Date: Thu, 06 Apr 2000 21:12:03 -0700
From: Robert Harris 
Subject: Antiquity

Goals
Always drive the mixture towards lean best torque/power
Remain at light knock as long as possible
Run as close to unthrottled ( diesel like ) as possible
Use the highest intake temperature possible to accomplish this
within the oxygen budget

Now we hard dive and snatch a gem from the ancient unenlightened ones.

Packard - 1930ish - depression days when Packard was big time luxury player

Reference: Dykes Pg 108, Instruction 13
Pg 140, Instruction 14
DrD - you really have to get one - its the pure motherload!!!

Fuelizer

Now those poor old bastards had to make an engine idle with a coin balanced on
the head and pull from idle to whatever and be glass smooth at the same time.
Hard starting and rough cold idle offended the patrons mightily.

Packard's approach was straight out of the darkside.  No choke - no passive
anything.  By god, they got right down to it and ACTIVELY heated the intake
charge from cranking on.  Got it hot and dry ( fully vaporized ) and actively
kept it that way.  No pucking around for dem.

"Purpose: The fuelizer heats the gasoline and the air from the carburetor, so
that the mixture enters the cylinder as a dry gas rather than a combination of
air and liquid particles."

What they did was shunt some intake charge after the carb into a small
combustion chamber, light it with a spark and vent the hot exhaust straight
back into the intake charge.  And since the chamber was in direct contact and
part of the intake manifold, virtually all of this heat went into the charge.
Get right to it and get it done.

Yikes.  But wait - worst case was about 3% of the fuel used.  So how much do
you waste cold "choked" start, idle, warmup, high vacuum light cruise ??
Because this was thru a tiny passage, as the flow increased, less was diverted
thru the shunt as the rpm, load, temperature increased and was cut off at
about 30 mph.  Self adjusting.  Plug was more like a jet engine ignitor than a
sparking plug.  And since it was venting back into the charge via "long" tiny
ports, the flame was quenched - leaving nothing but energy in the form of
heat.

So what does this buy us?  Start with pre-burning a small amount of fuel and
using that to heat the air and vaporize the fuel downstream.  No liquid
gasoline combustion.  Straight homogeneous pre-mixed gas.  Very smooth, very
efficient, almost perfect combustion that left no deposits from crap gas.

The exhaust was jetted thru tiny passages that killed the flame so that only
hot gas below the ignition temperature of the main charge entered the charge.

Had a sight glass to optimize the color - thus efficiency of the combustion -
does ccd optics or colortune for the fuelizor click on anything?

Now we know that we want the highest temperature charge possible under less
than wot because that means we minimize the pumping and throttling loss's.
Anyone care to guess how much this "superheating" of the air did for reducing
those losses at the time they are the greatest.  Plus no low temperature oil
dilution, no pinging carbon buildup.  Since it worked on a very high end
luxury car, might give us a clue that everything else might have been a lessor
compromise.

What does this give us?  How about a fuel efficient way of ACTIVELY changing
the charge temperature to great benefit without screwing up high demand
operations?

Fuel injection provides dry air - right?  So, unlike Packard, we run dry air
into the fuelizor and "inject" a desired amount of fuel to get the charge air
heating we want.  Now within reason we can computer control the amount of
charge heating needed to optimize main combustion.  And we can do what they
couldn't and stratified charge is attempting.  Run the fuelizor rich.
Controlled Pig rich.  The excess fuel is exhausted into the intake manifold
not as gasoline, but CH4, CO and H2.  Nice high energy gaseous fuels that
really help meet our goal of a premixed gas thru most of the power band.  And
any remaining liquid is boiled, vaporized and greatly refining into much
smaller chain components.  The heat is not wasted either - remember pumping
losses. And for the knock o phobic - twice the amount of fuel consumed is
released as CO2 ( definitely changes knock ) and H2O - water injection - to
the tune of about twice the amount of water formed as gasoline consumed - with
the kicker that its as steam - expanded ~ 1800 times liquid water - hot dry
superheated steam.  And what effect might that have on density downstream?

A touch of Glassman again.  Peak Flame temperature is a product of three
things only.  The total atomic mass of all the components, the atomic
distribution ratio of the components C H O N, and the total energy present and
released ( fuel chemical ) during combustion.  It's massively insensitive to
pressure - that only changes the burn rate - not the temperature.  Virtually
all of the heat consumed by the fuelizor is transferred to the intake charge
which is then recovered at combustion.  This implies that we recover in
combustion virtually all of the heat "wasted" to condition the intake charge.
Plus, we waste much less energy on pumping losses.  And we get much better
faster efficient combustion when its most needed as a bonus.

GM tried unsuccessfully during the manufactured gas crisis of the seventies to
twice burn the charge by intaking the exhaust of one cylinder, mix with same
air and fuel and reburn.  Efficiency went way up, but power bit the big one.
History repeats 40 years after the Packard, but not done right.  So we have
major precedent for what I'm thinking.

Since flame speed is irrelevant - only quantity of gas, heat and desirable end
products is, this opens Dave W's cherished back door.  Suppose we introduced
some gasocrap to the fuelizor.  It would get converted to a much more useful
fuel and not waste anything.  Knock quality is irrelevant - we are not
compressing it - just burning it, converting it to a higher quality fuel and
recovering virtually all its energy.  Remember virtually all of the waste heat
is going into the air charge.

