“Super Engine” may fundamentally change the way internal combustion engines work
anl.gov
anl.gov
Edited comment: Man, I don't get hacker news... Why do you downvote this? I thought I was adding a valid and important point - that an increase in efficiency is fighting the wrong battle. I even added references via link. I would be super happy if I could be informed of what in this post is offending or off topic!
Compared to external combustion engines (steam engines), ICEs have much quicker start-up and response times. Steam engines require building up a head of steam, and actually exhaust the working fluid (water) over time, which is why steam railroads had water towers every so often.
ICEs have been improved over more than 130 years, and scale from a few CCs of displacement to many cubic meters -- the smallest ICEs could fit in the palm of your hand, you could stand in the largest and not reach the sides or top of the cylinder.
Liquid hydrocarbon fuels are exceptionally energy dense by both weight and volume. This makes certain classes of use very difficult to substitute for: commercial passenger and freight aircraft, overland truck transport, and powered marine shipping really have few tractable alternatives. Aircraft would all but disappear without liquid hydrocarbons (gasoline for piston engines, kerosene for gas turbines), trucks would probably be replaced with electrified rail, and shipping would return to wind power. Optimists might suggest nuclear marine powerplants, but I find that unlikely; ships are lost at far higher rates than is commonly realised: about 200 every decade, and existing trials of both military and nonmilitary nuclear marine power have proven it expensive and nonviable for all but the most demanding instances -- aircraft carriers and submarines.
They're also quite stable in storage (proved over hundreds of millions of years), relatively safe to handle (no respiration or exceptional contact protection required), and their combustion products are mostly benign: CO2 (I'll get to this) and H20 with scant quantities of carbon monoxide, sulfer and nitrogen oxides, and other contaminants or partial combustion products, all of which can be greatly mitigated with combustion and exhaust controls and treatment.
The CO2 exhausted isn't a problem in itself but for the, um, slight problem that in the past 200 or so years humans have returned to the biosphere carbon sequestered over several hundreds of millions of years. Which turns out to be a rather considerable problem.
But it's only a problem where what you're burning are fossil fuels. There exist several options, though all much more expensive and/or constrained than present fossil fuels, for creating synthetic hydrocarbon-based liquid fuels. These also have challenges. Biofuels are intractable at scale given natural limits on plant production: what's called "HANNP" -- the human appropriation of net primary production -- or the photosynthetic ceiling. There's only so much plant growth which occurs and humans already consume much of it (40%, biofuel replacement of fossil fuels would consume another 20%, see Jeffrey S. Duke's "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003), PDF available online, for more on this.
Another prospect: sequestering carbon from the biosphere, and combining it with hydrogen, electrolised from water. The US Navy and national energy labs (especially Brookhaven), as well as M.I.T., have researched this for the past 50 years. It's proven expensive and hasn't been scaled past very low production (a few litres), but does work. It raises costs of fuel from one unit of input energy per 20-40 units made available to two units per one provided -- that's a 40-80x increase in the real cost of fuel.
Not cheap, but it might still be our best option.
I root for electric propulsion and solar power (go Elon!). But I support all efforts in this fight.
I will read the references you gave. Edit: "Burning Buried Sunshine" is a great read! 86 m3 of ancient biomass for 1 gallon of fuel..
Carbon sequestration from seawater is a rather different animal from most CCS discussions. Though, in the world of strange bedfellows, it turns out that various coal industry organisations follow this information pretty closely and have some of the more complete compilations of research. Just ... beware biases.
PS: As to fuel vs. energy costs. The vast majority of gas's costs has nothing to do with direct energy costs. Oil is already vastly more expensive than competing fuels so even a 2>1 energy loss could end up less expensive than current production methods.
Again: an ICE engine for a car is a few hundred dollars. A fuel cell for a car is about a million dollars. That's significant even to a physicist.
Also: stored-energy locomotion. Fully-powered walking is expensive.
I was thinking of hydrocarbon fuel cells, to be honest.
But if you're trading an abundant, variable energy source (say, peak solar which is otherwise wasted) for a scarce but valuable and useful store, that's a net win.
Note that whether you're formulating H2 or hydrocarbons, the energy cost is about the same (the carbon sequestration from seawater mentioned above is low energy cost), though it requires fairly substantial capital investments.
