I had sincerely hoped to profit from the things I have learned
about energy over the past 20 years. Much time has passed
without progress. I never found anyone to help or encourage me
to bring these not so new technologies to market, so here I will
offer them to the world and see if anyone might find value in
free information.
The combustion process 19th Century engineering gave us, I call
slow burn. Over the past century this technology has been
retained because it provided great profits to Big Oil, Big
Energy, Big Banking and Big Government, through fuel taxes; a
very big conspiracy to rip off global consumers. All have agreed
on the desirability of using more than twenty times the fossil
fuel needed for inferior performance that poisons the world’s
air, soil and water. Indeed, it may be demonstrated in the near
future that liquid fuel technology has squandered fifty times
more fuel than needed per developed horsepower.
Fast burn technology, developed by Canadian, Charles Pogue, in
the late nineteen forties, bought and suppressed by automakers,
is a fifty five year old solution.
Charles had easily solvable power problems with his hot vapor,
fast burn, gasoline fuel system. But he refused to address the
performance problem in his quest to achieve 300 mile per gallon
fuel economy, after successfully surpassing 200 miles per gallon
with a 1937 Ford V-8 sedan. This at a time when fuel was
relatively cheap in North America and few would trade power for
economy. I solved these problems in a simple fashion and never
built a conversion to demonstrate the solutions. This was due
partly to fear of the opposition and an unreliable sense of
market timing.
The old slow burn technology makes just enough vapor in a
combustion chamber to light the mixture with a spark or
compression heat in a diesel engine. At the same time heat
begins to vaporize liquid fuel to a combustible state, pressures
build to great heights and prevent rapid vaporization of the
remaining fuel. In addition, the unvaporized fuel absorbs great
amounts of heat that cannot contribute to combustion pressure,
which creates power. This rich or fuel heavy mixture serves to
lower and regulate the peak and average combustion temperatures
throughout an unnecessarily long combustion cycle. This process
uses a surplus of fuel that passes out to atmosphere unburned.
The catalytic converter was the industry response to cleaning
this unburned fuel.
Fast burn technology does just the opposite of slow burn. In a
slow burn four stroke combustion engine there is fire in the
cylinder for more than one complete crankshaft revolution. That
is, somewhere between 360 and 420 degrees of rotation. The power
stroke is a 180 degree event and if we use a bicycle crank for
comparison, we can see that most of the power is delivered in
half of the full stroke, centered on the mid point. That is,
cylinder pressure creates the greatest torque when the piston is
half way through the power stroke. The engine will easily
provide all the power needed for cruise and moderate
acceleration if there is only enough fuel available to make
cylinder pressure fifteen or twenty degrees before and after the
midpoint of the power stroke; a controlled power stroke of
thirty to forty degrees. This is controlled by metering fuel so
all fuel is burned up in an oxygen rich environment and the
emissions will now be hot air and trace amounts of oxides of
nitrogen.
Most children learn at a young age, they can pass their finger
through a candle flame without pain or injury by moving their
finger through the flame quickly. Such is the secret of fast
burn technology. Temperatures that would melt engine parts like
valves and pistons if maintained for four hundred degrees of
crankshaft rotation are no problem if the burn cycle only lasts
for a maximum of one hundred degrees in the case of maximum
power. Performance enthusiasts looking for that extra 50
horsepower by adding fuel, are the ones most likely to melt
parts. For these people - racers, hot rodders; engines likely to
melt at high power outputs and too much fuel can and should be
assembled with readily available thermal barrier coatings to
prevent melt downs.
About ten years ago I read that the slow burn performance engine
developed peak cylinder pressure at 15 to 18 degrees after top
dead center, early in the power stroke. What if we could develop
just twice that amount of cylinder pressure, three times as late
in the power stroke? That is, at 45 - 54 degrees after top dead
center. The answer is we would have more than three times the
power at the point of greatest mechanical advantage in the power
stroke as we do with the bicycle crank in the middle of its down
stroke.