To further weird the wicked, you might want to check out the efficiency of
conversion of chemical energy to work of an external combustion engine such as
the Stirling.  Just might want to increase the percentage of fuel a tad over
what Packard was using - specially since we can control it.  And a look at
catalytic convertor material might allow us to increase the efficiency and
heat even more.

The thought of greatly reduced pumping losses, refining crap liquid fuel into
high quality gaseous fuel, nicely improved thermal and combustion efficiency
in a region where it is not necessary to sacrifice efficiency to maximize and
doing it with ancient technology ought to have your head spinning and the

<<>>

thought of continuously variable effective VE and compression ratio without
moving some huge mass of metal around. And since the high temperature charge
will be much faster burning, throw in better pressure to mechanical energy
conversion that normal - about the same as increasing the expansion ratio -
without the complications.

And I only ran across this evening on browsing for something else.

Welcome to my nightmare.


Date: Thu, 06 Apr 2000 21:43:20 -0700
From: Robert Harris 
Subject: Antiquity - after thought.
To: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams),

Do not confuse the fuelizer with EGR.

EGR displaces some of the intake charge with residual exhaust, thus reducing
the amount of oxygen and increasing the amount of combustion products in the
total charge prior to combustion

Fuelizer - precombusts part of the charge - but has no change on the total
oxygen present in the charge nor the total combustion product from the charge.
All it is doing is pre-burning part of the charge and the remaining part of
the charge will have approximately the same ratio of fuel to air as the total
initial charge.

This is not to down EGR - I love the stuff - but to make sure you understand
the difference.

The Fuelizer's unburned fuel is not discarded, but is available in a higher
quality form for the remaining main charge - thus keeping close to the
original mixture balance.

Got to do some more reading and writing - but major problem of rich combustion
is that there is insufficient time for some of the products to release their
energy in a timely fashion for conversion to pressure, but since we have much
longer, that loss in efficiency of rich PARTIAL burn is not a problem.

This implies that the main charge will burn in the cylinder with little
degradation over a normal charge, and will in many regions burn faster and
better.


Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2000 22:59:52 -0700
From: Robert Harris 
Subject: SAE 972937 Fluid Flow, Combustion and Efficiency with Early or Late

Ok - so I'm looking thru SP-1300 and I read the above paper.  Lots of nice
four valve strategies - but something really jumps out.

Late inlet valve closing markedly reduces part throttle pumping losses.

Late inlet valve closing combined with lean burn ( Lambda x 1.5 or 50% excess
air or as I am used to .666 F/A ) gave the best efficiency.

Late inlet valve closing gave the longest flame development period.

Late inlet valve closing, and in combination with lean burn, gave the longest
combustion burn period.

Late inlet valve closing gave the fastest late combustion ( 50% to 90 % of the
charge burn )

Report concludes late inlet valve closing greatly reduces pumping losses until
the combustion deteriorates.  Attributes that probably most of the
deterioation is due to reduced charge heating from cylinder walls.

OK, now for high load, another data point.  Some part of the increased mid and
top power comes not just from ramming, but "cooling" as the walls don't heat
the charge as much.

God it would be nice to recover that charge heating.  Conventional thought -
raise the compression ratio to recover the "pressure" and raise the heat - at
a cost in increased detonation and other losses.

I want that great reduction in pumping losses - but right when the wall
heating effect is working against me.  Woe is me.   ( offstage stage whisper -
Turn to the Dark Side - The Dark Side )

Silly me forget all about the Packard Fuelizor.  In the very region that the
lower heat from the walls is reducing my combustion efficiency almost as fast
as the pumping losses are going done - I can actively raise the charge
temperature to any level I want - thus recovering all the lost combustion
efficiency and keeping the greatly reduced pumping loss.

BTW they delayed the closing enough so that with late or lean and late, the
throttle was WOT ( I think - mentioned but typical SAE ).

The Dark Side Fuelizer could give us all the advantages at Joy Time of a late
closing and significantly improve part throttle everything.

Teaser - Bosch has some papers and in the book talking around stratifying
STOIC mixtures by 2 stage injection - lean early and direct rich upper mid
stroke compression.  Charge always ignites and initially burns rich then
expands into leaner burning charge without puck around of conventional
stratified charge.  By varying fuel percentages can go lean to about 30 to 1
and smoothly evenly transition back to a maximum power charge.

Motronic MED7 sounds an awful lot like a backwards, sneak around way to Fuel
Leads Air, as the fuel to process the power needed is calculated and then the
throttle - connected to the air valve by the foot is moved to add the back
calculated air.

So Dave W.  - we fuelize and make more joy without diddling with the intake
closing.  Tickle anything?

Lots of stuff about EGR and how GOOD it can be for everything.  Bad is always
good - good is always suspect.  Maybe there might be someone yet to talk to on
street corners.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Fuelizer:
 Packard Fuelizer could be described as "divorced stratified 
 charge" think of burning wood to make charcoal; the charcoal is 
 more efficient as fuel