This is in reference to the EGR build that T Vago was presenting.

[RustyLugNut]

Apologies first of all to T Vago for the thread jack. It is a good sound build. And I used it as an example of what happens when extemporaneous and unthoughtful postings are interjected into a thread.

I am not one to engage in flippant repartee or vulgar banter, but even without that approach, I can be very damaging.

The first thing to remember is, it is T Vago's thread and respect must be given to his train of thought as well as to his standing as the author.

So, what do I do? I undermine his authority as the original poster (OP). I make veiled or direct references to his lack of understanding of the subject and continually do so throughout. This is a basic tactic of arguments whether consciously done or not.

Next I attack his train of thought by simply arguing point after point, nit-picking around the edges, waxing pedantic about the smallest points, obfuscating his original intent. It has the same effect of burying a thread in stupid postings.

Then I jump to conclusions. I lead the reader off the path by making an ending that may be plausible or not but has not been reached by the OP's build.

And I continuously needle the OP to get a reaction. Making him uncomfortable and defensive.

Does any of this seem familiar to you? It should, because this is exactly what happens to pretty much any build that starts here in the Corral.

If someone is starting out with a sales pitch, well, that's a different story. But, if someone comes in with an honest desire to share a build, I expect we can be as considerate as to builds that reside outside the Corral. The Corral was created for such situations. But, it is not license for a free-for-all to apply the said tactics I outlined above.

Let me bring in a post from the other thread.

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

Some people just really don't like HHO text pollution.
My self included.
HHO and similar super secret magic bullet pseudo science is cancer to the ecomodder community.
Because when you say that you want to, or that you have improved the fuel economy of your vehicle most regular people automatically assume you are one of those crazy HHO or magic black box users.

If you want to do HHO there are plenty of forums out there for the experimentation of HHO and other pseudo science.

This is the forum where the mods have some basis in proven science build upon known laws and well understood phenomena or at the very least taking an automotive industry idea and expanding or improve on it or taking an industrial energy saving concept and trying to apply it to a vehicle.

This post shows the tone of many members of Ecomodder. That is alright in and of itself. But, by preventing any honest inquiry into subjects such as HHO, vapor carbs or plasma ignition ( I use these examples for a reason ), you NEVER get to an answer you can point to as reference whether for nay or yay or maybe.

I have made posts on the subject of seeding, precursor entrapment and high enthalpy reaction conditions to provide nothing more than the acceleration and strengthening of the combustion event in stoichiometric as well as in lean-burn regimes in the spark ignited gasoline engine. The posts are buried and derailed by the usual suspects and others unknowingly.

Over the next couple of years, I hope to get some answers for the Forum Community to the above mentioned subjects. Even if I believe otherwise, I will start the inquiry here in the Corral where it belongs until we have concrete groundwork. It will be slow, as one would expect since the level of evidence must meet the level of scrutiny required.

And I expect the same respect due build threads outside the Unicorn Corral.

Again, all apologies to T Vago. He was just an easy target. But, I trust he will survive and so will his contributions.

[RedDevil]

Originally Posted by RustyLugNut

... by preventing any honest inquiry into subjects such as HHO, vapor carbs or plasma ignition ... you NEVER get to an answer you can point to as reference ...

This is an open forum. If you feel anyone is so disrespectful as to prevent an honest inquiry into anything fuel efficiency related, flag that post. Use the triangle.

I was interested in HHO, as I saw potential in using it as a temporary boost device as well as load spreading.
So I did my own honest inquiry into the subject, and read whatever anyone brought up on the subject.

I was deeply disappointed in the lack of basics that the HHO advocates display. The fact that it takes much more energy to generate HHO than burning it can ever give back is ignored by all, or waylayed by stating that even a tiny amount of HHO would improve the efficiency by a large amount, without any proof.
That a modern fuel injected engine typically burns its fuel almost completely, and that the low efficiency of a gas engine is mostly due to the adiabatic expansion in the power stroke, whether the mixture contains HHO or not, shows those claims exceed the technical limits, hence they can not be true.

Those vapor carbs work. Point. The modern fuel injection system, coupled to a good oxygen sensor and a smart ECU can easily compensate by adjusting the amount of injected fuel as long as you avoid open loop mode.
It even allows you to mix in something other than proper gasoline, like propane gas. If you can get that cheaper than gasoline it is easy to see how that can save you some.

The problem there is danger. Some vapor carb installations have exploded, causing damage to the vehicle and lots of bad media exposure. To the point that I can't tell my colleagues I'm into fuel saving without somebody asking if I want to blow up my car.
Obviously a working vapor carb setup needs a professional approach, more than most of us can achieve in our sheds.

Your post is the first time I consciously read about plasma ignition. It might well be able to ignite more fuel than a spark plug, or faster, better controlled or whatever. I'll pass on that.

