This looks promising. It is basically a continuous combustion wave turbine. While not super powerful in this early design and not intended to replace a V-8 it can be brought to market for a hybrid vehicle application soon, according to the researcher. See the video below. While they’ve got a focus on CO2 for the usual reasons, I’ll take increased efficiency any day.
Schematic model of a wave disk engine, showing combustion and shockwaves within the channels. Source: Michigan State University.
Researchers from Michigan State University have been awarded $2.5 million from the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program to complete its prototype development of a new gasoline-fueled wave disc engine and electricity generator that promises to be five times more efficient than traditional auto engines in electricity production, 20% lighter, and 30% cheaper to manufacture.
The wave disc engine, a new implementation of wave rotor technology, was earlier developed by the Michigan State group in collaboration with researchers from the Warsaw Institute of Technology. About the size of a large cooking pot, the novel, hyper-efficient engine could replace current engine/generator technologies for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.
The award will allow a team of MSU engineers and scientists, led by Norbert Müller, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, to begin working toward producing a vehicle-size wave disc engine/generator during the next two years, building on existing modeling, analysis and lab experimentation they have already completed.
Our goal is to enable hyper-efficient hybrid vehicles to meet consumer needs for a 500-mile driving range, lower vehicle prices, full-size utility, improved highway performance and very low operating costs. The WDG also can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 95 percent in comparison to modern internal combustion vehicle engines.
From ARPA-E
The Wave Disk Generator revolutionizes auto efficiency at lower vehicle costs. Currently, 15% of automobile fuel is used for propulsion; the other 85% is wasted. A Wave Disk Generator hybrid uses 60% of fuel for vehicle propulsion.
MSU’s shock wave combustion generator is the size of a cooking pot and generates electricity very efficiently. This revolutionary generator replaces today’s 1,000 pounds of engine, transmission, cooling system, emissions, and fluids resulting in a lighter, more fuel-efficient electric vehicle. This technology provides 500-mile-plus driving range, is 30% lighter, and 30% less expensive than current, new plug-in hybrid vehicles. It overcomes the cost, weight, and driving range challenges of battery-powered electric vehicles.
This development exceeds national CO2 emission reduction goals for transportation. A 90% reduction is calculated in CO2 emissions versus gasoline engine vehicles. Wave Disk Generator application scales as small as motor scooters and as large as delivery trucks, due to its small size, low weight, and low cost. This technology enables us to radically improve the atmosphere and human health of major global cities.
Last week, the prototype was presented to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), this video was released:
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All of this is still theoretical. They haven’t even built a prototype yet and until they have done that and measured the efficiency of the prototype I’d take this with a pinch of salt.
Something is impossible here: the piston motor has a fuel-to-force energy yield of about 25% (gasoline) to 35% (diesel), because of the difference in compression ratio. Electricity generation from mechanical force should be high in all cases. Thus a fivefold increase in yield seems rather impossible. Further, the Wankel motor which was based on some similar disk principle (be it not turbine-like), had one difficult to solve problem: the sideways sealing of the moving parts so that no combustion gases leak back to the input (and compression is lost). I suppose that this is not different for this type of motor.
This won’t fit in your SUV but look at the 50+% efficiency from the commom IC engine
http://qualityjunkyard.com/2009/05/27/worlds-biggest-engine-the-wartsila-sulzer-rta96-c/
How does this engine differ from a Wankle Rotary engine?
Too Cool. Innovations we may be able to believe in.
there is one sure sign that this is a scam: they need government money to produce the prototype of something that would make its designer a billionaire.
keep this stuff off your site, Anthony; things like this will destroy the hard earned reputation of this website in no time.
Why is it that when college professors use phrases like “five times less than”, that my BS detectors go on full alert. Am I just an old fashioned mathematical pedant? Or have we heard stuff like this before?
promises to be five times more efficient than traditional auto engines in electricity production, 20% lighter, and 30% cheaper to manufacture.
can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 95 percent
Really? 95%.
But then I always did believe in Father Christmas, The Easter Bunny and The Man in the Moon.
If you had a car which ran on sunbeams by day and stardust by night, there are still people who would not like you to drive it. It appears that the personal freedom to drive is what they don’t like. Or at least it appears so from the way they are never satisfied.
