Quote:
Originally Posted by Old Tele man
All AIR has some amount of water vapor (humidity is never zero), thus all internal combustion engines (ICE) have, since day one, been operating with water vapor (of obviously varying amounts) in the AIR consumed during combustion. That has BEEN and will CONTINUE to be a fact (pending global warming effects).
Adding additional water vapor into AIR is functionally equivalent to driving through air with extreme humidity, akin to "...a foggy London day/night..." That increased water vapor in the AIR does not itself produce ANY additional heat energy (power), rather it allows the engine's EXISTING ignition-mapping (new cars) or ignition-advance (older cars) to simply USE more of the already existing timing advance without fear of detonation from the same octane-rated gasoline. It is the advanced timing--not the water vapor--that produces more power, by extracting more thermal energy from the combustion process before the opening exhaust valve(s) cause the in-cylinder mean-effective-pressure (MEP) to cease.
And current ICE do not have intentional operating combustion conditions sufficiently hot enough to dissociate water vapor back to free H and O atoms...specifically to avoid combusting N2 in AIR into its oxides (smog).
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Everything you have said is correct as far as combustion quenching using the tremendous heat capacity of water. I am simply making the point that water does interact with the combustion process in a way that could change the pressure profile if used accordingly.
And water dissociates even in liquid form and that is why we measure a pH of pure water. Water is actively dissociating at temperatures where carbon would be reactive. These steam temperatures of only a few hundred degrees C occur all throughout the engine cycle. The FLAME front is in the thousands of deg C. This heat may only occur for a few milli seconds before work is extracted and the heat dissipated, but it does exist.
I am in no way supporting the claims of the Aquatune company. I am simply stating that there is some good science that again is being thrown out with the idiot product claims. Their claim of water splitting by a resonant cavity is bunk science. Their water addition without any form of dynamic feedback would be useful in improving engine efficiency at only one specific set of conditions of engine load and atmospherics.
Again, I am speaking of water reactivity in combustion. You are speaking of water quenching.