OT - Bill Crower designs gas engine with no cooling system.

I get this theory but a few things bother me.
1. How to maintain the 212 tempature that water need to be converted to steam inside the combustion chamber , if it drops below that , no steam. eventually the entire engine is going to reach the 212 temp whick is more then the usual 190 f that most engines operate at.Unless there are fins and a fan attached.
2 . adding additional cycles to a complex 4 cycle motor with either more cam lobs or different valves for the additional strokes seems almost " too " complex. I will add some gas to this topic. While the 4 stroke engine works well and has been streached to the max in racing there is still power in only one of the four strokes. Lets look at this whole steam stroke with a two cycle. It's already been done with air and fuel injectors to have a two stroke with no premix , with air injected it does not have to pass through the crank cases so oil or lube of whatever sort can be stored in the bottom end with out if going through the transfer ports. If we are going to think outside the box then ya need to think what is best for this application a four stroke or a air / fuel / water injected two stroke. Get your head around that.

I honestly think if this idea has been around and it was controlable the F1 geeks would have been using it for years if there was any gain from it. Those guys are pretty sharp. Water is not compressable so just adding it to a normal power stroke will raise the compression ratio by filling the chamber with non compressible material.

to me a two stroke seems like the proper application for this method of injecting water for a " steam stroke" . no cams . no valves , no springs , just three injectors.

 

Not real sure I see this idea as viable HOWEVER lets talk about Bruce's CROWER MILEAGE SYSTEM from several decades ago and then some body tell me that isn't exactly what all the hybrids with Atkinson Cycle engines are doing.

I had the pleassure of retaining Bruce as a consultant when I was developing variable valve timing technology three decades ago.

Bruce has forgotten more than most of us will ever know about engine design.

 

The 1960 Corvair I drive is air cooled and gets over 23mpg. Cool article!

 

That's what I mean .. Yeah !! 'Cept it should go more than 5,000 miles on a charge. Should go for years and years. I nuke sub goes for years ...

 

Combustion temps inside a gasoline engine routinely reach in excess of 900*. In a diesel engine, 1200* is not un-common. Infact, when hopping up a diesel, the firsd reccomended addition is a pyrometer to monitor EGT's [exhaust gas temps] A diesel can [safely] reach 1400* for 30 seconds, and 1500* for 10 seconds.

All things are relative... Your assertion is paramount to "DOHC 4 valve engines are too complicated to work."... Well, we all know that's not true.

In a 4 stroke engine with one power cycle, energy is only being "produced" 25% of the time. In a 6 stroke engine with 2 power cycles, energy is produced 33% of the time.

Bringing this technology to life would require no more than an additional exhaust lobe on the cam, and a timing chain/belt that opperates at 33% of crank speed instead of 50%. If you started with an engine that had [from the factory] dual spark plugs per cylinder, you could screw a water injector into the second spark plug hole and go with it.

Run the H2O system as a "high pressure common rail" and fire them [h2o injectors] off with either opposing cylinders spark signals or a cam position sensor, and you would be good to go.

While were on the subject, water has an expansion rate of 2000:1, where as gasoline has an expansion rate of 1900:1, so theoretically, you could increase your MPG's by about 120% if the technology were developed and tuned properly,,, That also means that for every 20 gallons of gasoline the engine burns, it would consune 19.5 gallons of water.

The expansion rate of dteam is dramatically slower than that of gasoline. The benefits of this technology are very real, but simply not applicable @ 10,000 rpm.

A diesel is a better suited application for steam recovery technology due to it's much higher combustion temps, and it's low rpm nature.