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posted by chromas on Friday June 21 2019, @01:28AM   Printer-friendly

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Record efficiency for a gas engine

At the end of May, the final meeting of the "Horizon 2020" project "GasOn" with the EU Commission took place in Brussels. The aim of this EU project was the further development of gas engines for cars and vans. Around 20 partners participated, including ETH Zurich and Empa as well as four European automobile manufacturers and well-known suppliers. Gas-powered vehicles generally emit less pollutants than petrol or diesel cars. They are likely to gain importance in the future due to their possibility of being powered by renewable energy.

[...] A highly efficient combustion process was implemented for a gas engine with two liters displacement: A lean gas mixture is ignited by means of a thimble-sized, flow-calmed prechamber. In the ETH laboratory for aerothermochemistry and combustion systems, basic experiments were carried out in optically accessible engines. These were used to investigate the behavior of the ignition in the prechamber and the overflow of the hot rays into the main combustion chamber. Based on these data, numerical tools were developed in order to calculate the processes in detail using computer simulations. These results allowed Volkswagen Group Research to optimize the design of the prechamber and the main combustion chamber. Empa scientists set up an engine accordingly and investigated the combustion process. An engine control system developed by the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control Technology at ETH Zurich was used, which coordinates the complex overall system and enables adaptation to new findings at the same time.

Compared to the state of the art, the consumption of the new gas engine with prechamber combustion process was reduced by 20 percent (converted into WLTP standard consumption for a mid-size passenger car). The peak efficiency in the best engine configuration was over 45 percent, with efficiencies of over 40 percent achieved over a wide operating range. Such values are currently only achieved by significantly larger engines, such as those used in commercial vehicles, stationary or marine applications. 45 percent is a new record for passenger car engines. By way of comparison, petrol engines typically have efficiencies of 35 to 40 percent. The GasOn project has not yet dealt with the exhaust gas treatment of such an engine; there is still need for further research, due to the lean combustion process.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 21 2019, @12:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 21 2019, @12:27PM (#858520)

    methinks it is silly to connect a ice to the wheels "directly". it should rather be a device that most efficiently EXTRACTS
    the energy in the fuel and converts it to something easy to handle: electricty.
    also the idea of a piston mass having to REVERSE direction is just plain stupid. the reason probably being that it is easy(ier) and cheap(er) to get a good seal in a geometric cyclinder as opposed to a tourus.
    with a tourus, the piston could be magnetic and revolve in a circle ... the magnetic piston head directly inducing electricity in static housing coils ...
    also one could consider that there is "free energy" in fhe athmospher and with a lean burn this latent energy is "abused" too. if this
    is the case then it is not just the energy of the fuel gas, oil, liquid or whatnot that counts as input but the "broken" athmosphere too?
    anyways good show keep up the good work and hopefully not too much of the gaind efficiency gets lost in making it idiot user, mud and dailyuse proof ...

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