Ozone intake for internal combustion engines

Don't worry about the unbirned ozon because ozone is very unstable gas and in high temperature of combustion chamber it turns almost instantly into Oxygen again.

I doubt that the efficiency gain (if any) would outweigh the energy cost of creating the ozone. But I'm replying mainly to follow the thread. Volvo has an ozone conversion catalyst on their radiators -- so as long as you have a Volvo follow you around, you wouldn't need to worry about causing more ozone pollution.

Chemically, it doesn't seem there would be a difference: for every 3 molecules of O2, you get 2 of O3, which then combine with C and H to form CO2 and H2O. Once the equation is balanced the masses involved are the same.

Now, most engines completely burn at least 96% of the fuel going in. I'd think that the unburned part has more to do with incomplete mixing than with chemistry. But it would be interesting to see what others have to say.

what is the purpose of the ozone conversion catalyst on the radiator ??

Hi reefdiver,

It is simply there to reduce ozone concentrations, and to thereby reduce smog. The radiator coating works as intended, although I don't know what the overall effect is -- in other words, if 20% of the cars were Volvos, would there be significantly less smog? Dunno. Volvo does a lot of environmentally sound things (and they have done a lot of safety work as well).

The reasoning at Volvo was, I assume, that the small amounts of NOx and VOCs (HC) that cars emit, in the presence of sunlight, create O3, which creates smog. If cars could get rid of some of that O3, it would be a good thing, reducing their life-cycle environmental cost. Given that a car puts out a very small part of a gram of NOx per mile, it might be that Volvo's radiator could clean up all the O3 from the car immediately ahead.

Very good, Blink!

As you know, combustion is an oxidation physical-chemical reaction and you're perfectly right applying the law of mass conservation. From chemical point of view, we say that fuel has to be completely burned. But what we are looking for in ICEs is the amount and nature of the energy output and the dynamics of this process in time. Explosions in cylinders are delivering heat (not good - wasted) work (good - used) and maybe light (I wasn't there ). So possibly, using an oxidant more reactive ( or unstable) could make a difference in the dynamics of combustion and in heat/work ratio. I don't know but I'd like to learn in this discussion.

Now, most engines completely burn at least 96% of the fuel going in.

• Engines that burn high percentages of their fuel are sometimes known as 'lean burn' engines.
• There is a concept known as 'Maxwell's Bomb', a combustion chamber where about 20% of the fuel that enters leaves it unburnt, giving the highest power-to-volume ratio achievable in any combustion chamber. Unfortunately, no-one has seen fit to write this up for Wiki to date.

I suppose that the convertion from O2 to O3 works as a turbocharger. Now in the same volume of internal air (together with ozon) may be burnt more amount of fuel.

So, the power of engine will be more. The pollutants may be the same, less or bigger depent on additional internal conditions.

The main profit is the greater power in the same engine.

So, the power of engine will be more.

Why? Surely power is needed to make the ozone?

Hi PWSlack.

To have an idea of order of magnitudes, for a 60HP car engine a 15-30W of electrical power is needed to convert O2 in O3 at the air intake.

Patents claims say that mileage can be increased by 15-40% and fume pollution in diesel can be cut by 98%. There are also figures for gas engines pollution cuts (less impressive).

My whole concern is that a patent claim is one thing and third party tests could be very different. Please don't take me wrong that I would mistrust inventors. I'm an inventor myself but when getting intriguing results I doubt my own work too.

So I'm looking for some data sheet of a product (if any) or some published R&D in this field.

Thanks.

Michael

15-30W is a rate. At what rate is O₃ produced using 15-30W and what effect does it give? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone gives the heat of formation of ozone as +142.3kJ/mole. So at 100% efficiency (really?) a 30W electrical plant producing ozone will create it at a rate of 2.11e-4 moles per second.

A 60HP engine, running at, say, 30% efficiency on 2-2-4-Trimethylpentane with a combustion energy of -5461kJ/mol will consume 2.7e-2 moles of fuel per second, each of which requires 13 moles of oxygen, or 3.6e-1 moles per second of oxygen. So 30W of ozone will produce an effect equivalent to 2.11e-4/3.6e-1 = 5.9e-4 or about 1 part in 1700.

If someone can shoot holes in that then healthy scepticism is a prerequisite for a constructive forum.

You're such a patent smasher, PWSlack...