One other alternative is the Li-Ion batteries that we already have.
In any case, I am just reacting to the hype we sometimes see about an `H2 energy future', as if hydrogen was a source of energy.
1. Run silently or near silently. They're generating electricity via redox reactions, not combusting.
2. Have effectively no moving parts. Again, no noise or vibration.
3. Product electricity directly. For powering electronics, this means no secondary generation required.
4. Utilise extremely expensive catalysts. The reason you don't see fuel-cell automobiles (excluding very small numbers of test vehicles) is that the engines cost, literally, on the order of $1 million, as opposed to a few hundred for a typical ICE. This price premium has proven difficult to overcome.
5. Operate better delivering fairly steady-state power, from what I understand. A tremendous benefit of ICEs is that they can scale output in a second or few seconds, with very little throttle lag. Yes, straight-up electric motors are even better at this, but straight-up batteries tend to not store much power.
A fuel cell is essentially a battery whose electrolytes you fill rather than recharge or replace. This offers the advantages of fuel-based systems (high energy capacity) and batteries (direct electrical output). Unfortunately, it introduces the disadvantages of fuel cells (cost, power delivery profile).
I'd had a comment downvoted and flagged recently, perhaps understanably, though the follow-on discussion made pretty clear that I'd identified a pretty salient point.
Upshot: HN is no less immune to voting what it wants to see over what's true or not. I may even be subject to that myself, though I prefer to see my votes as aiming for at the very least a deeper truth and validity.
I wasn't among your critics.
My thinking is that you can't have an honest discussion if people can't count on their replies applying to the parent after the fact, and if I've screwed up enough that I want something off the record, I really should have thought more before writing it, so leaving it and the sting of it's continual viewing is a good reminder for the future.
Sorry to go off-topic, but how do you down-vote people? I've looked through the FAQs and everything and can't find anything about it. I only have the ability to up-vote.
It's conveniently placed close enough to the upvote button that on mobile, any moderation action is essentially a 50-50 probability of either....
https://www.gatesnotes.com/2016-Annual-Letter
He talks about the Energy Equation and declares green energy as the only solution to our carbon emissions.
> When I first heard this I was surprised. Can’t we just aim to cut carbon emissions in half? I asked many scientists. But they all agreed that wouldn’t be enough. The problem is that CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for decades. Even if we halted carbon emissions tomorrow, the temperature would still rise because of the carbon that’s already been released. No, we need to get all the way down to zero.
So if we can only reduce them by 99%, we shouldn't even bother?
It seems to me that the closer we get to zero, the more expensive the next 1% will be. At some point, it's not worth the cost to keep going, and we'd be better off looking for ways to remove some of the CO2 that's in the atmosphere instead of just reducing how much we're pumping in. His equation notably omits that possibility.
The good news is that we have a proven carbon capture technology. Grow new forests.
Yes there are many opportunities in replacement but none have won out and more are on their way. None are at a price point where those least capable of the costs are going to be able to take advantage of them. So in that meantime we keep pushing the cost of burning fossil fuels down.
Hacker News comments are for discussion of the article content, rather than being a soapbox for your views and blogposts.
The next problem, of how we can maintain our lifestyle without breaking the emission limits that we set, is what inventions like this one help with. I expect that piston engines will continue to have some applications for as long as I'm alive, so improving them is a good thing.
We are now beginning to have good products on the market that are sustainable: electric and solar. Making internal combustion engines more efficient seems a dead end. Or worse - making them more efficient may delay the move to what is actually sustainable.
Side note: I regret adding my comment about downvotes. But I will leave it to preserve sense of thread and to remind me not to go there again.
Right now, if one country limits the amount of oil it uses, that just makes oil cheaper for another country which hasn't set limits. 50 years from now, Saudi Arabia could be still burning its last drops of oil to produce electricity, while the rest of the world has moved on to.
So yes, you're correct that improving internal combustions engines might not help at all, but that seems to be true of any other technology, too.
The only thing that will save out planet is our ability to organize ourselves globally to drastically cut emissions.
Side note: don't take the downvotes here personally. HN is a place where quality discussions happen, and a lot of folks would prefer to simply downvote something they don't agree with rather than clutter up the whole thread with responses. :)
The Chinese don't like the fact that coal mining kills 1000s of their citizens each year, nor do they like the smog. They know growth in their economy has to come from an alternative fuel.
