[pgfpro]

Originally Posted by Old Mechanic

It was Oak Ridge, not Argonne.

Green Car Congress: ORNL Research Project Seeks to Boost Combustion Engine Efficiency To 50-60% By Reducing Combustion Irreversibility; RAPTR

I may be wrong, I seem to remember Argonne Labs mentioned but this link is to the Oak Ridge entry.

You can find a lot of info on Green Car Congress by going to the engines topic.
Mine was there in the summer of 2006 and causd quite a heated debate with one poster who was trying to push othe OPOC design.

I'll post on mine in another thread later today.

regards
Mech

Thanks for the link!!! Lots of good info.

I like this one something that I understand now.

Longer term, the team is looking to evaluate fuel effects, the effects of major configuration changes, and to translate the results to proposed ICE concepts.

Asked whether there was a conflict between the thermal recuperation aspect of this work and the effort that the industry has put into chargers and EGR coolers, Daw said:

If you are looking at just extracting piston work alone, cooling the charge actually is a benefit. What you are doing, though, is destroying some of that exergy which could be extracted in other ways from the exhaust. You have to take a global systems perspective, and not look just at what you get out from the piston work by itself...

The other example of that now is where we have been going to lean engines. Going lean also destroys exergy because essentially you are diluting the energy released from flame. While in the end that is beneficial for producing piston work, the global effect is in the wrong direction.

Where all this is leading to, we need to relook at whole picture particularly with engines now where we may perhaps extract work in multiple ways.