Bruce Crower has made a six stroke engine that uses water and has no rad. http://www.autoweek.com/apps/pbcs.dl...THISWEEKSISSUE
Looks promising.

 

Very interesting/cool

 

That is awesome.

I may have to do a thermo analysis on it to get an idea of ideal efficiencies.

 

ok, so they use the heat of combustion to cause a steam explosion by direct injecting water... interesting thought. haven't diesel owners been doing that for a while with water/meth injection?

 

Water/meth injection is done during the engines regular strokes. This experimental engine actually has a dedicated power and exhaust stroke (6-stroke) for the water/steam part of the cycle.

Intake,compression,power(on gas),exhaust,Water injection (to steam), exhaust... I think that how it goes Screwy but cool.

 

That was an interesting read.

 

yea, he added an extra compression and expansion cycle for the steam operation. but the water injected in a diesel engine draw off a bit of heat and evaporate giving extra volume during that cycle.

and for your cycle, replace the first exhaust with an recompression, the way I read it the strokes are Intake, compression, power, recompression, water expansion, exhaust. the first exhaust stroke has been removed to retain heat and evaporate more water.

One draw back I see to this engine is on a cold engine, the water cycle needs to be cut out to avoid washing down the cylinder.

 

Your explination is a bit better than mine..

 

This article says it was last updated in 2/23/06. I wonder what new information is available and I wonder why they ran the old article today if the dates are correct.

 

i think what killed the whole thing is the following:

"Offsetting that, of course, would be the need to carry large quantities of water, and water is heavier than gasoline or diesel oil. Preliminary estimates suggest a Crower cycle engine will use roughly as many gallons of water as fuel."

can you imagine how much water we would need to create this efficiency, what does the U.S. use per year, like 10 billion gallons of diesel fuel? Not the best use of our freshwater resources.

I had another idea I thought had some merit in this regard years ago ... I was going to use the excess heat coming out of the header to power a small steam generator and use that to power provide additional power. The steam generator would be on a common shaft as the engine output (or maybe geared onto the flywheel -beefed up of course-) ...and help reduce the inefficiency of all the excess heat going out the tailpipe instead of producing power ... but it would have been a complicated solution and pretty costly.

 

while its "technically" fresh water, to cut my fuel consumption in half, I would be willing to convert my house to a gray water/black water system. I dont see gray water being a problem in that engine.

besides, estimates are we use something like 50 gallons/day/household anyway, whats another 5 gallons in Iowa?

 

I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to condense a large portion of the water out of the exhaust stream and cycle it back into the storage tank. You probably wouldn't get 100%, but I bet you would get alot.

 

nature will do that on her own...
its just water vapor. cool it and it will condense.

 

I was wondering about wash-down too and whether it would corrode or seize up if shut down for long periods? As far as useing a lot of water, maybe it would be a good type of engine when used stationary, like a generator application? It would probably run continuous anyway and less emissions to contend with for something like a hospital or school to use?