Now there have been some surprises in the worlds of physics that seemed to defeat common sense and knowledge at the time. If you can prove it works it works, even if theory says it can't.

But you need proof.
All I see is words. Allegations, accusations, hints, but no facts, no controllable data.
T Vago presents his test results and you deny them. Why? Did he not test it right? How, then?
Do you expect anyone to believe what you write without proof while you deny the data of others?

Of course it is hard to find the truth.
I hardly take anything I read for true unless I really trust the knowledge and experience of the provider, and even then I like to know how that wisdom was derived.

When I read your posts I cannot verify your claims. I miss the information I need to prove or disprove it. All I get is bags of lines that circumvent the subject.

Getting emotional makes it worse.
I cannot escape the feeling that you are trying to take revenge on T Vago.
I don't like that. You lose my sympathy doing that, and my patience to sift through all your lengthy posts.

Now I can't blame you for making lengthy posts in a lenghty post
but I felt I had a lot to say and want to do it all and be done with it, so here goes.

[RustyLugNut]

Originally Posted by RedDevil

This is an open forum. If you feel anyone is so disrespectful as to prevent an honest inquiry into anything fuel efficiency related, flag that post. Use the triangle.

There is almost no value in the triangle when the WHOLE of the community is bagging on a thread. Look what happened on the soulcrusher vapor post. It is gone now, and it was a free-for-all on both sides. The WHOLE thread was deleted by the mods. So, what good value there was, and there was much good, is now gone.

Originally Posted by RedDevil

. . . I was deeply disappointed in the lack of basics that the HHO advocates display. The fact that it takes much more energy to generate HHO than burning it can ever give back is ignored by all, or waylayed by stating that even a tiny amount of HHO would improve the efficiency by a large amount, without any proof.
That a modern fuel injected engine typically burns its fuel almost completely, and that the low efficiency of a gas engine is mostly due to the adiabatic expansion in the power stroke, whether the mixture contains HHO or not, shows those claims exceed the technical limits, hence they can not be true.

I assure you, I understand the thermodynamics of combustion on a level much deeper than what you have outlined. That is the point. Just because you don't understand it, means you cannot just dismiss it. Let's take a deeper look and see what we have or not. I am not going to sell you a kit and I'm not claiming to double your mileage, I am saying there is a possibility that under the right conditions a small amount of HHO will accelerate the combustion process allowing less ignition lead time to be used. Does that make sense to you? Please Google the advantage of rapid combustion. You will find links to homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) which show thermal efficiencies exceeding 50%. The key is the rapid rate of combustion.

People get thermal efficiency mixed up with combustion efficiency. There is a difference. I agree that 98% of the gasoline is burned in a modern engine. That is combustion efficiency. So how does the HCCI engine exceed 50% thermal efficiency? It cannot burn more than 100% of the fuel so even at 100% burn efficiency, the 2% added fuel value would not cause the gap advantage the HCCI engines have over a very efficient gasoline engine such as Toyota's Atkinson engine used in the Prius which stand at 38% thermal efficiency at last report. Thermal efficiency is a measure of the fuel energy actually used to produce mechanical work. There are numerous parameters that contribute to this, including combustion rate. HHO can increase combustion rate and allow you to extract more work from your fuel burned. The mechanism it uses to do so is combustion seeding. A Google search will yield some difficult reading. Include ozone or O3 in the search as it is a forgotten part of the HHO question. Radicals and precursor radicals are as much a part of this science as stress/strain is to the mechanical engineer and ohms/amps are to the electrical engineer.

All I want is the opportunity to develop and answer some questions. In the Corral, this has been an impossibility.

Originally Posted by RedDevil

. . .
Your post is the first time I consciously read about plasma ignition. It might well be able to ignite more fuel than a spark plug, or faster, better controlled or whatever. I'll pass on that.

Are you familiar with high energy plasma ignition systems? They are in use by racers everywhere. You can buy them on Ebay among other places. They have been in development since Old Mechanic was a lad. I cannot link directly to the PDF file but if you go to academia.edu and search for "Variable Spark Lenght in Conventional Ignition System for ICE: Experimental Results. Ermanno RIVIEZZO", you can download the file after a simple log in. Academia.edu is only one of many places I go to for reading during my morning coffee. I know, I'm weird that way.

Originally Posted by RedDevil

. . . But you need proof.
All I see is words. Allegations, accusations, hints, but no facts, no controllable data.
T Vago presents his test results and you deny them. Why? Did he not test it right? How, then?
Do you expect anyone to believe what you write without proof while you deny the data of others?

Of course it is hard to find the truth.
I hardly take anything I read for true unless I really trust the knowledge and experience of the provider, and even then I like to know how that wisdom was derived.

