‘Omnivorous engine’ hopes to run on many fuels

The ‘omnivorous engine’ is no picky eater. Gasoline? Down the hatch. Ethanol? Butanol? It’ll slurp those up too. The creators of the omnivorous engine, engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, seek to fashion an engine that can run on just about any type of spark-ignited fuel.

“Just because an engine is compatible with different fuels doesn’t mean that it has the ability to run at peak efficiency regardless of the fuel mixture,” Wallner said. “That’s where the benefits of the omnivorous engine lie.”



According to Wallner, all single-fuel and most flex-fuel engines are typically calibrated to run on a single, usually all-gasoline, fuel source. To calibrate an engine, engineers and auto manufacturers typically tune the engine for several variables, including the amount of fuel injected into the engine per cycle, the time at which the fuel is injected and the timing of the igniting spark.

Each of these parameters will have different optimum values for different fuel blends, Wallner said. Without an omnivorous engine, cars cannot adapt themselves independently to other fuel concentrations and therefore cannot maximize fuel economy

Physorg