Hello all,
 A project was tried some time ago (30+ years now!) on a Pontiac Fiero,
 which investigated the effects of completely vaporizing the fuel before
 combustion.
  A heat exchanger was put in the intake system, after fuel mixture, to
 create enough heat to completely vaporize the fuel.  Because of pressure
 loss due to mixture expansion a turbocharger was used to achieve the
 same output power.  My memory is of a 40% improvement in BSFC or 40 %
 power improvement depending on turbo pressure.
 The work was done by Smokey Unik (sp) of "The Best Damn Garage In Town"
 fame, and was reported in either Hot Rod or Car & Driver magazine.  I
 saw the vehicle at the GM proving grounds while involved in a college
 project in 1978 or '79.
 Dan F

 "40% improvement in BSFC"

 I doubt that.

 Paul Lamar

40% improvement would be low.  The volatiles would be more available to
the combustion process, giving up more of their power, possibly to
several hundred percent.  There were a number of experimental fuel
systems which got 100 MPG or more from gasoline, back when cars were all
steel.

The reason this technology never took off was because it makes the
engine a ticking time bomb.  When the volatiles are ingested in the
proper mix, everything is fine, but imagine if a concentration of the
most explosive components were brought into a hot cylinder, and none of
the more stable compounds.  You will get anything from detonation in the
cylinder to initiation in the intake system . . .and imagine the joys of
having your preheater rupture, spraying explosive vapor all through your
engine compartment!

Preheating works well with waste vegetable oil being used in Diesel
engines.  It also worked well with alcohol, when I was experimenting
with that back around 1980.  But gasoline is just too unstable and
dangerous, it's intended to be handled as a cool liquid and broken down
inside the cylinder.

Keith W

I don't believe it. If there was a 40% improvement in BSFC that would be
unprecedented
in the history of the ICE and it would have been done years ago.
Engined engineers have been busting there buns to get .1% improvement in
BSFC.
Manifold heat is used to this day but it does not improve the BSFC anywhere
near 40%. There are a zillion other factors that affect the BSFC and
not just unburned hydro carbons. The RX8 engine recycles unburned HC.
We have all sorts of charts on heat balance and unburned HC are way down
the list.

Paul Lamar

I'm not talking about manifold heat, I'm talking about heat leached from
the exhaust.  You really have to heat up gasoline to get it to break
into its separate components fast enough to use them.  Remember last
week's discussion on BTUs in fuel?  Heat gasoline up enough and you get
a lot more of the BTUs to work for you.

The conspiracy theorists have a lot of the information on early
experiments, but they claim that the oil companies suppressed the
technology.  There was no conspiracy, just simple engineering.

If you can get a fuel to release its energy in a controlled way, you can
harness a lot more of that energy (that's the basis of my statement that
LNG is more efficient than gasoline).  Drag racers know this, that's why
they pump nitro into their engines -- but these engines must be
redesigned to handle it.

This is the same basic idea, but they are going for the power, not for
endurance.  At Caltech, there used to be a saying: "A slap is an hour's
worth of caresses."  The same energy can work quickly or slowly.

If you were able to store gasoline in it's components, then mix them in
measured amounts, you would see a massive boost in mileage (partly
because we wouldn't be bothering with a lot of what's in gas to make it
stable in storage).  Unfortunately, this is not practical, and the
engineers who are scraping for every .1 MPG are constrained by the fuel
they're using.  They have to start with what comes out of the pump.

Consider the ultimate liquid fuel -- hydrogen peroxide and liquid
oxygen.  This is as simple as any liquid fuel gets.  The components are
extracted from the air that we breathe. Unfortunately, it's a real pain
to work with, and while the fuel itself is highly efficient, the process
by which it's produced is anything but.

Thus, we have a great technology, but it's just not practical for use in
the Real World.  Same thing with the 100 MPG carburetor, it's great but
not practical for the only uses to which it would be put.

Keith W

Get off of this BS.  Nitro has oxygen in it. So does hydrogen peroxide.
That is why they get more power.

If it was possible to break just gasoline down to some magical liquid that
would have more energy per pound it would have been done years ago.

Paul Lamar