Alternative Engine Tech

[AriLea]

Mazda is coming out with a car with rotary engine. Motor1.com . it comes out this year; 2023. Fox News .
It drives a generator.

Yep, I see it's just a range extender. That is a use type that the rotary loves. Steady high HP output. Good in aircraft too.
If they blow a tip seal, they often just keep going until shut off after landing.
Maybe they have been able to get emissions down under those conditions.

Maybe they even did a peripheral port design like we used to do back at the VRI in the 1980's, which doubles the HP output. Add a high boost turbo, doubles again. The actual rotary for this application could be tiny if they did all of that. Also make it a ceramic liner and rotor, and wow. So ceramics could work.

The smaller the rotary engine the less wear on the tips, but leakage is higher by percentage.
I don't know the chemistry of ceramics for internal combustion, but it's in racing all the time.

 

[Hog]

Mazda originally had the rotary engine, I remember the ads -

 

[Velhartice]

Mazda is coming out with a car with rotary engine. Motor1.com . it comes out this year; 2023. Fox News .

It drives a generator.

I saw this and found it quite intriguing. My biggest concern is durability, all production rotary engines to this point that I know of don’t last long enough for my tastes without needing a rebuild (200k+ miles). While Rob Dahm (on youtube) has likely made some improvements in this area, it still is an unknown and would keep me from buying one.

Secondly is fuel economy, rotaries aren’t known for that either.

 

[AriLea]

So on Liquid Piston..... This type of engine is good in steady high output running. Even though the LQ people say it's good at part throttle operation as well.

Thier latest call for public funding in emails....

Is the worldwide auto market ready to go fully electric? If you’ve seen the splashy advertising, you might think so.

However, listening to the CEO of the world’s biggest automaker, the future is much more nuanced. Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda recently held firm that there was still a prominent place in the market for plugin hybrids, and the numbers back him up.

Hybrid cars brought in $329 billion in 2021 and could reach $1.6 trillion by 2030.

Sales of hybrids jumped 76% in the US last year alone.

But what if we could make the hybrid even better…

Our X-Engine™ is lighter and up to 30% more efficient than traditional internal combustion motors. If equipped with an X-Engine, an EV’s battery requirement would shrink by up to 80%. That means super range, lighter weight, lower emissions, and way less lithium for batteries.

We want the transition to HEVs to exceed Toyota’s expectations.

You can join us as a shareholder and help make it happen.

As a series hybrid, that would pump an overall ICE/Generator/EV-out effciency of 7% up to maybe 10%. As a plug-in version that is eMPG at a higher level for up 40 to 100miles, since you have 80% the weight of an engine saved and double that for everything structural to support it, then less batteries to match it. (lots of weight and space saved folks! )

As a parallel, if the effcency holds up, then 130% over your typical hybrid today. Say maybe a PriusC at 54mpg/highway. So maybe 70 eMPG running after the battery has run halfway down it's plug-in storage(, where they use both in parallel). eMPG genrally is double MPG if we are at over $3/gal, so 140 eMPG in full EV mode.

So when running a series hybrid, not in 'all ev mode', after that 100mi, 140eMPG equivelent vehicle goes back down to around 42MPG in series mode.

Ya all know the difference between series and parallel hybrids, yes? And plug-in vs non-plug-in hybrids yes?

The PriusC was mostly parallel, but spent about 15% of it's effort (as a guess) recharging the pack (when drained) at the same time. A mix like that is a tradeoff between range and efficency, depending on the distance traveled.

Either way, I still wonder what thier emissions are like. You would think, the big auto makers must see something wrong not advertised.

RQ Riley's XR3 was a full-on parallel and claimed 125MPG. Best I know, they expected to drain the battery out, and plug that in at that point, @ maybe100miles.
So they had a smaller ICE and a larger eMotor than a PriusC per size of vehicle.

 

[Marshall]

Mazda is coming out with a car with rotary engine. Motor1.com . it comes out this year; 2023. Fox News .

It drives a generator.

History repeating itself? The first time it almost bankrupted the company.

 

[AriLea]

History repeating itself? The first time it almost bankrupted the company.

Well, not completely. The article says the rotary will be a range extender. The car will mostly be an EV, unless you exceed the range of the battery pack.

As such the rotary runs in a cycle that it loves, steady and high output. So in that use it's also going to be a smaller unit than a main drive would. And it will be a much smaller package than a piston equivelent. I'm not sure how they solve the emissions issues. Mostly how they usually produce more oil/carbon burn. But maybe that will not be so bad in a small range of RPM that it will use.

