Highly Efficient Hybrid

*Sorry, the document isn't complete, working while at school* Basically, I have been looking into the emissions of on- road vehicles, their cost, fuel efficiency, etc. I figured that I should try to make a system that is highly efficient and in some aspects if not put into a whole production vehicle, some do-dads could be retrofitted to improve late model and early model vehicles alike. Things included and discussed are: emissions, fuel efficiency, friction, electric motors, batteries, hydrogen injection, water injection, egr, bio fuels, engine theory and design, etc. There are also other things about this vehicle that are unique and unrelated to the drivetrain and powerplant, such as suspension.

1st - vehicles | The automobile is an outstanding invention that has affected our society to the point where it's odd if you didn't have one of these miracles. The problem that occurs more often today however is emissions and economy of these production vehicles, it would be nice to see an automobile manufacturer produce a vehicle that gets 100+ mpg, and puts out nearly zero pollutants. However, this is more of fantasy than reality for anybody knows that they wouldn't do that unless their company is in jeopardy, which I find that it's not always what the people running and working at/for these places want to do but it would be extremely risky to go above what's standard and invest a bunch of money into making a slightly more economical car. At this rate, the only people who are making standards for pollution is the EPA, which so far hasn't been the biggest help as far as I understand.

*Note: I am 14 so please don't criticize me too much for not being the most reliable source of information or if I have something wrong here.*

2nd - Engines & Power ---> Wheels | There are very many basic drivetrain and engine configurations, first, how does an engine work? Well, if you're reading this you already know that, and you would suspect that if we were going to use any engine that it would be a four-stroke engine, well, have you ever heard of a 4+2 (6) stroke engine? These are typically opposed piston engines which have one piston working half the revolutions of the other piston and can use the 2 stoke piston to open and close valves as seen in the Beare head 6 stroke engine. These engines have 2 power strokes out of 6 strokes which means that every three strokes, 1 power stroke occurs. The 2 power strokes are different however, for one uses the fuel/air mixture and the second uses water injection, this is by far the most common design I have witnessed. The second power stroke that uses water injection works by either having a water injector in the intake or a separate intake and valve altogether, when it sucks in air to ready the second power stroke, no fuel is sprayed, only a fine mist of water, which then adsorbs heat and turns into steam which, obviously, means that it is not going to be as powerful of a stroke as the fuel/air power stroke but the power output is relative - meaning that it makes a sufficient amount of power, especially talking torque maybe? Anyways, this engine has variants -some up to, 40% reduction fuel consumption, 65% reduction in carbon monoxide. They overall have low build costs since you eliminate the camshaft, valves, and the head altogether. Water injection too can be added to the fuel/air mix to further reduce Heat, NOx, and other things that are discussable. One more note on the water injection is that we can further cool down exhaust gas temperatures to start condensing the steam into water. We can filter this water and use it through a system of filters, pumps, reservoirs, injectors, and lines.

3rd - Hydrogen Injection, Lean Burning, Emissions, Hemi | So we will pick up one more thing that will refresh us but familiarize us, Water Injection, the main reason that water injection was ever used was actually to control pre-detonation, (Just a thought.) Alright, now hydrogen injection is pretty basic, and this is where the water recollection system will also come in handy for we don't want to have people riding around with an unstable bomb in the back, we can use h20 to produce hydrogen on demand and feeding it through a vacuum tube that leads to the manifold, or a specific series of strategically placed hydrogen vacuum tubes in the manifold to ensure steady hydrogen/petrol ratio in each cylinder. Hydrogen burns 7-9X faster than petrol, it also ignites extremely easy. This is because of the nature of hydrogen, by definition, explodes vs petrol, which burns. This enrichment of hydrogen can also help ignite engine that runs extremely lean. The leaner you can run an engine, the more fuel efficient it becomes, and despite usual rumors, it actually makes the engine run cooler running lean, at least to a certain extent. The matter is not running anything lean is always making it better, it's all about how well the fuel can ignite, if the fuel is not spread out enough with the air, it won't burn properly, it the fuel is spread out to far across the bore it may have problems running, with hydrogen injection, no problem, and the production of hydrogen can be directly related to engine rpm by using the alternator on the engine. There are two different types of hydrogen cells (Cells/blocks that produce hydrogen/oxygen using hho) if you want to learn more about the hydrogen cells google them. Hydrogen Injection is not producing more fuel than its burning despite it being able to improve power, it takes a small amount of hydrogen, which is basic and easy to produce especially with as much wattage as an alternator can produce. One more thing, Hydrogen injection can reduce emissions because it burns the fuel more efficiently, less hydrocarbons are left un-burnt and also means less carbon buildup. So we are done right? Wrong. I'm losing my mind... ? ...I mean lets make this thing a d*mn hemi for better thermal efficiency? It's known that the surface area of a hemispherical object is less than one with sides, this means less walls for heat to be adsorbed in, and more power to the wheels, one more thing -you're think "Hey wait a minute, I thought this d*mn thing was opposed piston or something, so how are you to make the combustion chamber hemispherical? Well, it's easy, I can groove out the middle of the pistons so that each half forms half of the oval that makes the combustion chamber. Oval is not hemispherical I know, but it would definitely offer more thermal efficiency while keeping a usable compression ratio.

