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Old 07-06-2010, 06:42 PM   #94 (permalink)
Dr. Jerryrigger
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Join Date: Jun 2010
Location: mass
Posts: 181

The Sh*t-Box - '99 Subaru Impreza Outback Sport
90 day: 27.81 mpg (US)
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Okay, I'll jump back in here.
So the way I see this working well is to really try to get heat every way you can. Rap the block in rock-wool, use the boiler water as coolant, rig it up so the radiator is only used when needed
This will give you some 95C water to pump into the boiler.
For a pump you need something that can give really high pressure, like one of those 3 piston pumps used on pressure washers. There are some small 12V ones made, but it took me many hours to find one last time I looked (a few years back) and I'm not up for that right now. A belt drive one may be good. I think a computer controlled electric one is really what is needed.
With the water already at 95C hopefully you can cut back the 12sq ft : 1hp to something more reasonable for this application.
So then the high pressure hot water is run through post turbine steam (more on this later), getting the temp up to say 110C (not steam at this pressure), then into a post cat boiler. The steam is then run into a pre-cat dryer (and there are a lot of tricks for drying steam), and then to a turbine like :Slotted Disk Turbine
The steam coming out the back of the turbine will still have a lots of heat, some of which can be recovered by the water flowing to the boiler. It could also be bubbled into a water holding tank.

The hardest part of this is how to scale thing. How much heat can you really get from the exhaust? How much can you insulate the block and exhaust with out causing problems.
I generally like to try things on a small scale first, but I don't think it would work well on a smaller scale, in fact I would think it would be much more efficient on a very large engine

For a boiler I would need a few weeks with a Bridgeport.
Also, it's been a long time since I did the math on this, so this may be way off or for something else, but I seem to remember that a lot of water would be needed, something like 1gal:2miles.
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