(I’ve lost count, over the years, of the new engine designs which were going to replace the piston. Only the wankel ever made it into production, yet pistons go on and on, or maybe up and down, getting more efficient every year. I sincerely doubt whether the headline (and misleading) 4X efficiency will be forthcoming with this device, but twice would be fine.)
Umm, I don’t think any motor can achieve 4x the efficiency of pistons.
A modern European turbo-diesel is already running as about 40% efficiency, and so 4x that efficiency would make the new motor 160% efficient. Wahayyy, perpetual motion here we come….
4x the efficiency of some gas-guzzling American monstrosity designed in 1935, perhaps. But 4x 10% efficiency is … errr … about the same as a modern European turbo diesel.
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It will be interesting to see if this type of generator can be coupled to Lotus’s REEV engine technology. It likely be more compact and smoother than Lotus’s initial proposal of a 3-cylinder reciprocating ICE.
http://www.lotuscars.com/engineering/en/lotus-range-extender-engine
Seems like a verrrry interesting technology.
But also like they are playing with the numbers just a bit. OK, a lot. Why couldn’t they just present the merits of the technology?
Sure, its 60% efficient and internacl combustion engines are only 15%, so “four times” as efficient? Let’s think through the numbers.
First of all, modern internal combustion engines are more like 25% to 30% efficient in terms of converting fuel to useable power. Depends on any number of factors from turbo charging to compression ratio to material (aluminum vs steel block for example). Then you have to subtract about 6% for friction in the transmission and rest of the power train. So call it 20% worst case for easy figuring. We’re down to 3:1.
Next, what’s missing out of the Wave Disk numbers? 60% efficiency in terms of converting fuel to electricity. Hmmmm. What makes the vehicle move forward? Magic? Maybe it should have some electric motors to turn the wheels? How about one big one and… a transmission? No? How about… two medium size ones? Or four small ones? And you still need a wide power range in most vehicles for uphill, passing, towing, etc that exceeds the power range of most electric motors… so you probably STILL need a transmission. and axles and a differential. So the Wave Disk powered vehicle doesn’t get off scott free on the friction score. Say its still better, 4% instead of 6%. Now we’re at 20% vs 56%.
What else are we missing. Emission controls? I have no idea how the various emission control standards would affect the Wave Disk, but I know they affect internal combustion engines. Tack on another 4% for internal combustion to compare no emission controls to no emission controls. 24% vs 56%. A bit better than twice, not four times.
Anything else missing? Generator maybe? From the ARPA web site:
“Requires developing new low-cost, high rpm generators, which currently do not exist in automotive markets.”
Oops. No transmission, but it does need a generator.
What about power on demand? How fast can these Wave Disk engines ramp up and down? Perhaps not fast enough, again from the ARPA web site:
“…resulting in a “hyper-efficient” serial hybrid vehicle…”
Uhm… so its a hybrid after all. That means…. BATTERIES!
Cost and weight of same not in their numbers anymore than the electric motors and generator were. And battery technology still has major issues with longevity (a well maintained engine will outlast several sets of batteries) and disposal (they have nasty stuff in them like acid and various not so good for the environment metals) so you have to include maintenance and disposal costs of the batteries…
No idea how to quanitify that in terms of % efficiency. What are we at? 2:1 max? less?
But it is still a very interesting approach, even of the efficiency claim is more than 50% hype.
IMHO, the horse-carriage replaced by the internal combustion engine not because
people complained about the horse manure, but because its more efficient.
Anthony you right, take increased efficiency any time.
Now, where is my ZPF Gravity Drive …. 🙂
The other problem with designs of this nature is always – blade sealing, seal lubrication, seal wear, and lubrication oil ingestion (with resulting smoke and EVIL EMISSIONS). Same old problems the Wankel motor had.
You could get rid of the blade seals, if you span the motor at 150,000 rpm. But then you might as well just use a Bladon micro jet engine, which is a proven technology with very few moving parts, and available off the shelf now. But then you would still have the same old problem of the jet engine being less efficient when run at low levels in the atmosphere.
http://www.bladonjets.com/
If this new engine is to be run at slower rpms, as I suspect, then sealing all those blades will be an unsolvable nightmare.
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A four-fold boost in efficiency should be shouted out from the rooftops! Bravo.
I’m lost though as to why you just wouldn’t couple it up directly to a drivetrain? Surely there’s losses in efficiency in generating the electricity, and then converting the electricity back into rotary motion?