4th - Alternative Fuels and EGR | Alternative fuels are nothing new, but there are some I would like to discuss, and they all have similar properties. Kerosene, Vegetable Oil, and Gumweed Oil, if your not sure which one is then I highly recommend researching them. Anyways, it seems they all work really well as bio-diesel, but they seem to have an octane rating around 20, not much. At that rate I would have to run about 6.5:1 compression and still it would have a high likeliness that it starts dieseling since 6.5:1 is about when Kerosene, Gumweed Oil, and Veggie Oil start to self detonate from compression. So not a big success there but sometime in the future I could possibly look into useful biofuels for diesel generators or something. Another Biofuel is Wood Gas, wood gas is not nearly as dense as gasoline so engines naturally aspirated mostly will be affected with less overall engine torque and horsepower, but wood gas has about %14 hydrogen, which helps a lot when it burns and is probably the sole reason why running wood gas produces low emissions and a lot less carbon building and getting into the oil. But wood gas is something not very useful in a production vehicle. So lets stick to gasoline, for now at least. Egr is Exhaust Gas Recirculation, some may argue that R doesn't mean recirculation but in the end I couldn't give a sh*t, what matters is what its capable of doing, and egr can reduce NOx and peak cylinder temperatures. This is useful but causes rough idle which some systems disable egr at idle and peak loads. Regenerative braking can also be used to reduce heat caused by traditional brakes and make useful work most likely using an electric generator that is connected to the drivetrain to slow down the rotating mass. This is essentially hybrid technology which already exists on vehicles such as the Toyota Prius, but it instead uses an electric motor to drive the car under low loads and to regenerate electricity when available, and we can see just by the Toyota's Gas Millage alone that they must be on to something.

5. The Design | So I was thinking for a production car, that this was going to be pretty expensive, but It's a concept not a reality, yet. I wanted two different models, one a hatchback with fwd vehicle with a 1000cc (1.0l) six stroke. And another perhaps a truck or a sport coupe with rwd and a 2,000cc (2.0l) six stroke engine. There will be another design but I want to get to these two first. There is one more thing, which is the Stirling Engine, which uses the difference in temperature to make power. We can use these in cars on items such as the exhaust and coolant which tend to be where a lot of the heat energy goes. Knowing this we can configure a way to dump all the heat in a stirling generator somewhere within the car to use that waste heat and turn it into electricity, the other side of the stirling engine needs to be cool for max power out of the stirling generator, this can be achieved by routing conductors to fins somewhere on top or the the sides of the car, or have vents like the vw beetles that push the air in and through a heatsink on the stirling so that you can effectively maximize the amount of power being regenerated. One thing about running lean is that not all the air and fuel can sometimes be mixed properly, to overcome this issue, we could make the air/fuel mixture swirl into the cylinder as it draws the mix, just as the hcci engines do.

