You might be curious why almost every field of technology has advanced so rapidly through the XX century, but internal combustion engines still preserved very low efficiency level hardly exceeding 20%?

The answer to this question might surprise all, but would shock researchers that had tried almost everything to improve the efficiency. Unfortunately everything these guys have tried is wrong, because the entire field of the research is on a wrong track. This is wrong direction, so no matter what effort, it would not yield results.

It seems, that the trend of engine research is rather to preserve faulty engine than oil resources, as it totally concentrates on preventing fast release of energy by detonating fuels. The trend is described in document of DOE, that present future strategies of research, that brags about stratification of fuel, slow combustion, multiple fuel injections etc., which could not improve the efficiency, because those suppress power available from fuel.

Power available from fuel is defined as energy released in time - and that indicates, that only speeding up energy releases from fuel can improve the energy conversion, which is the most ignored principle of nature by developers of IC engines.

The problem is, that Otto and Diesel created engines that are simple and work well, so nobody wants to change something proved to be very simple and functioning.

The author, when challenged to improve the efficiency of engines, could not believed that these are so inefficient devices, and thought "It should be a piece of cake to drive the efficiency of engine above 90 %" and he has succeeded, why those at Universities backed with multi-million dollars instrumentations and unlimited finances exceeding billions of dollars failed?

The answer to this question is simple: the author knew nothing about existing engines, but suspected that some causes of the inefficiency must be buried in the design itself - and as a physicist he concentrated rather on the processes and entirety of engine, than on details that cannot be cause of 80 % energy losses in engine.

Interestingly the author could not find a single publication on causes of the inefficiency, which should be the main task of everybody who wants to improve engines. How could you eliminate something that you have no idea what it is?

The major cause of the inefficiency in every existing engine is incomplete expansion of exhausts, because the exhausts when expanding produces work and cools at the same time. Indeed incomplete expansion causes incomplete conversion of energy released from fuel into useful work, so the rest of not converted heat just accumulates in internal parts, so it must be disposed, either wise the engine malts down. Therefore every existing engine is rigorously cooled and the cooling complicates design and affects reliability.

Apart from that, there are many other causes of inefficiency spotted by the author, who managed to eliminate all the causes when developing a concept of a gun-engine, the efficiency of which is close to that of ideal engine as only always existing friction wastes energy in the novel design.

Operation of gun-engine is different as it involves combining operation of a gun with operation of engine. The purpose of gun is to allow detonations of vaporized or gaseous fuels to speed up energy releases from fuel up to 1000 times.

You might ask what for? What is wrong with slow combustion of fuel mist or gradual addition of heat into cylinder?

The answer to this questions provides a devastating blow to the over century long history of direction of engine research as, it just proves the direction is very wrong.

The author advice is to introduce a law that would prohibit use of XIX century engines, because the newly invented gun-engine with efficiency that quadruples that of traditional engines and zero toxic emissions is ready for mass production, but its existence is ignored by the big three car producers that are about to go bank rapt.

Why should these be supported with taxpayer money? They had a chance to produce gun-engine powering a transmission free vehicle with mileage exceeding 450 mpg, as the inventor has approached all the big three as early as in 1999.

Why such a drastic approach?

We cannot afford any longer wastes of oil resources or the environmental changes inflicted by XIX century technology of combustion engines, because solution to problems inflicting our environment is ready for mass production!.

Kazimierz Holubowicz (December 2008)

Main page