6 stroke engine

[pete c]

Read about this idea awhile back somewhere on the interwebs.

For those that haven't heard of it, it is basically a 4 stroke ICE with a 2 stroke steam engine tacked on at the end.

The way it works is that after the normal 4 stroke sequence, the engine gets a qsuirt of water which immediately turns to steam due to the heat and pushes it through one more pair of strokes.

The guy that put this together says why throw away all that heat from combustion when you can make some steam out of it and put it to work.

The problem I see is you probably don't want that stream going through the cat and you would like to recycle it to cut water use which means an extra exhaust valve and port. Maybe you could use the same exhaust port and have a secondary valve down stream to dump the steam back into the loop. Doing this would aid in exhaust valve cooling.

The inventor was claiming some pretty high thermal efficiency if i recall and said that the steam cycle cooled things well enough to do away with any other cooling system.

I'll see if I can find the info on it.. Can't do it here due to this damn work firewall.

[BackroadBomber]

Sounds fairly plausible, the problem I see would be that it would have to run like a normal 4 stroke untill the engine warms up, or if you ran out of water. If you removed the radiator I'm sure it would warm up quickly, but if you ran out of water to inject you'd need some sort of radiator to cool the engine so maybe a y-valve on the radiator hose so you could either run coolant through the radiator or just loop it back to the engine. Also it seems like a programming nightmare to have a cars computer switch from 4 stroke to 6 stroke on- the- fly. also, oil changes would probably have to be more frequent, due to water vapor leaking past the rings. But like I said it sounds plausible. If the theory works, that would mean a 4 cylinder engine would fire 1600 times at 1200rpm instead of 2400 times. That's a big difference! Also, I don't know the laws where you live, but here in new York if a vehicle is 25 or more model years old, it doesn't need a catalytic converter so a swap Into an older vehicle would be the best route

[user removed]

Originally Posted by pete c

Read about this idea awhile back somewhere on the interwebs.

For those that haven't heard of it, it is basically a 4 stroke ICE with a 2 stroke steam engine tacked on at the end.

The way it works is that after the normal 4 stroke sequence, the engine gets a qsuirt of water which immediately turns to steam due to the heat and pushes it through one more pair of strokes.

The guy that put this together says why throw away all that heat from combustion when you can make some steam out of it and put it to work.

The problem I see is you probably don't want that stream going through the cat and you would like to recycle it to cut water use which means an extra exhaust valve and port. Maybe you could use the same exhaust port and have a secondary valve down stream to dump the steam back into the loop. Doing this would aid in exhaust valve cooling.

The inventor was claiming some pretty high thermal efficiency if i recall and said that the steam cycle cooled things well enough to do away with any other cooling system.

I'll see if I can find the info on it.. Can't do it here due to this damn work firewall.

Crower 6 stroke.

Six-stroke engine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

regards
Mech

[Daox]

We have a few threads on this topic:

http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...roke-3960.html

http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...idea-3185.html

http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...lves-9588.html

[pete c]

did a search and couldn't find them. probably because they were ancient.

i reserected one of them, so if a mod would kindly put this thread out of it's misery, i would appreciate it.

[JackMcCornack]

Originally Posted by pete c

did a search and couldn't find them. probably because they were ancient.

Type "6 stroke" in the -Search EcoModder.com- window right under the ecomodder logo. Click -Go-, and in 1/6 of a second, a page will pop up that says...

Results 1 - 10 of about 125 from ecomodder.com for "6 stroke". (0.17 seconds)

The concept is pretty ancient ('bout a hundred years since the first one) but the threads are still searchable. Which thread did you revive? The newest one (before this one) was started about a year ago.

Some six-strokes use hot air, some use steam. All the functioning ones I've heard of used conventional camshafts, except turning at 1/3 crankshaft speed instead of 1/2 (a la four-stroke). Some use injected water as the only coolant, in which case the weight of the injection water would be compensated by the non-weight on the non-radiator and non-coolant. To the best of my incomplete knowledge, the conventional cam six-strokes have a warm up phase where they just rest through strokes #5 and #6 (intake, compression, ignition, exhaust, nada, nada) until they're hot enough to get with the program (intake, compression, ignition, exhaust, squirt-expand, steam-exhaust).

[pete c]

I did exactly that, jack. or at least I thought i did. i revived the crower six stroke thread. it's a good read.

[bha6002]

I'm interested in ways of regaining energy lost in ICEs, so the 6-stroke appeals to me. I reckon it might work well in a ported 2-stroke diesel (eg the Commer opposed piston design in the UK in the 50s & 60s), which would make it a 4-stroke.
In its simplest form, the fuel pump would run at half engine speed (instead of engine speed) & another pump would squirt water (through the same injector, which means it would be lubricated on the fuel cycle) at alternate strokes.
This means the water would be finely sprayed into hot compressed air as well as on to the hot surfaces inside. Most of the negative energy used in compressing & therefore heating the air (which wouldn't occur in a 'normal' 6-stroke) would be recovered by the 'spring' effect of the air pushing the pistons back, & the extra heat going into the water.
This 'simple' version wouldn't bother with a condenser; the weight & volume of the tank of water needed would be at least partially offset by a smaller fuel tank (because of increased efficiency) & lack of the condenser itself & its associated plumbing.
This idea may not appeal to Bruce Crower due to lack of any cams!