Re: Anybody done the math lately?


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Posted by D. Sherman on Thursday, April 03, 2008 at 00:20:27 :

In Reply to: Re: Anybody done the math lately? posted by Todd Wilson on Thursday, April 03, 2008 at 00:08:41 :

It may come to that, but my point was that there's no engineering reason why a "diesel" engine has to run on "diesel" fuel. Conventional diesel engines were developed to make use of the (then) cheap #1 or #2 fuel oil, or in the case of marine and stationary diesel engines, even heavier grades of fuel oil. The driving factor in the design was to make an engine that will use the cheapest fuel, and that was always the heaviest fuel. That's no longer the case, so it's time for us to step back from the assumption that gasoline and alcohol must be burned in a spark-ignition Otto-cycle engine.

The Otto cycle, mixing the fuel with the air and compressing the mixture together, limits the compression ratio to a relatively low value to prevent detonation. Thermodynamic efficiency is directly related to compression ratio, so if we double the compression ratio, from say 10:1 to 20:1, it does wonders for the efficiency. The Diesel cycle does away with the detonation issue by injecting the fuel into the hot, already-compressed air. There's no law of physics that says that fuel has to be the expensive liquid from the green pump. With the right engine design, most any combustible liquid will work, including gasoline. It would probably even be possible to develop a propane-burning diesel engine.



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