When there is absolutely no liquid fuel in our air/fuel mixture,
the rate of combustion is many times greater than when there is
an abundance of liquid fuel, as in the 19th century slow burn
technology. This means we can supply spark much later and burn
all the fuel in thirty degrees or less crankshaft rotation. An
engine that can burn all its fuel in twenty degrees of
crankshaft rotation will deliver twenty times the fuel economy
of an engine that does not burn all its fuel in 400 degrees of
rotation. Although the fast burn engine might generate peak
temperatures and cylinder pressures three times higher than a
slow burn engine, the burn time is so dramatically shortened
that the engine will actually run cooler than slow burn engines.
Smaller cooling systems will do the job at lower water
temperatures, like the 160 degrees of old days.
It has never been the case that piston engines are inefficient
and they could serve us very well into the Twenty Second Century
as soon as we deep six their liquid, slow burn fuel systems. The
reasons Charles Pogue never realized the tremendous power
potential of his fast burn, 200 mile per gallon Ford sedan, was
likely two things. The hot gasoline vapor made with exhaust
system heat and inappropriate spark timing for an engine that
required the spark to come about eighty crank degrees later than
the timing it had as a slow burn factory engine. Combustion
performance enthusiasts the world over, know the coldest,
densest air/fuel mixture makes the best power. These people can
also understand that making peak cylinder pressures when the
piston is near the top of the power stroke, only tries to push
the crankshaft out of the engine, onto the ground - wasted
energy like standing on the bicycle pedal at the very top.
What we want is cold vapor fuel which is much more easily
created than Charles’ exhaust heated fuel. The secret is the
vaporizing power of vacuum. Success in cold vaporizing has been
demonstrated by radio frequency vaporizing chambers. But the
piston engine operates on a vacuum system. In the days of
carburetors, vacuum drew in the air to the engine’s cylinders
and metered the fuel fairly accurately by means of that same
vacuum and simple mechanical adjustments to fuel flow.
Modern electronic fuel injection is perhaps the most expensive
incremental improvement to slow burn technology in the Twentieth
Century. It served multiple purposes. It exchanged a good,
simple system, with a slightly better complex system. Computer
controls took auto repair out of the realm of backyard mechanics
and restricted it to $50 - 70 per hour service centers - a great
big bonus for the auto service industry and a big expense to the
do -it -yourselfer.
I am no combustion engineer, nor do I wish to become one. I can
only say I intuitively expect two horsepower per cubic inch
displacement on any four stroke spark engine modified for cold
vapor fuel, using an appropriately sized carburetor as would be
done on a slow burn engine.
I further expect that a performance modification that would
increase the power of a slow burn engine by fifty percent, will
increase the power of a fast burn engine by sixty to one hundred
per cent. All the common power boosting practices work on fast
burn engines better than slow burn. Compression ratios are not
critical as the octane of pure vapor is up around 110. A 12 to
one compression ratio would be about 9 to 1 at 45 degrees after
top dead center, when the spark would occur at full power. While
misfire can occur as often as 3 - 4 cycles per hundred on a new
V-8 engine, misfires would be very rare with fast burn engines
due to the lower compression at ignition and the evenness of a
lean air/vapor mixture. The fast burn engine may be supercharged
with a draw through carburetor producing the vacuum to operate a
fresh air bubbler at the bottom of the fuel tank. If a richer
vapor is desired in the bubbler, a racing fuel cell can be used,
packed with fuel cell foam, greatly increasing the surface area
exposed to liquid fuel, vacuum will readily vaporize. Large
metal fuel tanks should be reinforced top and bottom by epoxying
bar stock or angle stock, so they do not collapse under vacuum.
Lastly, I would like to mention that fast burn technology is a
multi fuel system. With a little experimenting and fine tuning
of mixture and spark, a fast burn engine can burn gasoline,
alcohol, diesel, kerosene, vegetable oil, propane and liquefied
natural gas. The fuel with the greatest latent energy per pound
will deliver the best performance and the least powerful fuel
will deliver very adequate performance. If you are anxious to
try a fast burn conversion, please read my Fast Burn Conversion
essay for tips and details for a safe conversion. Here’s to big,
clean, cheap power for the new age!