Bringing up these calculations is perfectly OK. However, a good effect on ICEs efficiency was first empirically observed during and after summer storms when ground level ozone concentrations were somewhere between 30-270ug/m3. Let's take an average of 150ug/m3. A 2000cm3 non-turbo engine at 2000rpm calls for 6.6e-3m3 of air at atmospheric pressure per second. If that air has an ozone concentration of 150ug/m3, it means that the ICE is taking 1ug/s (1 micro-gram per second) of ozone.

By your calculation, a 30W ozone generator can produce up to 2.11e-4 mol/s which means 0.01g/s or 10,000ug/s (1 mol has 48g) - That is 10 thousand times more than an average storm can produce!

Now, giving credit to this observation, I am still looking for measurable effects of ozone on ICEs' efficiency.

Regards.

You're such a patent smasher, PWSlack...

It is a wonder and a matter of such joy to be so well appreciated. Thank you.

I really hope my joke didn't offend you. If it did, I'm sorry about that.

Regards.

None taken, so don't apologise.

An intersting deveropment, linked elsewhere on CR4, is the 6-stroke infernal combustion engine, where the suck/squeeze/bang/blow of the Otto Cycle is supplemented by spray/chuff. On the spray stroke, part of the exhaust gases are recompressed, and water is sprayed into the combustion chamber, which turns to superheated steam. On the chuff stroke, the steam expands and then exits down the exhaust pipe, having simultaneously increased the fuel efficiency of the engine and also cooled it. Advantages claimed are lower fuel consumption for the same output and a lower investment in cooling equipment. For every lite of fuel, a lite of water is also needed, necessitating two tanks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Stroke_Engine_%28Trivandru%29 gives more details.

Good, innit?

Whether it would work in the Shetland Islands or northern Saskatchewan in the depths of winter is another story...

Whether it would work in the Shetland Islands or northern Saskatchewan in the depths of winter is another story...

All that's needed is two bottles of Vodka. One for the water tank, one for the driver.

OK!

Yes, I knew about the six stroke engine but I'm more interested in not modifying at all an ICE, just add an accessory that can be adapted at new and used ones as well. I stick with air intake because other developments like ICE modifications (fuel injection, multi-spark ignition, modified pistons and chambers a.s.o.) or tail-pipe gadgets (catalysts, heat exchangers, etc.) are done. The idea is to try acceptable incremental solutions for cutting pollution and raising efficiency.

I invented a simple and scalable ozone generator and I wonder if this can be a good application for it. I think the best way to test the hypothesis that ozone is increasing ICEs' efficiency is to put an ozone generator at the air intake of a genset and run it on a constant resistive load, at constant speed, up to draining the tank compared with the same layout without powering the ozone generator and time it. If the genset delivers 5KW for 4 hours without ozone and 5KW for 4 hours and 20 minutes with ozone for which production a 50W is needed, than we have something there. It means that it takes 1% of the output power to extend running time by 8% which overall means 6.4% more output energy.

I didn't do the test, all is just prudent guessing based on the credit I give to the first mentioned patents claims. Until I'll have the money to perform this test, I'm searching for white papers or other literature on the subject. Unfortunately, there is not much...

Thanks for all your inputs.

I haven't had time to really look for much support for ozone conversion/injection, etc. However, I know that a 15 HP diesel takes in about cubic meter of air per minute. A 430 Watt ozone generator (commercially available) puts out about .5g of ozone per minute. Given that air is about 1.2 kg per cubic meter, the concentration produced by the 430 watt generator would have little effect, I'd think. (Granted, some of the 430 watts runs the fan which would not be necessary in the intake stream... but putting gizmos in the intake stream causes losses too.) If we strung together 26 of these generators, we could generate 13 grams per minute, still a very small percentage of the 250 grams of O2 in a cubic meter of air, and we would consume all 15 of the engine's hp in the process.

Nevertheless, there are apparently people working on injecting ozone for soot reduction in diesels. And I suppose that if an engine were supplied with a great deal of ozone (replacing, let's say, half of the oxygen) then the charge would be significantly denser. So volumetric efficiency would improve, and the fuel injection rate could be increased. (The effect would be somewhat like the effect of nitrous oxide injection.) Thus, more power could be produced, if one did not have to subtract the energy used in creating the O3. Given some planning, you could melt holes in pistons, I suppose.

