The Quasiturbine Engine thread

[phantom power]

Somebody brought this engine design up as a tangent in another thread. I was curious to see what people think. I know we've got some engine guys out there.

The inventors claim it can easily be adapted to run on hydraulic power, steam power, and can be run "inverted" as an efficient fluid pump as well.



http://auto.howstuffworks.com/quasiturbine.htm

Here's the inventor's site:
http://www.quasiturbine.com/

[wli]

1. more fuel-efficient engine design...

Sounds like something people should run with, and aggressively try to get deployed (after verifying cars can be run properly off them).

[Old and In the Way]

2. Are those segmented flywheels?

Is this anything like the Wankel Engine? Looks like a pretty efficeint design, although I'm clueless about how it works..

[Canuckistanian]

7. Read about it on the website. It's fairly easy to understand.

It gives a nice history lesson about engines, including diesel, gas and wankel (rotary) engines.

[Massacure]

11. It is essentially a Wankel Engine, but with four sides rather than three.

Read the How Stuff Works article. They have good primers about the Wankel and the Quasiturbine.

[phantom power]

15. They're both inferior to my new five-sided design!

[Maple]

3. An idea behind it's time

[dcfirefighter]

4. Not exactly

IC and steam engines will be around for quite some time, an improvement in the field could mean greater efficiency all around.

IMO, the nicest thing about it is the multi-fuel nature of it.

I don't think it will make much of a pump, though - most fluid pumps are centrifugal, and can take advantage of incoming head pressure. Positive displacement pumps have their application, but I don't think that they represent a significant portion of our energy demands, and they typically tend to be used in applications with high wear, such as concrete pumping. I don't think the quasiturbine pump would lend itself to pumping gritty fluids, as there is no wear seal on the faces of the rotor or the casing.

[Maple]

6. You wish

[dcfirefighter]

8. Ooh, your logical and eloquent argument has won me over n/t

[Maple]

9. LOL that's because

it ain't the 1950s anymore.

Next we'll be hearing about the 'new and improved' Stanley Steamer. :rofl:

[dcfirefighter]

10. It'll run on oil, diesel, gasoline, alcohol, methane, hydrogen

or just about any other fluid that will burn.

[htuttle]

21. Hey, don't laugh at the Steamers!

They could drive you to work on kitchen drippings, the contents of an oil lamp and two bottles of vodka. One set the land speed record at 121 mph in 1906.

Unfortunately, they took 20 minutes to warm up in the morning. And sometimes the boilers blew (but not often). The biggest problem with the Steamers was the Stanley brothers -- honest, but really terrible businessmen.

Switch to a modern (and safer) flash boiler, make it a turbine/EV hybrid -- there's your car of the future. Pour any fuel(s) that will burn into an external combustion engine like that, and you can drive away. Hook up a solid fuel feeder, and you could drive on your own combustable garbage.

Electric cars were invented back around 1840. Nobody is laughing at those anymore. Given that our petro-powered 'free ride' is almost over, I think plenty of old ideas deserve a second look.

[phantom power]

13. Can you explain your opinion?

[Canuckistanian]

5. Impressive. Is anyone working on this?

Efficiency is the key here. It seems like a great leap, efiiciency-wise.

But what troubles me are those wheels. Creating precision wheels that have operate under near-constant cycles of heating cooling and great force would be daunting.

I always wondered about the rotary engine, it seemed ideal at the time. I had no idea it was INefficient by burning fuel incompletely.

[skids]

12. There's also a stirling variant.

...which is actually less complex (less parts) than the injection chamber variant.

The main problem I see with it are those invisible front and back plates you don't see in the diagram. That's a sliding surface that has to keep a tight seal and remain relatively frictionless.

I understand they have working models though, so if they can get it to do anything unique, more power to them.

[phantom power]

14. Look at it this way:

good old fashioned pistons have maintained the same kind of "sliding" seal for decades, under pretty much the same conditions of intense heat, pressure, etc.

[skids]

16. Sortof...

...good old-fashioned pistons have a much more regular shape and maximize volume to sliding-surface ratio.

[htuttle]

17. The performance characteristics sound similar to the Tesla turbine design

It could be used as both a pump and a turbine, and could use many different fluids/gases to turn it. However, Tesla's design was a lot simpler. It uses the boundary effect to spin the disks:

http://www.animatedsoftware.com/pumpglos/teslapum.htm

[dcfirefighter]

18. Originally used at the Niagra Falls

generating station, currently (i think) used as a concrete pump.

I don't think that it ever got off the ground as an internal combustion engine (It worked, but eventually the disks got hot and deformed - spinning out thinner and wider until jamming against the outer case). I wonder if new materials science could handle it. Apparently it's a fairly popular home machine shop project.

http://my.execpc.com/~teba/main.html

[htuttle]

19. I've been planning to build a small steam-driven one

I've been casually researching them for a few months. From what I can gather, they might work better in a smaller scale than the monster they tried to use at Niagra Falls.

It's a very easy design to build. Just wish I had a machine shop at home...

[dcfirefighter]

20. Just wish I had a machine shop at home...

You and me both. Actually, i just wish I had a shop of any sort. Garages are rare in my neighborhood. I had thought the Niagra falls version worked successfully for years, until replaced by a larger capacity conventional water turbine.