Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
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This would work fine, except in terms of success.

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Bomb calorimeter engine

 Bomb calorimeter combustion engine
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I was wondering if it would be possible and somewhat efficient to have an engine that can take in just about any burnable substance as a fuel, then grind it up and burn it in a cylinder that is pressurized with high purity oxygen or ozone and ignited similar to a bomb calorimeter, you could probably even use fruit juice or soda as fuel but you'd have to dispose of the ash water at some point...
—tabarin, Apr 10 2004

The Stanley Steamer http://www.vintagec...ntage/06Stanley.htm
Early auto - ran on anything flammable. [bungston, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 06 2004]

Lycopodium engine http://www.niepce.com/pagus/pireus1.html
The first internal combustion engine [Fussass, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 06 2004]

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       It's Mr. Fusion!   

       </geek>
—5th Earth, Apr 11 2004
   

       Which btw looked suspiciously like a soda stream.   

       EDIT: just looked it up, apprently it was a Krupps coffee grinder.
—dooper, Apr 11 2004
   

       as we all know fruit juice and soda burn so well...   

       on a more serious note, juice and pop are much more expensive per joule than gasoline
—alc, Apr 11 2004
   

       Coal or wood-fired steam engines will burn whatever you put in them. In Buster Keaton's movie _The General_ they run low on coal and search their train for anything they can break off and throw into the furnace - wood, curtains, furniture, etc. I linked the Stanley Steamer, an early steam powered car. My grandpa knew of these growing up, and told me that some folks did run their Stanleys on wood. No need for ozone - air works fine.   

       A noble first effort, [tab]. They beat you to it by about 200 years. Flex that brain and try again.
—bungston, Apr 11 2004
   

       Yes, I'm familiar with steam engines ;P the reason I thought this idea might be better is that the high oxygen environment would burn the fuel completely and the presence of excess moisture wouldn't retard the burning process as much...
—tabarin, Apr 11 2004
   

       I don't think [bungston] knows what a bomb calorimeter is... since I've actually used one, I'm thinking this idea won't be practical... Even so, [bung] is talking about external combustion -- this is internal combustion.   

       I'm giving it a croissant just for that.
—zigness, Apr 11 2004
   

       Maybe it is time for me to be edified. I thought a bomb calorimeter was like a steam engine except instead of transfering the heat to water and using the steam for work, the bomb transfers the heat to water and measures the change in water temperature. Usually the bomb does not produce enough heat to turn the water to steam. I googled around some and still do not understand the distinction. So, your [zigness], or [tab], if you would be so kind...
—bungston, Apr 11 2004
   

       Well... I understood the description to mean that this would be an internal combustion engine where the cylinder / piston arrangement would be fired by burning things with much lower volatility than fossil fuel by using pressurized oxygen instead of normally aspirated air. I didn't read into it that it would simply use heat to make steam. [tab]... comments?
—zigness, Apr 11 2004
   

       At first, I thought [tab] was proposing some sort of engine that would burn more 'exotic' fuels, like pop and juice... But perhaps there is some science behind this that would make it more efficient than metabolic processes?
—alc, Apr 11 2004
   

       [tab]--- where do you get the energy to concentrate the Oxygen ?
—SystemAdmin, Apr 12 2004
   

       Hopefully if it created more energy than it used it would create it's own oxygen stream using Pressure Swing Absorption or an ozone generator... The idea I was thinking is that you would have a lot of fuel flexability since a bomb calorimeter extracts all the energy from a substance
—tabarin, Apr 16 2004
   

       Using pure Oxygen has an advantage because the heat of combustion doesn't have to heat up all the Nitrogen in the air. So the efficiency would be very good.
But the flame temperature would also be very high, and the problem would be to find an engine, or materials that could work with these temperatures. Plus the speed of the combustion would be extremely fast (like an explosion).
Oxygen is an extremely dangerous gas, and can ignite traces of grease or oil in a pipe simply from the frictional heat of the gas passing through.

As an after-thought: Instead of injecting the fuel into the compressed oxygen, why not do it the other way round?
—Ling, Apr 17 2004
   


 

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