Turbine powered without exhaust

[racemybuick]

This turbine you are looking to creat seems all like a propane ignited boiler. A mini boiler. If you plan on thinking this through, you must realize you are going to be adding substantial weight to your car. If you plan on running a min of 4 gal of water, you must figure about 10 lbs per gal of water. 40 lbs of water are under the hood.
You must secondly consider where your evaporator tank will be kept, and your condensate tank. You will also probably need some form of condensate pump, because the steam will have to reduced back to water before re-entering the process. This could mean a trunk mounted condensate tank, with a pump somewhere in between. Now you have steam lines through the car or under the car, you are going to need steam traps to keep steam from re-entering the turbine, and you are going to need some form of safety like a black flow preventer to keep everything at your pressure requirements, without blowing the hood sky high. It seems you are going to be stripping a car to the frame basically, to compensate for just the weight gain. I figure, the propane will be trunk mounted, the condensate will be int he rear also, and you can run lines under the car on both sides, however, that steam is going to be mighty hot, and 1/4 inch lines are not going to make the cut. SO your plumbing skills are going to be put to the test finding a ligher pipe to run uner the car, without melting, and without melting your floor boards.
I love this idea, and I think it is fantastic that a car could have a steam powered, propane injected turbing forcing 40 lbs of air or (1200 CFM sumthin like that) into your intake, but man, that motor is going to have to be bullit proof! And them floorboads are goning to need some beefing up to keep the heat at bay.
Awsoem idea, and good luck. Keep me posted on your findings and results!

John

 

[AnArKey]

I have no intention of reclaiming the steam. Is a far easier thing just to vent it.

The excess bulk will consist of:

water tank, 1lb, plus weight of water. Probably won't need more than 5 gallons.
water pump, 5lbs
oxygen cylinder and regulator, 30llbs
combustion chamber, 4x12" tube, 1-2lbs

not counting propane as it's already there as the primary fuel of the engine

The gains are instant push button boost at any RPM, and increased engine horsepower from lack of backpressure in exhaust (10-15%).

I imagine turbo longenivty as well, as it would sit totally idle most of the time. Probably would shut off oil flow to it when not in use, which the engine will get instead. Higher idle and cruise oil pressure.

A engineer has proposed a different way of calculating work, which is probably more accurate than my comparisons. He came up with even more optimistic figures of usage rates:

SBBlue from eng-tips.com:
A few calculations. . . . .

I'm assuming that when you talk about 60-70 lbs air/min you are working with a boost pressure of one or two atmospheres. For discussion sake, let's assume a 20 psi boost pressure, and 60 lb/min air flow. We'll also assume that the compressor efficiency is 80%

Such a setup will require 2700 BTU/min of energy to run the compressor. If we have a steam cycle engine that is working at 30% efficiency (it will probably be lower than that), the amount of thermal energy required per hour will equal about 540,000 BTU. Assuming a BTU content of fuel of 20,000 BTU per pound (it will vary), we can see that about 27 pounds of fuel will be required per hour to power the compressor. If we are using gasoline, we are looking at about four and one half gallons of gasoline per hour to run the supercharger. The water requirements will be a little less than a gallon a minute, or 60 gallons an hour.

Less than .5LBM propane, 1.5LBM oxygen, and 1GPM water? That's VERY reasonable.

Also consider I can run twin turbos, and have two combustion chambers. I can have two stage boost, one or two turbos. One turbo also (TO4E, 50 trim), would allow me to boost to 20psi as little as 2000RPM and not surge. Activate the second turbo at 4000RPM as the first starts to run out of breath.