As the molecular weight of O₃ is 1.5 x O₂, the density is higher, so for a given intake pressure can get more fuel + oxidant into the cylinders, somewhat analogous to supercharging. But as the O₂ content of air is ~ 21 % v/v, and only a small fraction is likely to be converted to O₃ (in water treatment, ozonators using air (as opposed to pure oxygen) convert only ~ 10%, if I remember right, it's a while since I worked with them. And on a comparable air flow basis, you wouldn't get one under a car bonnet). So in practice I'd expect the effect to be totally negligible.

Codey

It might be helpful to look here:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=engine+%22ozone-injection%22&btnG=Search&hl=en&lr=

r/

Sam H.

Thank you Sam.

I googled myself before asking for any independent information source. Unfortunately, there is no relevant data there and apparently nobody here has working knowledge of the subject.

Still digging...

Regards,

Michael

I would not suggest 'holding your breath' for this to prove energy efficient.

Pure and simple thermodynamics are the arbitter of engine efficiency. Unless you can drastically lower the temperature of the heat sink to which heat must be vented, not much chance of improving engine efficiency.

The maximum operable combusion temperature limits are mechanical, and modern engines are there. Much more costly temperature management technologies ARE possible (like in jet engine combusters and expanders) but that is not economicaly practical for ICE's.

Thermodynamics dictates that burning a fuel at (35% efficiency?) to generate shaft work, converting that to electricity (95 %), and then generating O3 at (75%?) efficiency, and supplementing the intake air with the ozone HAS to be an energy loser. There simply is not much unburned fuel left in the exhaust of new technology gasoline engines. As it is, the engine exhaust has to be kept a little 'rich' to facilitate NOx control and oxidation catalyst cleans up the CO and unburned HC's exiting the combustion chamber. If one operated the engine for min fuel consumption, NOx goes way up!, which would require much more costly emissions control devices--similar to what is going on new diesel engines--ammonia injection and catalytic reduction of NOx.

Keith: thank you for your input.

Could you explain why a jet engine is much more efficient when flying at 11,000 meters than at lower altitudes? In fact, jets are consuming a lot of ozone up there in but nobody cares for commercial reasons. Who can stop the aviation industry for such a "detail"? CFCs are not the only culprits in ozone depletion.

Regards,

Michael

Could you explain why a jet engine is much more efficient when flying at 11,000 meters than at lower altitudes?

Answer:

Ok, I'll explain to you::::::::: But you better read it all!

Answer

where there is more pressure there is more resistance to the motion on an object.The atmospheric pressure decreases with hight-more on surface and less and lesser the higher one goes,thus the jets consumes lesser energy on higher level than lower and at period of take-off,simply because there is less air pressure or resistance of motion above.

Answer

Jets travel faster because of less atmospheric friction upon the aircraft. The engines are more efficient because of the colder air. The engines work by heating the air and it then it expands and exits the engine. When the air is colder (it easily gets -40 degrees up there) and the fuel air mixture is burned, the air expands alot more than if warm air was entering the engine. On a warm day a jet will not perform nearly as well as on a cold day.

Answer

Perhaps more to the point of the question would be to explain that the chemical energy in the fuel is a function of the mass of the fuel. Since a gallon of fuel expands or contracts with temperature, a gallon of cold fuel contains more energy than a gallon of warm fuel. As already pointed out, the temperature gets colder the higher you go (up to the tropopause, that is) and consequently, more thrust is derived from each pound of fuel which translates to greater fuel efficiency.

Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_do_jets_burn_less_fuel_the_higher_they_fly#ixzz21VRWq1Mp

This has nothing to do with Ozone gas Mr. inventor? hottech

As well I'd like to echoe, even though someone was ignored in here, that the effect is "negligible".. This means that the effects are so small they could very well be ignored themselves! Or in other words the amount of current (amps) required to generate the ozone (btw) I've seen some sold online, will be too much for the output G/Hr.. What you mentioned earlier about 48G, something like that, was really more accurately reflecting the per hour, output and NOTHING near 20-30watts. I've seen them online at 2amp for 3G/hr. so 20AMP for 30G/hr.. This is a lot of power for only 30 grams of ozone per hour! Have you lost your mind!? This is useless and no offense if you take a lot of belief in this. Facts are facts.

Regards.

Come see my channel, there's better stuff than this ozone intake stuff.

www.youtube.com/luc59457