Transmissions: So I also was looking into transmissions and thought that a cvt setup with a gearbox connected to its output shaft would be marvelous, what this does is it creates numerous amounts of gearing throughout each gear, and as the engine rpm increases, the cvt gearing gets taller. This essentially is a basic hi and low gear for every gear but it works better because of its auto transitioning of the gears which can save power by not loading the engine as much and create smoother acceleration, high low end power and higher top end speed. I've seen numerous power sport manufactures use this, commonly with a v- twin efi motor with a cvt coming out and going into a manual transmission behind the v-twin, making it really compact, yet extremely powerful. No I'm not telling you that you can only use manual trannys, you can also automatic transmissions as well.

Hatchback: The hatchback has a 1000cc six stroke engine that alone produces ~150 bhp, with the addition of hydrogen injection and extreme lean running conditions and also the quality and other factors of the engine we will be conservative and say it makes about 120 bhp with water injection (There will be little water mixed in with the fuel/air mixture to help with emissions but we actually want the engine to warm up some so that we can efficiently use water injection on every second power stroke.) So here's what it comes down to: Six Stroke - 1000cc (~120 bhp) (Inline 4) -Hydrogen Injection -Water Injection -EGR -Vacuum Advance ignition timing -Hybrid Configuration (Similar to Prius) -FWD -Decent Flow Exhaust and Intake -Baffled Muffler(s) -Stirling Engines (Attached strategically to the exhaust and coolant systems) - cvt + (automatic/manual) transmission - less than or equal to 2,500 lbs - ~28:1 a/f (Lean Mixture)

Truck: Basically the same thing as before except it is either a 2.0 liter six stroke inline 4 or a 2.4 liter six stroke inline six and it's all rear wheel drive instead of fwd, or it can be 4x4 but it is supposed to be a smaller truck and I like the simplicity of the rwd configuration, one thing not discussed is the type of wheels, and really, just some medium compound radials will do fine, basically some standard tires, though I'm not certain on the size of the tires or rims. The engine of the truck is going to not only be bigger but will also be tuned for more torque, I haven't decided on the bore and stroke yet but I'm sure when I do it will work for both applications. One more thing is the truck's weight, and well say that with a 2.4 liter inline six - six stroke engine tuned to make ~200 hp and ~280 ft/lbs of torque. These numbers don't sound like a lot but the engine would be purposely tuned to output said amounts of power which relatively would be enough to propel with ease these vehicles in mind. I'm not worried about the power output as I am to fuel consumption of the engine. Not to say that I don't care about horsepower and torque, h*ll, you know that I want power but that is not what this article is about, it is about efficiency overall of the vehicle and overall of the engine.

One more thing, which I had only thought little about until Beanangel brought it to my attention, is the production of the vehicle itself, sometimes, selling a vehicle to the masses isn't about how you can only make a car for this amount of money, it's also about the machinery and costs to manufacture and ship vehicles and other units. If we can find ingenuitive ways to mass produce vehicles like the ones I stated, we could potentially save fortunes. And with that savings you could potentially lower the price of each vehicle and sell even more. A lot of times success isn't limited by the company's creativity, but rather it's skills to produce that product. Honda's machining factories have become so skilled and advanced that they can almost cut something say a crankcase right in half and the two surfaces would mesh almost perfectly when put back together. Absolutely amazing what they are able to to.

Questions and Answers | A lot of people I assume want actual results and specific information that has not been fully discussed. For example, pertinax asked about the weight of the engines and how much I was hoping to scavenge. It's hard to say how much I can scavenge, but it is sort of relative to say that the stirling engine is quite bulky and may only decrease the power to weight ratio, I was thinking maybe having one that weighs about 100 lbs and produces around say 70 hp? It is not so much the hp I'm looking for unless the stirling was connected to the drivetrain which is a possibility but I was going towards the direction of making it an electric generator that gets rid of the need for an alternator and it directly dumps the power into the battery and other components in the vehicle. Of course there might be a backup alternator or something simple and cheap that can be used if something happens to the stirling engine than you can still receive enough power for the ignition system so that your car doesn't have to rely on that single component for it to run. The weight of the stirling engine may not be that high at all since I'm sure with the lack of research in the subject that there is room for improvement.

If you're still reading this you are one h*ll of a guy, but don't think that I don't know that adding all these different components comes with a lot a conflicts, such as weight, reliability, production costs, etc. I too know that throwing on a bunch of stuff onto a combustion engine doesn't always make it better.