There may not be an EPA rule for testing a pure range extender in the US. Not as yet, maybe.

Linked: The MX-30 R-EV uses a 17.8-kilowatt-hour battery, and — thanks to the rotary range extender — offers a competitive 53 miles of all-electric range. But the small body of the crossover prevents it from being an easy decision for the U.S. where consumers favor higher-riding SUVs and crossovers.

 

[AriLea]

Update on liquid piston

 

[AriLea]

New notice from LQ => (Link)

Our latest engine, the XTS-210, is getting primed for market!
The XTS-210 engine is a 25-horsepower, two-stroke, supercharged, and liquid-cooled 210cc engine based on our X-Engine™ technology platform

These random effcency qoutes are a bit irratating and problematic.
They claim 30% more efficent than common ICE's. But what are they comparing to?? Earlier they have stated as being over and above 'currect' diesel ratings.

Hard to tell how that compares to current tech. Sometimes, when generallizing the term 'efficency', R&D researchers mean more power per weight of engine, and sometimes just talking about mechanical effciency, which is a very minor stat compared to thermal effciency. Mechanical and Thermal must be considered together to get a full engine rating.

From a bench test, you would take the measured value and divide out the 'estimated?' mechanical to result into the thermal. To get a real/actuals mechanical rating, you need stress and pressure sensors inline with the mechanical parts vs the load end. They usually just estimate it all from engineering calcs.

In 1980's typically 20% thermal efficency was average. Sometime after the 1990's Diesel was approching 40%. In 2014 Toyota stated a 38% thermal effciency on petrol. Presumably they are using that now in production models.

So for the Mazda Wankel above, I will guess they are focussed on the power-to-weight specs at high power, while still keeping the emission in check. So poor MPG values at nominal power outputs are still likely.

So this LQ engine, what the heck can a vehicle with a 210cc/25hp LQ motor get? I need to see it in a motorcycle or micro car before we would know for sure.

So about thermal compared to a wankle, the chamber shape and dynamics is the main problem there.
From LQ:

"They have a long, skinny, moving combustion chamber, we have a stationary combustion chamber that's nice and round. You can drive it to a high compression, just by making the chamber smaller. And because it's stationary, we can directly inject fuel where the Wankel could not. So those are the two key advantages of the diesel: high compression ratio and direct injection. .... .... And we also upgraded its cycle to give it much higher efficiency.

 

[BigWarpGuy]

I like the rotary engine by Liquid Piston. It is a new take on the rotary engine.

 

[AriLea]

I couldn't find the EV Drive thread, so I will post this here, for the few dozen people who still come back here.

I knew about flow batteries, but this one is a brain twister.
https://newatlas.com/energy/rmit-proton-battery-energy-density/

The article says that the system uses water and an acidic source, has the same density of Lithium batteries (per the fluids?), and releases both H and O2. Which twists my head, since those can be combined in a fuel cell to make more power and exhausts H2O (water).
Say what?

The proton battery works something like a reversible fuel cell, accepting water while charging, splitting out positively-charged hydrogen ions and releasing oxygen.

OK, IC, maybe this below explains the first stage above (while charging), it's also like the a fuel cell in the final stange. (my brain is still twisted)

The proton battery instead stores the hydrogen protons directly and ?Immediately?, in holes in a solid, porous activated carbon electrode soaked in a dilute acid. Discharging the battery is a matter of adding oxygen, and energy is released as water is produced.

IS this chemistry double talk or what? Or is it charge cycle double talk?

So the inputs (the consumables) are H2O and the eventual output is H2O and EMF? Where did the power come from? What has changed from start to finish? I'm sure some of it did not E=MC2 into reality. !!!?!!! Somethings else had to be consumed while charging.

Was there energy used to charge? I didn't see that part. I mean, the charging would normally have to happen at a location where we find all the inputs, especially the energy to charge it. (and all they have left is H2 at that point) Then output would/should happen LATER on the vehicle, where H2 finds O2 from the ambient air. How is this different than a typical H2 fuel cell cycle? What do they mean by 'immediately'?

They say something about carbon in the article. So maybe they skipped that carbon is consumed and put together with the extra O2 as an CO2 output?,.. which makes this very similar to just buring carbon. So then the inputs would be H2O, C (as something like CH4-Methane ?) and O2; Outputs H2O 'EMF' and CO2? I don't gggget it. because they just say the carbon is a stratta/electrode for some part of the reactions/process.

Ammm OK, moving on...