Sciencemadness Discussion Board - Quick question

Quick question

kine - 22-12-2006 at 23:32

I am kooking for a gas catalist that will increase the burn rate of gasoline/air mix with out detonation. The purpose is to use it in an car injection for gaining horsepower. I know more oxygen will do that but there is a danger for detonation.

Thanks for any help.

unionised - 23-12-2006 at 06:02

I thought that modern engines burned a near stoichiometric fuel-air mixture. Too much O2 and you get NOx, too little O2 and you get lots of unburned fuel. If I'm right about that then it clearly burns fast enough anyway, the only way to increase the power would be to raise the RPM and that isn't healthy for the engine.

Anyway, almost anything that raised the reaction rate would be likely to lead to detonation. If there were a suitable catalyst then people would have found out about it by now and we would all be using it.

kine - 23-12-2006 at 09:30

It seems that the only way to increase the burn rate of fuel/air mix is detonation. I am planing to decrease the amount of injection on an old car to 1/4 and add a catalyst to the fuel so it will be detonatable, hoping that the tiny amount of fuel/oxygen(detonatable) mix entering the combustion chamber won't harm the pistons or any other construction.
Any sugestions on the kind of material would raise the rate of reaction to detonation?

quicksilver - 23-12-2006 at 09:47

What you MAY be looking for is used in motorcycle engines as an additive. It is nitro propane and etoh but you would certainly need to adust the computer 1st for the fuel injector. The liklyhood is that it would wear the motor down regardless due to simply higher force generated at time of combustion. It is commonly available wherever motorcycle proformance products are sold.

Bah Humbug

franklyn - 23-12-2006 at 10:37

Unionized is right
A modern auto engine is so well engineered that practically any aftermarket
modification or addition you may do to it will deleteriously diminish either
drivability or mileage or both. This has been proven time and again by testing
at underwriters laboratories and consumer reports. Fuel additives continue to
be a perennial hoax. http://pesn.com/2005/03/17/6900069_Acetone
Racing fuels are specifically blended and are not made up with " additives "
since the components are significant percent fractions of the blend. Antiknock
properties need only to be enhanced if the engine has very high compression or
is supercharged. Methyl Tertiary-Butyl Ether MBTE used in gasoline after
Tetra-ethyl lead was found to impair catalytic convertors is itself a ground water
contaminant given its affinity for water is being phased out and already banned
in many jurisdictions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBTE
Because much of an engines specifications are set from a controller there isn't
really anything you can adjust yourself except as stated here at the begining.
If you're looking for remarkable performance boost by putting a little something
in the tank, it just won't happen.

All of this is rapidly becoming moot as the economy shifts over time to hybrid
vehicles where the engine will run at an optimal speed continuosly when it is on,
and it will turn on by itself or off as power demands warrant. The driver will only
steer, brake or accelerate.

[Edited on 23-12-2006 by franklyn]

kine - 23-12-2006 at 10:48

well i will wait for the pulse detonation engine to come out then some time in the future....

thanks for the info

[Edited on 23-12-2006 by kine]

Sickman - 23-12-2006 at 16:29

I'm thinking the best you can do for a little more performance, without getting a bigger engine, is:

1. Make sure your spark plugs are not fouled, and make sure they are properly set to the right gap distance.

2. Use Premium gas instead of regular unleaded. Keep your gas tank only half full, this reduces the overall wieght of your car.

3. Remove any unecessary items from your car that add wieght to it, as for yourself you might want to consider a better diet and more excercise ( every pound less will make your car accelerate faster and you'll get better mileage)!

h0lx - 24-12-2006 at 02:19

excercise? normal people GAIN with excercise as they ingrease in muscular mass.

neutrino - 24-12-2006 at 07:25

Quote:

Originally posted by Sickman
2. Use Premium gas instead of regular unleaded.

No. Just no. Unless you're driving at high altitudes or towing a very heavy load, you won't need premium.

Two articles I found through 3 seconds of Googling:

straightdope
USAToday

Quote:

No data show that engines designed strictly for regular run better or longer on premium.

The Federal Trade Commission, in a consumer notice, emphasizes: "(I)n most cases, using a higher-octane gasoline than your owner's manual recommends offers absolutely no benefit. It won't make your car perform better, go faster, get better mileage or run cleaner."

There is "no way of taking advantage of premium in a regular-grade car," says Furey.

"There is no gain. You're wasting money," insists Jim Blenkarn, in charge of powertrains at Nissan in the USA.

"No customer should ever be deluded into thinking there's any value in buying a higher grade of octane than we specify," says Toyota's Paul Williamsen, technical expert and trainer.

When you see the gas station advertising that their premium gas has engine scrubbing chemicals that make the gas burn cleaner, remember two things:
1. By US law, all three grades have the same additives
2. Gas stations buy premium for ~8 cents more than regular and sell it for ~20 cents more. Guess which grade gives them a better profit margin?

Sickman - 24-12-2006 at 14:09

Quote:

Originally posted by h0lx
excercise? normal people GAIN with excercise as they ingrease in muscular mass.

Unfortunatley, unless your from a third world country, the normal person you see at walmart or whatever is like 30 pounds or more over wieght. While it's true that some of the fat will be converted to more muscle if you are intaking enough protien in your diet. Over all, a healthy person that runs two miles a day is going to wiegh less than the twinky eating fat ass that is always on the couch, and uses his car to take the trash out (I see them do it all the time).

