cool stuff, I wonder if the motor would have severe durability issues though


Bruce Crower's Southern California auto-racing parts shop is a temple for racecar mechanics. Here's the flat eight-cylinder Indycar engine that won him the 1977 Louis Schwitzer Award for racecar design. There's the Mercedes five-cylinder engine he converted into a squealing supercharged two-stroke, just "to see what it would sound like," says the now half-deaf 77-year-old self-taught engineer.
Crower has spent a lifetime eking more power out of every drop of fuel to make cars go faster. Now he's using the same approach to make them go farther, with a radical six-stroke engine that tops off the familiar four-stroke internal-combustion process with two extra strokes of old-fashioned steam power.
A typical engine wastes three quarters of its energy as heat. Crower's prototype, the single-cylinder diesel eight-horsepower Steam-o-Lene engine, uses that heat to make steam and recapture some of the lost energy. It runs like a conventional four-stroke combustion engine through each of the typical up-and-down movements of the piston (intake, compression, power or combustion, exhaust). But just as the engine finishes its fourth stroke, water squirts into the cylinder, hitting surfaces as hot as 1,500°F. The water immediately evaporates into steam, generating a 1,600-fold expansion in volume and driving the piston down to create an additional power stroke. The upward sixth stroke exhausts the steam to a condenser, where it is recycled into injection water.
Crower calculates that the Steam-o-Lene boosts the work it gets from a gallon of gas by 40 percent over conventional engines. Diesels, which are already more efficient, might get another 5 percent. And his engine does it with hardware that already exists, so there's no waiting for technologies to mature, as with electric cars or fuel cells.
"Crower is an innovator who tries new ideas based on his experience and gut instincts," says John Coletti, the retired head of Ford's SVT high-performance group. "Most people won't try something new for fear of failure, but he is driven by a need to succeed." And he just might. Crower has been keeping the details of his system quiet, waiting for a response to his patent application. When he gets it, he'll pass off the development process to a larger company that can run with it, full-steam.

INVENTION AWARDS Six Strokes of Genius - Popular Science

 

sounds sextacular

 

That's amazing!! Rep for you sir!

 

I'm glad to see the six stroke hasn't died like so many other new engine technologies. It sounds like a really good idea.

 

that has to be so bad for a motor in the long run

 

I remember reading about this almost 2 years ago, but was actually thinking about it today! I just heard of a new design (that's probably still just on paper) which tries to get the benefits of a 2 stroke engine with a 4 stroke design. Basically,one piston constantly intakes air/fuel on one stroke, then compresses it and exhausts it on the next stroke, pumping it into a piston that only takes in the mixture and ignites it. Basically, 2 cylinders each getting half the uty of a 4 cycle engine. I immediately saw flaws in it though...

 

I've seen that. I think it was on a motorcycle in Australia. The vast majority of these weird alternative engine designs aren't feasible mass-market engines because of overcomplication, durability issues, emissions and a host of other reasons. Occam's razor in engine design. Hell, there's still a debate over the viability of the rotary engine design and that's been around for almost a century .

This one seems to be pretty simple, though, and based on a good principle. Most of the energy in an ICE is wasted through heat; this engine uses this heat to do work. As for reliability- the bugs in steam engine technology were worked out two centuries ago. I'm sure they can make this work now. BMW has been fiddling with a system that uses heat from the exhaust manifolds to run a secondary steam power generator to supplement engine power- this is one step further, but doesn't seem very far fetched.

 

Agreed.

 

Wow this is pretty crazy, rep for you. The only thing I'd worry about is something breaking because of heat cycling

 

Why do you guys think this is bad for a motor? As long as the water doesn’t set in the cylinder for any length of time there no corrosion. We are dealing with water vapor so it’s not like there a puddle of water setting in the cylinder. If anything its better for the motor because it will run much cooler. Everything unreliable about engines usually results from heat. This is actually ingenious, its basically half gas half steam. What makes combustion engines inefficient is the amount of heat they produce. Heat = wasted energy. What make steam inefficient is the means to heat the water to produce steam. So basically this idea uses wasted energy from the combustion process to make more energy. It’s really the best of both worlds. I’m not trying to start an argument, I’m just curious as to why you guys think reliability will become an issue. I know there will be obstacles to overcome, but with new technology there always is. Perhaps it’s something I haven’t thought of.