Hi. Why have there only been a few pre-combustion devices like Turbo's, EGR, cold air ducts and water injection accepted by car manufacturers to enhance ice efficiency and obviously to reduce emissions to meet government laws?
Is it because they can clearly demonstrate they provide extra energy to the combustion process or there haven't been any new devices that actually work.
Ps. Total agree with you on hho and other devices. Science will always prove these things offer no benefit.
I've never heard of a car with water injection, unless you are meaning direct injection, referring to putting gasoline into the combustion chamber. The only instances of water injection in an internal combustion engine I can think of is in the B-52 Stratofortress and other early turbojets. In the late 1950s, the bomber's turbojets weren't powerful enough to get the heavy jet airborne in the required runway distance, and engineers discovered that injecting a small amount of water in the exhaust stream produced a lot more thrust than the normal turbojet alone. The process was filthy for emissions and created loads of soot and black smoke, which contributes to air pollution. Not to mention the extreme tactical disadvantage if your big bomber is pumping out tons of black smoke that enemy fighters can see from miles away. Cars can't do that, imagine everyone's car putting out black smoke like the diesel engine of an 18 wheeler. Asthma sufferers beware!
Combustion is a poorly efficient way to convert chemical potential energy to usable mechanical energy. It creates a ton of heat, which is basically disorganized energy. The heat and pressure of the combustion event causes the piston to be forced down, turning the crankshaft, but nowhere near all of the available heat energy is extracted from the fuel charge by the cycle. The turbocharger recovers slightly more of the disorganized energy (the heat) and makes it available in a useable form, but nowhere near all of it. A longer piston stroke will give the engine more time to extract useable energy from the heat and pressure, but that introduces loads of other problems.
Batteries are much more efficient in terms of converting potential chemical energy to kinetic energy via an electric motor, but they are nowhere near as volume efficient as liquid fuel in an internal combustion engine. Internal combustion engines are almost as efficient as they can be, these days.
I've never heard of a car with water injection, unless you are meaning direct injection, referring to putting gasoline into the combustion chamber. The only instances of water injection in an internal combustion engine I can think of is in the B-52 Stratofortress and other early turbojets.
Water injection, actually "Turbo Rocket Fluid" with some methyl alcohol to prevent freezing, was used in the first turbocharged production car, the 1962 Oldsmobile Jetfire which had a turbocharged aluminum V8. The fluid injection was used to cool the intake charge and prevent detonation since there were of course no modern engine controls available at that time. (Whether that car or the 1962 Corvair Spyder was the first turbocharged car available is a matter of some contention. They were released within a couple of weeks of each other. The turbcharged Corvair did not use fluid injection.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpoRB-3wOu0
https://jackbaruth.com/?p=15191
That's very interesting, thanks for that! Sounds expensive. Haha.
Not many were sold (yes they were expensive!) and of course mechanics back then didn't know how to deal with turbochargers. Also owners would forget to add the Turbo Rocket Fluid which would disable the turbo.
Many if not most of the Jetfires sold wound up having the turbos stripped off and converted to plain normally-aspirated carbs. What is interesting is that GM in the early 1960s really was a technological leader and innovator. How the mighty have fallen!
That is unfortunate for GM, and really our entire automotive industry. We lost our drive in favor of profit/greed, no pun intended. Haha. Did these systems actually inject water into the airstream before the charge goes into the cylinder?
Yes, that's the way they worked. The idea was to cool down the mixture to prevent detonation. Remember, no knock sensors! On the Corvair instead of using fluid injection they lowered the engine compression.
Clever solution, probably took some fine tuning to get the water ratio just right and not stall the engine. If there was any significant steam creation, that may have enhanced the power as well. The turbojets boosted power because the exhaust blasted water and air out of the nozzle, not just air. The water made the engines expell more mass at high speed, which boosted power.
In the 1970s manufacturers toyed around with stratified charge engines to improve emissions and efficiency but the only one that actually put the technology into production as I recall was Honda with its "CVCC" (Compound Vortex Controlled Combustion) engines introduced in 1972. These used a combustion "pre-chamber" to light off a lean mixture in the main combustion chamber.
https://global.honda/heritage/episodes/1972introducingthecvcc.html