Making a better engine might slightly perturb the virtuous path we're on. If it does, it will slightly delay the trend away from fossil fuels. But mainly it is irrelevant.
We need to reduce our lifestyle. Live closer to workplaces so we don't need the car at all, which requires a complete rearchitecture of the cities where jobs are knit with housing and public transport, like Sydney or many places in Europe. US people have a difficulty understanding this, because petrol have been so cheap and untaxed for so long that they've built their cities around "1 car, 1 person" - and now they secretely hope for fuel efficiency improvements "to maintain their lifestyle". No, sorry, they're just killing the planet.
"What about China, who pollutes much more?" Yes, they should be allowed to reach their economic development, because US should pollute much less per inhabitant. An American emits 6x what it should, a Chinese person 1/6th.
This is why GP wrote this warning. And it's important because some people still don't believe it.
Similarly, cigarette packets still have to remind "Smoking kills", because a lot of smokers aren't persuaded yet.
So I could say OP is more off than you think, and he could say... whatever. The worse the situation will get, the more people will be willing to sacrifice their well-being, invest in groundbreaking expensive new tech etc. We are not there yet, not the nations holding most of cash in their pockets.
Oh, and don't get fooled - you can put any cancerous lung photos on cigarette packages, I don't know a single smoker that would change their habit based on this. They ALL know it's bad and can kill you and go on nevertheless, don't treat people like stupid children.
Improving efficiency helps everyone because there is not going to be any overnight and likely within one generation shift to another lifestyle. You will never have all the jobs needed within a city to support all the people who live there. As in, your electronics, your food, and many other items, will be produced elsewhere and have to be sent there. The only things cities can self support usually are services.
Cars became popular not because fuel is cheap, they became popular because they represent the freedom to go where you want when you want. You are not restricted to some bus or train line whose routes and times are determined by a government agency.
So efficiency of the internal combustion engines is a needed move simply for the reason that not everyone can be put on the same schedule to change to the next means of individual travel.
Sure we can. It's called nuclear power. Too bad we're not allowed to use it.
"US people have a difficulty understanding this, "
Europeans have difficulty understanding the size of the United States. Oregon, a medium-sized state, is larger than the UK. Texas is larger than France. Alaska is larger than all of Western Europe.
Canadians use even more fossil fuels than Americans, and for the same reason. It's a really, really big country.
It has nothing to do with "cities". Our cities are reasonably high in density already, and the high density cities do have public transportation.
We just have a lot of people who don't live in cities, and we like it that way just fine.
The CO2 emissions themselves are not the whole problem. It's the fact that they are coming from a source that is introducing new carbon into the cycle. It's not the engine, it's the way it is produced and the fuel we use.
Public transportation, except for perhaps NY, is actually less efficient than driving because no one uses it. It'd be cheaper to just buy everyone a Prius than most of these light rail or streetcar projects and it'd be better for the environment.
> the purpose of developing a more efficient engine is to reduce emission
Generally saving money is why.
And as hackers we love making things more efficient.
Plus as scientist we love new discoveries, cause who knows where they'll go. Why couldn't this work on a hydrogen or future engine X? Perhaps it won't but scientists discover cause we can.
Last guess I read put it around 350 barrels for a family sedan. I don't know how much of that is plastics, smelting, and other materials and how much is energy requirements though (and to be fair, I have no idea how close or not that number actually is to the true cost).
But given that it takes some amount of oil at least, doesn't that invalidate the argument against increasing efficiency? Because you could call building any sort of car, even a Model S, a loosing battle then.
Another thing to think of: if you don't have access to a wall plug, and want to provide an air conditioned environment in a vehicle, there's no alternative to oil AFAIK for anything smaller than an aircraft carrier. Diesel Generators are the only option for air conditioning on Sailing Yachts for example. Nothing else has enough energy density and you can't fit enough renewable (solar, wind, hydro) power to keep up with the amps air conditioning will pull out of it.
I know that particular example is very niche. It's just an interest of mine and I'm hopeful we'll see some sort of game changer in the next decade or two.
In fact, in the U.S. most electricity is generated from sources other than oil. Unfortunately, a lot of it comes from coal, which is worse than oil in almost every environmental aspect. But theoretically the electricity could all come from solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear.
