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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

Combustion engines are so fundamental, they go far beyond fossil fuels. They are one of the best ways of converting chemical energy to work. Fossil fuels just happen to be very high in chemical energy. You can burn hydrogen, ethanol, bio-diesel, paraffin, methanol....

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.

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Not familiar with burning paraffin, but of others only hydrogen produces relatively safe emissions (water vapor), the rest produce the undesirable by products.

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.

Battery-powered 737's eh? While it's a nice dream, electric motors are way behind on power to weight ratio, thanks to batteries. We might get there someday, but we would need several stacking 10x improvements in battery tech, and who knows if they exist.

There are still a lot of places where very high power to weight ratio of combustion engines is extremely important.

How's 737 a small application?

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.

shrug Jet engines count as combustion research

But my apologies, I did miss the "small application" part.

Sure, jets burn fuel, so in that they count. However, the article is talking about a very specific application with opposing pistons and compression-based ignition. This is similar to how a traditional diesel works.

It's definitely useful to burn less fuel, but still.

But, when running E85 or E90 in a turbo charged engine you can run compression ratios equivalent to 100+ octane racing gas.

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