Alternative Energy Series Cheap, Clean Energy Everywhere Now! by Ed Howes

Alternative Energy Series Cheap, Clean Energy Everywhere Now! by Ed Howes

I had sincerely hoped to profit from the things I have learned about energy over the past 20 years. Much time has passed without progress. I never found anyone to help or encourage me to bring these not so new technologies to market, so here I will offer them to the world and see if anyone might find value in free information.

The combustion process 19th Century engineering gave us, I call slow burn. Over the past century this technology has been retained because it provided great profits to Big Oil, Big Energy, Big Banking and Big Government, through fuel taxes; a very big conspiracy to rip off global consumers. All have agreed on the desirability of using more than twenty times the fossil fuel needed for inferior performance that poisons the worlds air, soil and water. Indeed, it may be demonstrated in the near future that liquid fuel technology has squandered fifty times more fuel than needed per developed horsepower.

Fast burn technology, developed by Canadian, Charles Pogue, in the late nineteen forties, bought and suppressed by automakers, is a fifty five year old solution.

Charles had easily solvable power problems with his hot vapor, fast burn, gasoline fuel system. But he refused to address the performance problem in his quest to achieve 300 mile per gallon fuel economy, after successfully surpassing 200 miles per gallon with a 1937 Ford V-8 sedan. This at a time when fuel was relatively cheap in North America and few would trade power for economy. I solved these problems in a simple fashion and never built a conversion to demonstrate the solutions. This was due partly to fear of the opposition and an unreliable sense of market timing.

The old slow burn technology makes just enough vapor in a combustion chamber to light the mixture with a spark or compression heat in a diesel engine. At the same time heat begins to vaporize liquid fuel to a combustible state, pressures build to great heights and prevent rapid vaporization of the remaining fuel. In addition, the unvaporized fuel absorbs great amounts of heat that cannot contribute to combustion pressure, which creates power. This rich or fuel heavy mixture serves to lower and regulate the peak and average combustion temperatures throughout an unnecessarily long combustion cycle. This process uses a surplus of fuel that passes out to atmosphere unburned. The catalytic converter was the industry response to cleaning this unburned fuel.

Fast burn technology does just the opposite of slow burn. In a slow burn four stroke combustion engine there is fire in the cylinder for more than one complete crankshaft revolution. That is, somewhere between 360 and 420 degrees of rotation. The power stroke is a 180 degree event and if we use a bicycle crank for comparison, we can see that most of the power is delivered in half of the full stroke, centered on the mid point. That is, cylinder pressure creates the greatest torque when the piston is half way through the power stroke. The engine will easily provide all the power needed for cruise and moderate acceleration if there is only enough fuel available to make cylinder pressure fifteen or twenty degrees before and after the midpoint of the power stroke; a controlled power stroke of thirty to forty degrees. This is controlled by metering fuel so all fuel is burned up in an oxygen rich environment and the emissions will now be hot air and trace amounts of oxides of nitrogen.

Most children learn at a young age, they can pass their finger through a candle flame without pain or injury by moving their finger through the flame quickly. Such is the secret of fast burn technology. Temperatures that would melt engine parts like valves and pistons if maintained for four hundred degrees of crankshaft rotation are no problem if the burn cycle only lasts for a maximum of one hundred degrees in the case of maximum power. Performance enthusiasts looking for that extra 50 horsepower by adding fuel, are the ones most likely to melt parts. For these people - racers, hot rodders; engines likely to melt at high power outputs and too much fuel can and should be assembled with readily available thermal barrier coatings to prevent melt downs.

About ten years ago I read that the slow burn performance engine developed peak cylinder pressure at 15 to 18 degrees after top dead center, early in the power stroke. What if we could develop just twice that amount of cylinder pressure, three times as late in the power stroke? That is, at 45 - 54 degrees after top dead center. The answer is we would have more than three times the power at the point of greatest mechanical advantage in the power stroke as we do with the bicycle crank in the middle of its down stroke.

When there is absolutely no liquid fuel in our air/fuel mixture, the rate of combustion is many times greater than when there is an abundance of liquid fuel, as in the 19th century slow burn technology. This means we can supply spark much later and burn all the fuel in thirty degrees or less crankshaft rotation. An engine that can burn all its fuel in twenty degrees of crankshaft rotation will deliver twenty times the fuel economy of an engine that does not burn all its fuel in 400 degrees of rotation. Although the fast burn engine might generate peak temperatures and cylinder pressures three times higher than a slow burn engine, the burn time is so dramatically shortened that the engine will actually run cooler than slow burn engines. Smaller cooling systems will do the job at lower water temperatures, like the 160 degrees of old days.