My point is the overall wieght of your car is basically the most important deciding factor for performance as far as accelaration and gas mileage go. For example look at the excellent engine to overall wieght ratio of a crotch rocket motercycle compared to a semitruck. Most race cars use materials like aluminum engine blocks, sometimes magenesium alloys as well, in combination with carbon fiber frames and paneling. This is all to reduce the weight in order to boost performance and gas mileage.

neutrino - 24-12-2006 at 19:44

With this in mind, a liposuction can be thought of as an investment in your car to save fuel costs.

Liposuction --> better gas mileage

I wonder if there is some way to use this as a tax loophole. If some crazy lawyer could think of a way to write off liposuctions on tax returns, the lipo business would be set to explode. Maybe if we could get the departments of transportation or energy to subsidize this...

The downside would be that Americans would see this as a license to eat even more crap and end up with heart conditions because lipo doesn't scrub out arteries. Actually, no, this would be a good thing. Natural selection in action. :cool:

12AX7 - 25-12-2006 at 01:00

Stranger things have happened. Eh, I heard that a male (obviously) porn star got a tax writeoff on his penile enhancement...

Tim

h0lx - 25-12-2006 at 01:45

I disagree with that, when you are from the northern europe (like estonia or scandinavia), which aint 3rd world countries, you see that maybe 1 people from 50 you encounter is notably overweight.

gregxy - 25-12-2006 at 11:34

HaHaHa

You could also save the fat that is lipposuctioned off and
convert it into biodiesel and burn it in your car for even
more fuel savings! 30 pounds of fat is probably 3 gallons
of fuel. Kind of expensive fuel though!

Boomer - 3-1-2007 at 06:56

I once put the oxygen line of my welder into the air intake of my car. As soon as I opened the valve, the car hopped like a frog. Not what I call performance increase.

If you've got a regulated cat converter, whatever you change will be counter-regulated by the closed loop that tries to keep lambda at 1.0!

enhzflep - 3-1-2007 at 17:11

To get more horsepower out of your car you can really advance the timing quite a bit. The obvious problem as you mention is the resultant detonation.

Have a look into photoabsorbers - Toluene acts as one. Basically, at the extreme conditions found in the engine during detonation, it has been found (by whom, I don't recall. Nor where I read it) that quite a bit of the reaction is in fact initiated by the light produced by the fuel burned thus far!! I'd always asumed it was due to other factors, i.e temp pressure etc.

Toluene it would seem is able to absorb these emmisions and quell the detonation. Though surprisingly

it isn't good for the rubber seals used in the fuel system by some manufacturers. I've read reports that indicate upwards of 75% are ok - no good if you're the other 25% and find out the hard, EXPENSIVE way though.

Came accros this info when looking for a source of toluene for other purposes.

12AX7 - 3-1-2007 at 18:33

Not suprising, benzene works nicely in engines, as I recall. Toluene is almost benzene...

Tim

Fleaker - 3-1-2007 at 18:44

Benzene, toluene, and xylenes are all used in high test ''race gases''.

UnintentionalChaos - 3-1-2007 at 18:53

Benzene comes in with an octane rating of 101 and toluene at 112. That means pure benzene is just the tiniest bit less explosively combustible than pure iso-octane, while toluene is ever better. n-heptane, distilled from Jeffrey pine resin and sold as rubber cement thinner is 0

Woo, I am now a hazard to myself...then again, I didn't really need the little title to tell me that. On second thought, I'm probably more of a hazard to my improvised lab equipment. :cool:

[Edited on 1-4-07 by UnintentionalChaos]

kine - 4-1-2007 at 23:28

since a detonation event in the compustion chamber produce higher pressures than normal compustion, wouldn't it be possible to decrease the amount of fuel/air entering the chamber and promoting a smaller scale of detonation wiht a fuel with no antidetonation additives, at the point that it will not be destructive?
This will probably will not add any power output to the car but it will use much less fuel promoting beter gas mileage.

[Edited on 5-1-2007 by kine]

Boomer - 5-1-2007 at 01:32

Detonation does not help in combustion engines!

You want a long lasting pressure to push the piston some distance, not a shock hitting it for a fragment of a millisecond. Detonation does not produce more energy anyway with gas/air mixes. It only does so with high explosives because they burn incompletely if they deflagrate (like NG/NC-->CO/NOx in a gun, NG/NC-->CO2/N2 in blasting gelatine).

nitro-genes - 5-1-2007 at 10:59

Up to a certain level, the faster the deflageration is, the faster one whole cylce can be completed, resulting in higher revvings. The problem is that combustion engines are not developed to withstand such increased pressures and rpm's. Moving parts are to heavy to handle high rmp, and to weak to withstand the pressure of real powerfuels like NM/methanol for expample. It is basically similar to overclocking your CPU. The more juice you pump into it, the faster it will be worn down. In streetracing there are only a small set of engines that can handle NOZ injection for longer periods of time. And the engines of formula 1 cars are taken from cars that have run more than 100.000 km, to ensure the engine is without any weaknesses from production, but then again they only have to run for a couple of times!