Cars have of lot of plastic in them, and oil is the main feedstock for the manufacture of plastic. But that's not really bad in terms of global warming, as a lot of the carbon remains locked up in the plastic (as opposed to burning oil).
The final piece of the puzzle is transportation--cars are not built all in one place, the subassemblies might be manufactured all over, and then come together for final assembly via rail, boat, truck, even airplane. Each of those burns oil, so that's a big part of the oil footprint.
Major energy sources and percent share of total U.S. electricity generation in 2014:
Coal = 39% Natural gas = 27% Nuclear = 19% Hydropower = 6% Other renewables = 7% Biomass = 1.7% Geothermal = 0.4% Solar = 0.4% Wind = 4.4% Petroleum = 1% Other gases < 1%
Charging your battery might be less efficient.
They did the whole math in "Sustainable energy without the hot air", and over all, even burning coal and using an electric car is better than burning petrol in a comparitively small engine.
Funny enough, a similar analysis applies for heating: burning natural gas to make electricity to drive a modern heat pump is more efficient than burning the gas directly for heat at the premises.
From a physical point of view, that's possible because you only need low grade heat for your home, but burning gas produces high grade heat.
source: www.eurelectric.org/Download/Download.aspx?DocumentID=13549
I think the direction they are taking is not the right one. One step further, I suspect the oil lobby pays for this kind of studies.
Maybe it will have other usages than car, but I think that's the vast majority of them we are talking about here. Electric is today's way to go.
No, it is not
Hybrids will still exist. ICE powered engines will still exist
There are applications for internal combustion engines where practical alternatives are not even on the horizon, big ocean freighters for example.
It's very narrow minded to dismiss this as "wasted effort", just because it's not part of the endgame vision where no fuel is burned for any reason ever. There are many steps between the status quo and that idealized scenario, and any improvement in efficiency is always a good thing.
PatOP: Single-Crankshaft Opposed-Piston Engine
http://www.pattakon.com/pattakonPatOP.htm
OPRE: Opposed piston Pulling Rod Engine
http://www.pattakon.com/pattakonOPRE.htm
> A 500cc two stroke can easily make some 80 Nt*m (8 Kp*m) torque.
> At 6000 rpm this torque makes some 50 KW (70 PS).
> 50 KW from 20 Kp means 0.4 Kp per KW.
> And 0.4 Kp/KW with direct injection Diesel efficiency sounds interesting, especially for an engine with such a low cost."Sounds like they're trading the spark system (a pretty easy to maintain system) for a second piston/crankshaft/etc. Essentially pulling out a cheap and perfected system for one that adds a bunch of high stress, expensive parts. Just from that sounds like a bad idea.
They say the extra efficiency comes from heat loss from the cylinder head, but I have a hard time believing they're capturing that much extra (double-digits) efficiency from heat loss alone, especially given the reduced efficiency of having more moving parts.
Opposing pistons and compression ignition are (mostly) orthogonal optimizations. From years of working on engines, I'd also be more willing to call the mechanical parts "perfected" and the ignition system "not perfected", at least for common consumer engines.
We already have this technology. Diesel engines ignite the fuel through compression. We also had the opposing pistons layout for a while (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposed-piston_engine).
EDIT: we even have triangular-y shaped opposing engines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Deltic)
"and allows the engine to run with diesel-like efficiency and power, while maintaining gasoline's emissions benefits."
Whether or not any of this is actually feasible is explored in elbigbad's sibling comment.
2 strokes are terrible engines generally, because they have very high emissions, usually because they release unburned fuel in the exhaust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark-class_fast_patrol_boat
Dark Avenger probably being my favourite!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/John_Eve...
Gasoline is comprised of a shorter set of hydrocarbons (mostly 6, 8, and 10 chain) than diesel (about 12-16 chain length, though 8-21 carbon are listed at Wikipedia). Volatility (and ignitability) increase with shorter chains -- methane (C2H6) and butane (C4H10) -- that is, two and four chain hydrocarbons -- are both gaseous at or near room temperature.
Longer chains still get you heavy fuel oils, tars, etc.