It has never been the case that piston engines are inefficient and they could serve us very well into the Twenty Second Century as soon as we deep six their liquid, slow burn fuel systems. The reasons Charles Pogue never realized the tremendous power potential of his fast burn, 200 mile per gallon Ford sedan, was likely two things. The hot gasoline vapor made with exhaust system heat and inappropriate spark timing for an engine that required the spark to come about eighty crank degrees later than the timing it had as a slow burn factory engine. Combustion performance enthusiasts the world over, know the coldest, densest air/fuel mixture makes the best power. These people can also understand that making peak cylinder pressures when the piston is near the top of the power stroke, only tries to push the crankshaft out of the engine, onto the ground - wasted energy like standing on the bicycle pedal at the very top.

What we want is cold vapor fuel which is much more easily created than Charles exhaust heated fuel. The secret is the vaporizing power of vacuum. Success in cold vaporizing has been demonstrated by radio frequency vaporizing chambers. But the piston engine operates on a vacuum system. In the days of carburetors, vacuum drew in the air to the engines cylinders and metered the fuel fairly accurately by means of that same vacuum and simple mechanical adjustments to fuel flow.

Modern electronic fuel injection is perhaps the most expensive incremental improvement to slow burn technology in the Twentieth Century. It served multiple purposes. It exchanged a good, simple system, with a slightly better complex system. Computer controls took auto repair out of the realm of backyard mechanics and restricted it to $50 - 70 per hour service centers - a great big bonus for the auto service industry and a big expense to the do -it -yourselfer.

I am no combustion engineer, nor do I wish to become one. I can only say I intuitively expect two horsepower per cubic inch displacement on any four stroke spark engine modified for cold vapor fuel, using an appropriately sized carburetor as would be done on a slow burn engine.

I further expect that a performance modification that would increase the power of a slow burn engine by fifty percent, will increase the power of a fast burn engine by sixty to one hundred per cent. All the common power boosting practices work on fast burn engines better than slow burn. Compression ratios are not critical as the octane of pure vapor is up around 110. A 12 to one compression ratio would be about 9 to 1 at 45 degrees after top dead center, when the spark would occur at full power. While misfire can occur as often as 3 - 4 cycles per hundred on a new V-8 engine, misfires would be very rare with fast burn engines due to the lower compression at ignition and the evenness of a lean air/vapor mixture. The fast burn engine may be supercharged with a draw through carburetor producing the vacuum to operate a fresh air bubbler at the bottom of the fuel tank. If a richer vapor is desired in the bubbler, a racing fuel cell can be used, packed with fuel cell foam, greatly increasing the surface area exposed to liquid fuel, vacuum will readily vaporize. Large metal fuel tanks should be reinforced top and bottom by epoxying bar stock or angle stock, so they do not collapse under vacuum.

Lastly, I would like to mention that fast burn technology is a multi fuel system. With a little experimenting and fine tuning of mixture and spark, a fast burn engine can burn gasoline, alcohol, diesel, kerosene, vegetable oil, propane and liquefied natural gas. The fuel with the greatest latent energy per pound will deliver the best performance and the least powerful fuel will deliver very adequate performance. If you are anxious to try a fast burn conversion, please read my Fast Burn Conversion essay for tips and details for a safe conversion. Heres to big, clean, cheap power for the new age!

About the Author
Freelance writer published on many websites and newspapers.

Alternative Energy Series Water - The Perfect Fuel by Ed Howes

Alternative Energy Series Water - The Perfect Fuel by Ed Howes

As a freshman in high school, I failed chemistry class due to an extreme disinterest in the entire subject. I do recall a demonstration in which the teacher hooked a large one and a half volt battery to a glass and wire electrolyzer that transformed water into separated hydrogen and oxygen. I would later learn that commercial hydrogen and oxygen producers also used this method in an inefficient manner that requires more energy than the fuel produced can generate through combustion.

In the late eighties I would learn that a boy genius in California learned to make hydrogen from water efficiently with a twelve volt battery and standard auto electrical system, during the 1970s. Around 1990, my machinist neighbor built a hydrogen generator that did not work due to defects in the plans the boy genius had drawn up in prison when he was no longer a boy.

My neighbor was not interested in correcting the defect when it was discovered and I was only a bit disappointed. My father was a hobby style inventor and he gave me a good idea for a cheaper and much more effective 12 volt hydrogen generator. I never got around to building it and decided there was no point in separating the oxygen and the hydrogen after splitting the water.

