am i going to see this selling on late night TV with "real people" testimonials?
i'll buy one if they can pull this off [2]
Recycling exhaust heat and energy is hardly a new idea, turbo's have been doing this for about 100 years.
Turbos work by taking exhaust flow which is used to drive turbines to compress air and gas on the intake. The Heat2Power conversion approach is completely different.
The other storied linked to in this article are devices that create electricity from heat, this device "hooks right into the crankshaft” and is probably 99% someone’s pipe dream. There a tons of sites on the internet with “great new technologies” that in reality never would work well. There is no prototype just some shady website with lots of pictures, graphs, and no proof.
Turbo’s do a good job at increasing efficiency of an engine. I find it extremely unlikely that this device would come anywhere close to the efficiency of a turbo. Also seeing that engadget does not know much about auto technology it is sad that they posted something found off some random website.
Turbochargers increase the *volumetric* efficiency of an engine, that is, the amount of power produced per cubic in/cm of displacement. In some applications (particularly large Diesel engines) they can improve overall efficiency, but due to a multitude of factors, gasoline automotive engines equipped with turbochargers usually get poorer fuel economy than those without, all other things being equal. When a turbo engine is operating at low power and the turbo is not producing boost, it acts as an exhaust restriction. At high power, especially with forced induction, the mixture in a gasoline engine is normally significantly rich of stoich to reduce the burn rate and prevent detonation, both of which reduce economy.
Turbo is a whole lot of fun though.
Apparently you don't know how turbos really work. A turbo works much like a jet engine. It extracts energy from heated gasses to produce work by expanding the heated gasses through a turbine. The energy extracted from the gasses comes from the energy the gas has because of its temperature and pressure. That is why the exhaust gas becomes much cooler once it has passed through the turbo. So a turbo is exchanging heat for work. The work is used to pressurize the incoming air to achieve a more dense fuel air mixture which increases the engine's output, but you could store the energy in a battery or use it for some other purpose like the heattopower device is doing.
What would happen if you connected the air vents inside the cabin to this thing and turned the heater on?
Oh good god. I love these clueless people on Engadget.
Also michas-pi. I can see why you would have a VTEC engine.
can to share why you can be so smug? Not all of us are clueless about cars.
care to share why you can be so smug? Not all of us are clueless about cars.
You car lovers are the reason for global warming!
Why haven't they just slammed this in between the engine block and the radiator, so it catches the coolant before the radiator just wastes the heat away in the air? I mean, isn't that where most of the engine heat goes anyway?
Because slamming things usually breaks them?
Turbo?
that's exactly what i was thinking...
maybe i'm missing something here
Now the evil oil companies will buy this up and it will never come to market, just like that 200MPG carburetor that they've kept hidden for decades. Darn you big oil! Darn you to heck!
What is the difference between a turbo and this.
PS i am not a gear head so i only know the basicas of a car like changing the oil.
Turbo harnesses the power of the gas rushing through the exhaust. This captures the power of the heat itself.
That said, it's total vaporware.
Turbos work, this is someone's pipe dream.
A turbocharger, also sometimes called a turbo-supercharger, uses an exhaust gas driven turbine to drive a compressor (essentially a blower/fan) on the other end of a shared shaft. The compressor forces air into the engine intake rather than just relying on atmospheric pressure. This lets you get more air into the engine so you can burn correspondingly more fuel and get more power from a given size engine.
A supercharger is also a compressor used to force air into an engine, but instead of harnessing wasted energy from the exhaust, it is driven by the engine crankshaft. Both have advantages and disadvantages and it's a bit of a religious debate as to which is "better".
I don't see a lot of details here, but this looks a lot like a power recovery turbine, which were fitted to some WWII era military aircraft. Those used an exhaust driven turbine similar to what would drive the compressor in a turbocharger, but instead use it to add power to the engine through the crankshaft directly by way of a viscous coupling.
I like the 3D model stuck on the drawn cross-section of an old picture of an engine.
WTF! That website is run by a bunch of con artists! They stole my idea for a perpetual motion machine, too!
Step 1. = heat
Step 2. = ?????
step 3. = profit!!
"It certainly does suck!"
from the model this would never fit in modern cars unless its a lot smaller than it appears in the model. Their is not enough room, but hope it works, I like the idea at least
If you couple this thing with a small turbocharged 4-cylinder, you should be able to get excellent power efficiency..
Second Law of Thermodynamics bitches. Think again.
If by second law you mean exergy, the use of a second external combustion cycle circumvents that by just being an entirely separate cycle with the high temperature being that of the exhaust temp of the primary cycle. If by second law you mean entropy, this thing has already made chaos on this thread without even being real, it won't violate the second law by making order out of chaos AND producing power.
I don't think I could fit that inline with my turbo, but I wonder how efficiency increase/decreases with a much hotter rotary engine.
Why are companies wasting time and money trying to increase the efficiency of an inefficient gasoline engines. Their money would be better spent developing electric engines, which are way more efficient then gasoline engines.
One word: OPEC.