...and eventually that results in simple plastics like polyethylene, which is basically a very long chain hydrocarbon:
These engines use valve ports, so piston motion produces the valve action. All the timing is set by the engine geometry. There are few variables adjustable at run time. This is also true of Wankel engines, which is why Wankels hit a wall - you can't tweak fuel injection timing or valve timing. In a Diesel, you can't even tweak the spark timing. Much of the improvement in IC engines has come from active control of fuel injection and spark, along with a few attempts at dynamically tweaking valve timing. These designs don't seem to be able to do that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkH9QRaQJM0
Even if they weren't all that much more efficient, I bet a lot of people who miss the 2-stroke diesel sound would want one in their car.
0. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/23/fake-engine-sounds-...
This is based on input and output temperatures, more than anything.
I've seen a few other radical reciprocating energy designs, there are some interesting YouTube vids I should track down. I think "radial engine" might reveal something. New Zealand, possibly Australian engineering firm, IIRC.
https://www.formula1.com/content/fom-website/en/latest/inter...
As a mechanical engineer, this engine design seems much more promising, however: http://liquidpiston.com/
In a mobile system you could get 50% with a fixed load. The problem with the car is that is has to work in different regimes.
That is the reason hybrid engines are more efficient. They work at a fixed load and store the energy in a battery or super cap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairbanks_Morse_38_8-1/8_diese...
Maybe this kind of business is different compared to software where you're expected to build something revenue generating relatively quickly.
http://www.ecomotors.com/post/ecomotors-receives-new-investm...
>Dr. Senecal's test engine consumed 15 percent less fuel than a standard engine while producing one-third as much nitric oxide and half the soot.
That's a common pattern in new (combustion) engine designs; there's a lot of them being published every year, but almost none of them actually end up being mass-produced and they dwindle into silence or as just demonstration models. Why? I don't know; the media only seems to focus on the invention and potential, not the failure (or if I were to put on my tin foil hat, the disappearance under mysterious circumstances). The only nonstandard engine that (AFAIK) ever got some leverage was the rotary wankel engine, and even that was (iirc) in just one car model.
I think the main reason for the pattern you observe is that what's optimal and what's cost effective in a car is highly non-intuitive. Take front-wheel drive, for instance. Mechanically more complex than RWD, but (apparently) worth it due to the space savings inside the car.
Or take water-methanol injection: well-understood tech that's been in use since WW2, can save fuel and reduce NOx emissions significantly, or give higher power output. But it requires changes to all the fuelling infrastructure, and that makes it essentially a non-starter outside of racing cars.
So, the total cost of designing this prototype was $13 million? What's the size of the R&D budget for a typical automaker?
To me this just shows that typically businesses are in the mindset of "business as usual" because it's what they are comfortable with rather than looking into radical, new, innovation.
The new engine will meld the best characteristics of gasoline and compression ignition engines with an innovative piston architecture refined by Achates Power that sets two pistons moving in opposition in one cylinder. As the crowns of the pistons slide toward each other, they compress a mixture of air and gasoline to such extreme pressures that the mixture auto-ignites without the need for spark plugs in a process known as compression ignition.
which is the same principle as the deltic engine.
Mazda, GM and others are known to be working on CI engines for gas targeting 2020, so this might be the next step in 10 years. Assuming we don't all switch to pure electric...
http://www.enginehistory.org/Diesels/CH4.pdf
Claims of innovative internal combustion engine designs that will be significantly more efficient than current ones show up every few months. They never live up to the hype.
But I guess $9 Million isn't unreasonable if it actually produces engines that automakers will adopt.
In fact we could fund 50 more startups EACH YEAR with the ethanol subsidy. Some of them will work, some will fail, still would be same $10 Billion.
[1] https://imgur.com/gallery/bxzeN [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/educationalgifs/comments/468290/a_c...
IMO the better combustion engines become, the more options for fuel we have. For example, ethanol compares poorly to gasoline in power & consumption, but with continued engine development, ethanol will be able to develop as much power & economy as gasoline does today.
It would be better for smaller applications to move to electric and produce energy by other means. This requires investment into better batteries/storage applications. I'd rather all the money go to that instead of combustion research.
There are still a lot of places where very high power to weight ratio of combustion engines is extremely important.
I'm talking cars, bikes and the like...
EDIT: Also, a 737 does not use the type of engine described here, unless you want them to move back to prop design.
But my apologies, I did miss the "small application" part.
It's definitely useful to burn less fuel, but still.