Exhaust manifold Steam boiler?
 

This is off the cuff but hear me out.

My car has a turbocharger so it has a thick, heavy cast steel manifold, it gets ridiculously hot, I am thinking I could weld on a small, slim tank and fill it with water, this water would obviously boil and produce high pressure steam, I would then plumb this into the EGR system so this super heated steam goes into the intake manifold via specific Psi realise valve.


You must be thinking why would I put steam into the intake, I am asking myself that very same thing, well a HHO guy claimed it was the gas or steam from the HHO that turned into super heated steam in the chamber and produced more torque, part steam engine basically:D

That is the basic outline, what do you thing?

According to this article it looks like honda is looking at this same kind of thing. The trick would be to make it small and effective enough to compensate the extra weight.

A Tesla turbine might be the right way to go for a shade tree version of something like the Honda/BMW gadget.. If you could get enough energy to power the AC and accessories such a gadget might be a worthwhile bolt-on mod that some forward looking entrepreneur could make a buck on..

https://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/dept/Cou...essTurbine.htm

https://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/dept/Cou...a/turbine1.gif

Didn't some kids make a Tesla Turbine using a hard drive platter?

I believe all those systems would work, if we could convert some of the the 70% or 80% percentage of the heat loss in the exhaust system I would be pleased.

I don't want to use the steam to turn an alternator, I want to pump it back into the engine, a small amount of course but would this help FE?

Yep, people have made Tesla turbines from HD platters..

As for steam going into the intake manifold, I put a water injection unit made by either Holley or Edelbrock (I don't recall which) on a 327/350 hp Vette engine once (11.5:1 compression) to help control detonation at full throttle.. This was back sometime in the fairly early 70's..

I suspect that steam into the intake manifold might help efficiency if you were to combine it with a raised compression ratio.. Since you already have a turbo your compression ratio is probably not all that high and raising it would help efficiency, but with today's gas you couldn't do that without some means of suppressing detonation.. Steam might just do the job.

You could use the boost pressure from the turbo to control the water flow to the exhaust manifold/heater.. When there is no boost you wouldn't need the steam and as more boost comes on you get more steam generation pushed into the intake.. Just pressurize your water reservoir with boost pressure when the turbo is making boost..

A check valve would keep from sucking liquid water back into the intake under high vacuum operations..

Didn't some one come up with injecting water on the nonexplosive down stroke after purging the gases from the cylinder to create steam to make power? I know that on my twin turbo set up on my GT that i can inject water, methane or nitrous as these cool down the heat to make more power, they work better on cool days that hot. Actually make denser air for more power.

I think we got off track here at the start. H-H-O when burned, releases heat and results in or combines to form H20. At the temperatures in the burning chamber the H20 would be a pressurized (by the heat generated) gas, steam if you will. That is where the claim from producing more mechanical energy comes from.

So you have the combining of cold gasses H-H and O creating a hot expanding gas of combined H20.

Creating steam before combustion is not necessarily creating additional cylinder pressure. There would be an incremental pressure increase from heating a low temp steam to a higher temp steam, but the energy used to heat the steam would be taken from the other gasses in the combustion chamber. As water vapor probably has a higher specific heat than the other gasses, absorbing more heat energy per volume than the other gasses the overall effect would be a smaller increase in cylinder pressure than without the water vapor.

This is the reason water mist injection is used to lower combustion temperatures preventing ping in high compression or forced induction engines. The water injection alone does not produce more power, it must be used with higher compression or increased forced induction.

The HHO guy is right, but this application isn't for the gain that is expected.

you can directly inject water since your turbo produces enough heat to turn it into steam. BUt its mostly for high compression as already stated.

Yeah, and if you really, really wanted to tinker, experiment with injecting the gas right before the turbo to use it to help atomize the mixture, a la Smokey Yunick. Here, an intercooler is not your friend, it would condense and precipitate the fuel out of the fuel/air mix.

But that's a whole 'nother thread.

How do we actually calculate the amount of heat available from the exhaust side?

Lets say we have a 200Hp engine, does this mean we have just wasted 800Hp as heat from the exhaust heat?

How hard can it be to convert that heat back into something kinetic usable?