Because the hydrogen and oxygen have opposite electrical charges, they readily recombine as a compound I call hydrox. The man who discovered this gas and fooled with it to make underwater welders and cutting torches, named the gas after himself, so hydrox is also known as Browns gas. Simply put, hydrox is an oxygenated fuel, which means it burns hotter and faster than a non oxygenated fuel. In WWII the Germans used hydrogen peroxide as a liquid rocket fuel. H2O2 is a super oxygenated fuel, highly caustic, corrosive and dangerous to work with. Hydrox, however, is no more corrosive than water. Flat plate electrodes one sixteenth inch apart, made of stainless steel will last a long time if clean water is used. Clean water can be had from relatively inexpensive filters which can be carried on a vehicle. Having a good filter can also help supply one with potable water when clean water no longer flows from the pipes at home.

Big Energy talks only about a hydrogen economy - using expensive technology to manufacture a product that can be made inexpensively by anyone who wants it. The idea of water power is far too democratic to control. The rain falls both on the just and the unjust. If people put water in their fuel tanks and make enough fuel with a few watts of electricity that then makes kilowatts or megawatts of power in a combustion engine, who will buy hydrogen at fueling stations? Most Americans buy water cheaply compared to its value because of its relative abundance. In the U.S. it is usually cheaper to buy than to collect, store or drill for. Dry nations only need water pipelines from neighboring wet nations. Seaside countries can desalinate and filter sea water and pipe where needed. How can the corporate fascists gain control of water? Only by convincing everyone we need their new technology.

Water is to democratic energy access as the internet is to democratic discussion, information distribution and personal activism. This fact will be concealed for as long as possible and a few of us will be wise to the game. Without water we cannot live long. It exists in altered forms with special properties. When we know what there is to know about water, we will be wiser than any who have come before.

Engineers forge ahead building hydrogen fuel cells. These cells apparently generate electricity by recombining hydrogen and oxygen. This means that hydrox will not be suitable as fuel cell fuel. However, simple electrolysis costs little more to collect the two gasses separately and send them to the appropriate ports of the fuel cell. Thus, water can power these fuel cells as easily as combustion engines of many types, including jet and rocket engines. It is also likely from basic chemistry that steam is more easily electrolyzed than liquid water. Temperature rises speed chemical reactions. Steam is quite easy to create with combustion engines, which are the space heaters for the great outdoors.

I often wonder why greenhouse gasses are so readily blamed for global warming, while billions of super space heaters are seldom accused of much contribution. Fuel cells would be a fine solution to all this combustion heat. How many volcanoes would we need to equal the heat of transportation every day? Are we not burning up the planet one day at a time especially for the sake of corporate profit? Why do we so willingly play the game of dont blame me, I just do as Im told?

When water is our fuel, the environment does not suffer crisis when a spill occurs on a highway, an ocean or a storage container ruptures. When water is our fuel, old ships can run aground, break up in a storm and not destroy hundreds of miles of coastline and wildlife environment. When water is our fuel, cars do not burst into flame during rear end collisions. The great betrayers of humanity have known what I am saying for more than a hundred years, and dont want us to have water power. Is it not time for some changes? Shall we choke ourselves and our children for corporate profits? What is our reward?

Hydrogen and hydrox are both gaseous fast burn fuels, just as vaporized alcohol, gasoline and diesel; except even faster burning with much greater power potential, also producing the usual oxides of nitrogen, unless in fact such oxides mostly form in slow burn engines due to the long burn time. In this case we can expect greatly reduced oxides of nitrogen with water fuel, as well. When we make water fuel at home we can operate stoves and heaters and combustion or fuel cell electric generators and make electricity for a few pennies per kilowatt. Do you imagine the electric utilities will be happy they do not need to purchase more generating capacity? Will they want us to supply them at wholesale prices? Could developing countries adopt water power and internet connections to vault ahead to the 21st Century? Is clean, cheap power a huge threat to all the traditional power? Of course it is. That is why the science savior has not provided us with this miracle of the 19th Century. How does it feel to be one or two centuries behind existing technology? Is it not shameful and embarrassing? Humiliating?

The corporate scientists, engineers and energy experts will continue telling us it is impossible to make hydrogen as cheaply as some garage and basement scientists and engineers have been doing for decades. The sad thing is we will just say OK, we believe you. There is no such thing as conspiracy except in the mind of radicals.

About the Author
Freelance writer published on many websites and newspapers.

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