When I read your posts I cannot verify your claims. I miss the information I need to prove or disprove it. All I get is bags of lines that circumvent the subject.

Getting emotional makes it worse.
I cannot escape the feeling that you are trying to take revenge on T Vago.
I don't like that. You lose my sympathy doing that, and my patience to sift through all your lengthy posts.

Now I can't blame you for making lengthy posts in a lenghty post
but I felt I had a lot to say and want to do it all and be done with it, so here goes.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. And no, I am less emotional about this than most. I just don't like bullies. The Unicorn Corral attracts bullies. T Vago was only chosen as an example. There are others out there I could have chosen. I respect his work. He has been part of this community for some time so I knew he wouldn't be so upset and just leave.

And, your ability to understand my posts does not make my posts any less truthful. I do not say this to be patronizing and egotistical. I cannot link to the years of education and experience ingrained in me. How do I link to the hardbound books in my possession? Please turn to Combustion, 4th Edition, p.264, Detonation Phenomena, By Glassman & Yetter. It is sitting right here. Right in front of me. Bought for me last Christmas by my wife to replace the 1st Edition that was falling to pieces.

You want proof? Give me time to gather and present my proof in a logical and coherent way. Some answers I already know, some I don't. That is all I am asking. And, I understand the requirements of the Sagan Test. Thus, making a few mods and driving around as Tvago and others do in the open forum will not be enough. I will have to build a dynamometer. What? You can do that? Yes, I have in the past and modern improvements make it much easier now. Just look up DIY Dyno's on YouTube. Goodness. You can learn so much from YouTube. Why should I get a graduate degree? I just need Google and YouTube!

[RustyLugNut]

iveyjh!

Was that you that linked to the metro hot vapor build in the now defunct soulcrusher thread?

[iveyjh]

Originally Posted by RustyLugNut

iveyjh!

Was that you that linked to the metro hot vapor build in the now defunct soulcrusher thread?

[RustyLugNut]

iveyjh,

If you need anything, feel free to ask. I probably can't give it, but it won't hurt.

My wife thinks I'm weird because I download pretty machinery instead of pretty girls into my personal file folder .

[RedDevil]

Originally Posted by RustyLugNut

There is almost no value in the triangle when the WHOLE of the community is bagging on a thread. ...
Thanks for taking the time to reply. And no, I am less emotional about this than most. I just don't like bullies. The Unicorn Corral attracts bullies...

Well, thank you!
I was afraid was I was overly terse, in hindsight, but you took it with good grace.
I feared also that you were turning into the very thing you were complaining about. Not any more now.

Now, for all, the fact that something is in the Unicorn Corral should be enough to tone down the criticism. The subject is officially disputed as for being there, it is already hanging in the ropes so to speak.
Time to count to ten before you even think of hitting it again.

For those threads that got deleted, there is a thread about that so I'll keep it short here; the mods say that things got out of hand before they noticed it, if the disruptive posts had been flagged they might have been in time to cut out the bad and keep the good.
Flagging does help.

About professionalism and instrumentation.
It is true that it is hard to measure the effects of modifications just by comparing *gauge efficiency readings or tank averages over distance, because of the many varying factors. But if you know the effects of what you are doing, it is often possible to devise a way to make them visible without complex instrumentation.
Ernest Rutherford - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia is my hero in that aspect, for advancing science with very basic experiments.

I don't have a dynamometer but I can see on my UltraGauge how my EGR flow rate varies and how that influences engine load, intake pressure, and instant fuel economy.
The EGR flow % usually matches the difference between engine load % and intake pressure % within a few %.
Not surprisingly, at a fairly constant speed and varying load situations, engine load correlates strongly to instant fuel consumption.
The EGR flow allows it to get low under a relatively high intake pressure, reducing pumping losses and raising intake temperature.
I found I needed to trim down my grill block a bit as I saw both EGR flow and my economy drop when it got hot.

It was crystal clear to me that the EGR flow does help FE, and it made me wish there was a way to safely increase it even further under low load situations.

In comes T Vago's thread, doing just what I was dreaming about.
Then you stepped in. I understand you are convinced he is making mistakes there, but I was not convinced you were right about that.
We sometimes need a critical approach to help people avoid or mend mistakes but to achieve that you must put it in a way that one is willing to read and able to verify.

I deliberately make no references to my education as I want to make my comments speak for themselves.
Anyone should judge them for their content, not for what's on my bookshelf.

[pgfpro]

Good thread!!! It seems were getting somewhere now.

In the pics above is the plumbing for my now hot air system. It started out as a N2O direct port dry system and worked great!!! Nice even nitrous delivered directly to the intake valves. I was running up to a 200HP shot a couple years ago. I have in my engine management system a nitrous enable fuel table so as soon as the nitrous system is activated it switches to the nitrous fuel table.

