[Graeme]

Motorhead Messiah
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'J')ohnathan Goodwin can get 100 mpg out of a Lincoln Continental, cut emissions by 80%, and double the horsepower. Does the car business have the guts to follow him?

“Check it out. It's actually a jet engine," says Johnathan Goodwin, with a low whistle. "This thing is gonna be even cooler than I thought." We're hunched on the floor of Goodwin's gleaming workshop in Wichita, Kansas, surrounded by the shards of a wooden packing crate. Inside the wreckage sits his latest toy--a 1985-issue turbine engine originally designed for the military. It can spin at a blistering 60,000 rpm and burn almost any fuel. And Goodwin has some startling plans for this esoteric piece of hardware: He's going to use it to create the most fuel-efficient Hummer in history.

Goodwin leads me over to a red 2005 H3 Hummer that's up on jacks, its mechanicals removed. He aims to use the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it'll have two engines, including an electric motor. But in this case, the second will be the turbine, Goodwin's secret ingredient. Whenever the truck's juice runs low, the turbine will roar into action for a few seconds, powering a generator with such gusto that it'll recharge a set of "supercapacitor" batteries in seconds. This means the H3's electric motor will be able to perform awesome feats of acceleration and power over and over again, like a Prius on steroids. What's more, the turbine will burn biodiesel, a renewable fuel with much lower emissions than normal diesel; a hydrogen-injection system will then cut those low emissions in half. And when it's time to fill the tank, he'll be able to just pull up to the back of a diner and dump in its excess french-fry grease--as he does with his many other Hummers. Oh, yeah, he adds, the horsepower will double--from 300 to 600.

[mos6507]

A jet engine probably costs more than you'd ever see in gas savings. Isoalted prototypes are meaningless unless there is a way to make it cost-effective.

[nemo]

thread needs more umlaut

Also, a gas turbine is unlikely to be very efficient, supercapacitors or no. Those things make a lot of very hot exhaust=wasted energy. Not by any means an ideal powerplant for running in short bursts either, even if they indeed have "great gusto" for their size and weight.

[Graeme]

Ford Packaging Turbocharging, Gasoline Direct Injection and Downsizing as “EcoBoost” Engine Technology; Targeting Deployment on 500K Vehicles Annually

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'F')ord Motor Company is introducing a new 4-cylinder and 6-cylinder engine family it calls EcoBoost that features turbocharging and gasoline direct injection technology. The EcoBoost technology—and the downsized engine applications it enables—will deliver approximately 20% better fuel economy, 15% fewer CO2 emissions and better driving performance versus larger displacement engines, according to Ford.

[efarmer]

This is a humdinger Graeme. Turbine engines take a sizable amount of power to spin up to useful speeds, even if this is a smallish APU for starting aircraft. And then cycling the turbine on and off for a few second hints at thermal stresses and a repetition rate that will demand the innards of such a device be made from 100% pure unobtanium to avoid thermal fatigue and stress cracks.

The most fuel efficient Hummer is not at all uncommon. It is the Hummer in the showroom window before it is put into use.


Even if this turns out to be a gearhead's labor of pure love
in the guise of an energy saving project, I hope at least he
can find a substance to add to the french fry oil so that it at least blows green smoke as it howls down the road.

[dinopello]

I love the sound of turbine engines spinning up.

This guy has the sound on his website. An MD500 Helo

http://www.heloflights.com/

[Graeme]

Weaning America Off of Oil: The 'Motorhead Messiah' Has Arrived

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'J')ohnathan Goodwin's work proves that affordable modifications are possible for many vehicles already on the roads today. "His conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock Genral Motor (GM) parts and snapping them together in clever new ways." This means that fuel-efficient vehicles don't have to be wimpy in power or small and cramped in size. And while the large American automakers are resistant to change and skeptical that the domestic industry can survive Congress' target for fuel-economy standards to be raised to 35 mpg along with sharp increases in the reduction of emissions, Goodwin has a three-step plan for weaning Americans off of gasoline. The focus of his plan is adaptability. "The point," he says, "is to design cars that are flexible."

The first step in Goodwin's plan requires automakers to aggressively produce diesel-fueled vehicles. This step by itself would "improve the nation's mileage by as much as 40%." Diesel fuel is commonly available across the states, so American drivers could adjust easily to this step. Another positive aspect regarding diesel engines is that they can often burn biodiesel made from renewable domestic resources. Large-scale production of diesel vehicles "would both support the domestic biodiesel market and reduce our nation's oil consumption by up to 1.4 million barrels of oil per day - precisely the amount we import from Saudi Arabia."

Step two of Goodwin's plan calls for widely producing diesel-electric hybrid cars "which would double mileage on even the largest diesel automobiles." His final phase involves producing "electric hybrids that run in 'dual fuel' mode, burning biodiesel along with hydrogen, ethanol, natural gas, or propane." The dual-fuel mode allows a vehicle's mileage to be very high and emissions pollution to be very low. Because these vehicles can burn both regular diesel and biodiesel as well as go without any alternative fuels if needed, no one would find themselves stranded without a fuel source. Over time there would be a gradual increase of dual-fuel cars on the road which would push the demand for national grids to include alternative fuels such as ethanol, hydrogen and biodiesel.

Goodwin believes that for America to realistically move away from its dependence on oil, there will have to be fuel-flexibility for the vehicles of tomorrow. Auto-industry insiders agree with Goodwin's flexible fuel concept as well as the need to get alternative fuels into the market. GM's director of environmental, energy and safety policy, Mary Beth Stanek concurs that multiple fuels need to be available. She notes that Brazil weaned itself from gasoline in this way. "They pull up to the pump, and they've got a whole bunch of different choices." She also indicates diesel fuel will become a focus fuel "because of its inherent fuel efficiency."

Unfortunately, despite this concurrence of Goodwin's concepts for efficiently reducing our nation's dependence on oil and the need to focus on diesel engines to support our conversion to alternative fuels, reality demonstrates that American car makers are not "seriously thinking of abandoning the gasoline engine anytime soon. The 300-million-gallon U.S. biodiesel business is a fraction of the 12-billion-gallon ethanol one." And consumers won't purchase alternative-fuel vehicles until it is easy to get the fuel. However, with increasing political and environmental pressures to get away from our reliance on oil, improve fuel-efficiency and decrease emissions pollution, automakers have more reasons to promote and produce diesel-fueled vehicles.