Comments on: Transonic Supercritical Fuel Injection – Improves Efficiency 50 to 75 Percent

By: sean

sean — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:09:59 +0000

One advantage of the lean-burn capability is that you can have the throttle
more open at all power levels short of maximum – you aren’t using less fuel,
but you burn it with more air. That means less energy lost sucking air past
a butterfly valve, and more MPG.

By: Kai

Kai — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:33:26 +0000

Temperature goes up with pressure – current diesel fuels can go upwards of 800 degrees with current pressure ‘standards’.

Presumably this article is talking about temperatures ten times that? I’ve read studies from ten years ago where tests were being done with up to three times that temperature.

So far Diesel walks a tight-rope, looking for better efficiency and burn through higher pressure and temperature, but correspondingly higher pollutants – balancing nox, soot, etc, it’s almost like you can’t win…

By: L.K.

L.K. — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:28:41 +0000

I think the claims of increased efficiency come from the cruise scenario – essentially it takes very little power to maintain 50mph so why would you put in all the fuel needed to control detonation if detonation were not a factor – if, from a fueling perspective, you can use as much fuel as needed to produce the minimal power needed to maintain cruise without having to worry about negative consequences to your engine, then you have increased efficiency, right?

This is why diesels run more efficient at cruise, the detonation is needed for ignition, so if your power requirement is low, you only put in enough fuel to keep that level of power… this kind of sounds like that except that the fuel is no longer just directly injected into the engine via a sophisticated atomizer, but instead the physical properties of the fuel are altered somewhat (somehow) to allow even leaner burn without wrecking the engine – you’re not getting any more power out of the fuel, you’re just using the absolute minimum necessary for a particular power requirement.

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:24:37 +0000

Zippy, I assume you were being sarcastic. Those 200 major finds in 2009 amounted to about 10 billion barrels, problem is, we used 20 billion barrels.

By: Miles

Miles — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 03:20:12 +0000

Kai, no that isn’t what we have been doing for decades, it is hot enough to change its properties noticeably.

Some things to note:

Less octane is better(!)

Run at extremely lean ratios

Cannot form droplets in cylinder.

Plan is to burn the fuel away from the combustion chamber surfaces, keeping them cooler and cleaner.

Interesting idea, I hope it gets some uptake.