Some times you learn things from mistakes or in this case a nitrous solenoid leak. I was out FE tuning and happen to leave the bottle valve open after doing some 60' testing for drag racing. The first thing I noticed was a very slight lean condition at medium load before lean burn mode, so I adjusted and added a little more fuel to fix the problem. The crazy part was my lean burn was not affected, so no changes were made at this point. I was out for a couple hours adjusting ignition and fuel at very light load. About 30 minutes into testing I started noticing I couldn't add anymore ignition advance in fact I had to pull timing out to get the car to keep its freeway speed at light load lean burn???? I was running 15* less ignition advance. So I thought maybe the timing belt jumped or my CAS was moved or going bad. So I through a timing light on it to double check everything and it was all good???
I was totally baffled and very happy with the FE results but my TPS and load was lower then normal, so I knew I increased intake pumping losses.
About two days later I went out to try some more 60' testing and then realized all the nitrous was used up and the nitrous bottle valve was all the way open. Light Bulb ON So I did some FE testing and had to move every parameter back to before the nitrous leak. In my ECM link I keep all my previous files so it only took about 20 seconds to go back to the pre-nitrous leak map. I drove the car around for a couple days and didn't change anything. Then refilled the nitrous bottle and recreated the nitrous leak before fixing the nitrous solenoid and went to the nitrous leak map. AB tested without enough data collected so I never mention it.

I did this once before with my Del Sol but never tested it. It started out the same way from a nitrous solenoid not seated all the way. In both occasions were talking a very small amount of nitrous.

So IMHO I can see where HHO could possibly help with combustion efficiency? If you can increase flames speed you can increase engine efficiency. Whats even more cool is with an increase in flame speed you could increase the compression of the engine (North Star Cad engine).
Also if you increase flame speed it would help a ton with lean burn.

So I don't have any testing with HHO but I can see where it could help. Now the big $$$ question is how much HHO and would it be cost effective???
I don't have a clue?

[RustyLugNut]

It is true that you can get very good indications and measurements of core processes from seemingly tertiary readings. Your discussion was very good.

My criticism of T Vago's methods was largely in jest. I understand Ecomodder is largely composed of Hobbyists and not full time research firms with large budgets. It was mostly a backhanded jab at the request of some on this forum that I prove my research not just with concise and repeatable testing but with credible independent third party test labs (EPA quality) and proof by production.

Originally Posted by RedDevil

It was crystal clear to me that the EGR flow does help FE, and it made me wish there was a way to safely increase it even further under low load situations.

In comes T Vago's thread, doing just what I was dreaming about.
Then you stepped in. I understand you are convinced he is making mistakes there, but I was not convinced you were right about that.
We sometimes need a critical approach to help people avoid or mend mistakes but to achieve that you must put it in a way that one is willing to read and able to verify.

I deliberately make no references to my education as I want to make my comments speak for themselves.
Anyone should judge them for their content, not for what's on my bookshelf.

Understand, I played at being the fool in criticism. I understand exactly what T Vago is attempting. I have already contacted him and deleted my most abrasive remarks as I was purposefully being a disruptive person. I encourage others to do likewise and help T Vago put his thread back in order.

However, the link to the SwRI paper makes it clear that increased EGR is very limited in scope when applied to low load fuel efficiency. This is the area most of us are interested in. T Vago's 7.7% gain is already there. Someone made mention of heavy pulse and glide regimes. That could be another area increased EGR can be effective with even more gained during the acceleration, though because of the limited time at that load, it's overall effect is minimal in comparison to low cruise.

One parallel to the induction of EGR is the use of water injection - specifically water vapor. You can see much the same effect at the quench limit. Ricardo makes mention of it about 80 years ago while Glassman does the same in current reference. When induced as a true vapor, water has the ability to aid fuel efficiency in the same way as EGR induction.

And I make mention of my education because my posts are often met with derision because they are understandable only to a few. "This is why this is in the Unicorn Corral", was one reply to a post that took me hours to condense and simplify as to the principles of combustion in an effort to make it more understandable. The criticism came from someone I consider an ally in engine mods, but it made it clear to me that I cannot educate the forum to a level as easily as the topics of aerodynamics, mass and resistance. Those are easily visualized and understood in a tactile way. Combustion mods, not so much.

The work of T Vago, Oil Pan, the Honda crew, pgfpro, iveyjh, dustyfirewalker and others, is time consuming and is less understandable to the casual reader as the above mentioned mods. But, they all share the same basis - combustion.

[Daox]

I don't think I would call a 7.7% gain very limited. As mentioned, there aren't a lot of mods that will bring you that kind of gain for a single modification. In smaller engines, which run at a higher load for a given speed, you should be able to see even higher gains I would imagine due to being able to run more EGR.