Thanks for Mr. Yunick's reference. It seems like a low-pressure turbo with preheating of fuel, which should increase efficiency. How he avoided pre-ignition is a mistery.
After googlin' a while I find an explanation for the news. What I didn't understand of FIA's proposal in the beginning was the fundament.
Let me put it this way: the efficiency range of engines goes from 25% in a car engine (75% of energy is waste heat) to 60% for a gas turbine with combined cycle (you only "waste" 40 percent of the fuel). It seems awfully hard to improve efficiency by 35% putting gadgets on petrol engines. Why not propose directly gas turbines, specially when more countries are falling back to natural gas? Well, I suppose I can answer myself that gas turbines are not good for racing and are pretty expensive because of the high rotational speed.
However, perhaps, there is another logic behind the proposal:
try to build a petrol engine that uses the same principles of a combined cycle engine.
Actually, most thermodynamic cycles get around 30% of the latent fuel heat. The gas turbine by itself has no magic thermodynamic properties: simply, at electric generators driven by gas turbines, the excess heat is so evident
and localized that this was used to drive a steam turbine "in parallel" to produce more electricity.
You use two cycles to extract double the energy from fuel.
Examples of combined cycles include the
Brayton cycle or constant-pressure cycle, that originally used two cilynders, one for compression and another for expansion, or the
Rankine cycle, like the one used in steam generators/condensers in nuclear plants. We had a thread on six-stroke engines, which uses a combined cycle.
The most sophisticated generators can reach 85% eficiency, which is triple the efficiency of the petrol engine. They are expensive in capital costs and few have been constructed. Here you have an example:
Coal Gasification and Combined Cycle
You crush the coal and extract oxygen from air to the left, gassify it in the orange thingy in the middle, extract the ashes and sulphur in the brown boxes and the CO2 in the green ones, pass it through a gas turbine and use the excess heat to drive a steam turbine in the blue and red boxes.
IF every electric generator in the world used this technology AND the CO2 scrubbers in the exhausts could work (in the "non-defined" acid chemical plant connected to the yellow box to the right), then I guess we could end switching paradoxically to electric-driven cars powered by these kind of coal plants to avoid CO2 contamination.
So, what I see in FIA/GPMA's proposal is a steam engine driven by the petrol engine.
Anyway, cars use petrol engines and they are not going to disappear tomorrow. At Autoblog there is
an article on the BMW (not precissely GPMA
) initiative. It is essentially what the news reported by Principessa say: a steam generator at the end of the exhaust pipe (I wonder why there and lose the heat radiated by the pipe), as shown in the link:
The device has a small steam turbine that drives the crankshaft through a belt. It seems an effort to promote another "gas saver". The problem, like with all gas savers, is the capital cost, as BMW has made all efforts to be able to retrofit the current fleet (perhaps this explains the steam generator at the end of the pipe).
Putting this in F1 is a publicity stunt, if you ask me.