As for the claim “replaces 1,000 pounds of engine, transmission, cooling system, emissions, and fluids”, surely you’d need some form of cooling?
Or have I missed something? 🙂
blocked from linking this twice to Facebook, (2 different methods)… those people are off their tree…time to start a blog methinks…
Third time lucky, they (Facebook) must block at random…
What they may have produced is a Frank Wittle jet engine (circa 1938 – the first ever made), but with combustion inside the compressor rotor, instead of external to it.
The Wittle jet engine:
http://www.fiddlersgreen.net/aircraft/Gloster-E28/IMAGES/Whittle-jet-engine-testing.jpg
An interesting design, if they can make it run. But an axial jet was always more efficient than a centrifugal jet, and so the Bladon micro jet will probably still be more efficient than this new design. Note the pencil near the Bladon engine – the diameter of the intake is only about 18cm.
http://www.bladonjets.com/
Of course jet engines do come smaller than this, as this clip demonstrates. But these engines are horrendously thirsty and inefficient.
Shame that in all that advertising, nobody states the proposed rpm of this new engine. Is it a motor, or a jet?
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Higher efficiency is always welcome. Maybe it is a good idea but more hype than facts in this story.
Just showed this to my “green” group and they are all astounded, excited. The implications of parts no longer needed are amazing.
One caveat: please redo the sound track!
From the folks who brought us the Yugo…………
With all those shcokwaves rattling around, I wonder what the noise output will be. That could kill the concept by itself.
yeah, there are lots of these whacky rotary type engines around such as The C.E.M.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylindrical_Energy_Module
Heaps of animations on youtube as well.
Ever hear of the Wankel? Rotary engines can’t hold their seals; they lose lubrication and seize. Lots of other problems with this little wonder; the 10kW unit he’s holding is about as big as the design gets, so you need to gang them to get a reasonable output, even for a lightweight vehicle. Etc.
Being a sceptic, at first glance I found the 15% figure for fuel efficiency to be rather low, so I looked it up. The fuel efficiency of a typical engine is 20% (much lower than I had imagined) with an additional loss of 5% through “the tranny and real axle mechanical friction losses (or the transaxle friction losses) and the drain of a few essential accessories,” and thought the comparison should be 20 to 65 for a 3.25 times improvement instead of 4.
However, on thoroughly re-reading the article, I find; “replaces today’s 1,000 pounds of engine, transmission, cooling system, emissions, and fluids resulting in a lighter…”. Their calculation of efficiency seems to be valid.
I congratulate them.
I usually can’t stand reading an article that mentions CO2 savings and have seen this news item on various tech posts and haven’t read it until now.
I wish a tech site like Engadget would have a “This week in Purple” that mentions these types of things stripped of all references to Carbon, CO2 and variants. Instead they have “This week in Green”, yuk.
Ah, the Wankel gets revised, modified slightly and used to generate electricity as a gasoline powered electric generator.
This gives a good recap of the Wankel:
http://www.hesston.edu/academics/faculty/nelsonk/PhysicsResearch/WankelEric/ResearchPaper.htm and Wikipedia has a larger section on the cons of rotaries in their Wankel engine article. Depends on how one measures efficiency but the Mazda RX-8 is rated around 20 mpg.
What is missing is any hard numbers regarding simply taking one of those hybrid Volt things and replace the traditional ICE engine used after the batteries fail. Then ramp up the specs so there’s enough juice to run a very good A/C unit for you folks living around LA or Houston or New Orleans in the summer and a really good heater for those living in Quebec or Anchorage. These folks are engineers — it’s not as if they are really ignorant of these car designs.
One thing to always remember about these flyers (investment term) is the billions spent by (a) car manufacturers, (b) ICE engine makers like those lawn things you cut your grass with, (c) gasoline power generators like I use when that AGW Ice Storm killed all my power for three weeks and (d) the big power generators like ConEd.
Imho, maybe a good idea but I’d put an equal bet on cold fusion to power America.
Electric power generation is very well understood today along with all the downstream in-efficiencies. Only The pros are covered in the video. The cons are not – check out the Mazda RX-8 sports car. Very cool but mpg is not a biggie.
The engineers must know the simply huge problems of putting a tiny turbine in a car since they’ve simply ignore all the losses along the way. Electric generators that burn everything from natural gas to oil to wood are well understood by the 21st century.