Hybrid Ship Pulse Detonation Turbine to DC Electrics

[SeaBirdShip]

Hello All,

I recently purchased a 177' all steel ship here in sunny San Diego she has an amazing history which you can read about at www.seabirdadventure.com the plan is to convert her to a exploration and research ship for environmental issues.

Now to where you all can help, as I was thinking about the 600-700 gallons per day she uses it struck me that she creates 100's of gallons of waste oil and her emissions are that of three large diesel engines. So

What if I removed her three mains and replace them with 2x600hp and 1x500hp DC electric motors on direct drive and figured out a way to burn waste oil to create electricity.

The method I am using and currently building a 200HP prototype by using a combination of 3 technologies;

1) Pyrocatalytic Method “pyrocatalytic converter”
2) Pulse Detonation “pulse combustion”
3) Tesla turbine

and I am calling this a The Pulse Combustion Turbine.

Any one that would like to jump into this discussion please do, there are many engineering problems to work through and I need your help.

Thanks, SeaBird Ship

[StianM]

You could buy a westfalia combi master seperation system to make shure the waste oil you burn is off good qualety and burn it in a diesel engine.

If the oil is clean and preheated it should not be a problem. Or buy a sterling engine.

[SeaBirdShip]

Stian,

Thank you, the problem with burning anything in a diesel is the pollution we are trying to accomplish two parts one to burn waste oil the second to have little to no emissions.

I will definitely check out the westfalia separator though, thank you.

SeaBird

[StianM]

If your burn waste oil it will polute annyway regardless to how you do it.

The main problem with diesel engines is the high preshure that create NOx.

This can be reduced by biger chargeair cooler, water injection, alcohol mix in the fuel up to 25% or a combination off two or all three. Water injection and alcohol mix will also help reducing the CO2.

[SeaBirdShip]

Stian,

Thank you for your comments, however the pulse detonation uses a detonation process to burn the fuel not deflagration there by burning clse to 97% of the fuel during detonation and eliminating most of the bad emmisions.

SeaBird

[Kay9]

Im confused.
If you remove the 3 main diesel engines, where are you getting waste oil????


If this is the case then I would recommend sails.

[SeaBirdShip]

Hello Kay9,

Well, there is about 800 million gallons of waste oil created in the US alone of which 200 million is not even accounted for.

Here's the 1st focus, all of the fishing fleets, rec. boats, pretty much anything with a motor today creates waste oil -- all of this must be collected and if I was to get the waste oil I have collected it would cost me about $16 per gallon so I will be able to provide a low cost or free method for all those fishing boats to get rid of there waste oil.

Hope that helps, Sea Bird

PS there will be an entire article on this on the web site www.seabirdadventure.com in the next two weeks.

[Kay9]

it would cost me about $16 per gallon so I will be able to provide a low cost or free method for all those fishing boats to get rid of there waste oil.


Im not triing to be a jerk here. But Im hopeing that $16 per gallon is a typo, as that is about $14 a gal higher then filtered diesel. I do realize that there is a LOT of waste oil, however there is a HUGE diffrence between waste crude oil and waste hydrolic oil. I know nothing about your engine so I would be curious on how your engine handles the diffrence in viscosity (sp?) and flammability. Finally you might find it very hard to find waste oil world wide. Here in the US we collect and refine a lot of our waste oil but a lot of other parts of the world simply throw it out or use it for heating.

Again Im not trying to be a jerk, but a new source of power requires more then simply saying "hey lets burn waste oil" before I can take it very seriously.

[StianM]

I was going to check more on that pulse turine, but have ben too lazy to do so.

I still belive a diesel engine is the one producing the highest hp compared to emisions.

You can reduce emisions futer 20% or something with modifications and alcohol mix in the fuel, intercooler, higher charge air preshure, water injection and so on and so on.

[yipster]

bold thinking great initiative but what engine? the good but almost forgotten Brayton or nasa tech?
anyway, it think its a hot idea, litteraly

[SeaBirdShip]

Hello Kay9,

No unfortunately the $16.00 is no a typo, the cheapest I can get large amounts 500+ gallons removed for is $12.00 per gallon, the reason I'm told is that waste oil is considered to be a hazardous waste material and must be disposed of in a proper govt. manner, sigh.

The reason for waste oil is simple, waste oil is one of the easiest fuels for a large boat to acquire in a harbor and second if this system will burn waste oil cleanly then it will have no problem burning any of the natural oils i.e. soy, peanut, etc...

SeaBird

[SeaBirdShip]

Hello StainM,

Due to the deflagration of the diesel fuel diesel engines burn cleaner then gas engines but much worse then pulse detonation where the fuel oil is detonated and virtually all the by-products are consumed in the detonation process.

SeaBird

[StianM]

Originally Posted by SeaBirdShip

Hello StainM,

Due to the deflagration of the diesel fuel diesel engines burn cleaner then gas engines but much worse then pulse detonation where the fuel oil is detonated and virtually all the by-products are consumed in the detonation process.

SeaBird

bi products from combustion is NOx, CO.

They can't be consumed.

NOx can be lovered by lovering the combustion temperature and preshure.

Carbon mooxsyed, trioksyde and dioksyde will also be there, but in variable amound regarding engines running conditions and the abiltey to burn clean.

I would like to see some datta sheet on this turbine and I belive it's a bas sulution to annything.

[SeaBirdShip]

StianM

In order to obtain the best efficiencies from fuel to shaft horsepower we have to look at the entire process -- from fuel in its unburned, raw state, through the transforming of gas kinetic energy into mechanical power, and finally, the exit of hot gas from the machine and the recovery or loss of energy in the entire system.

First of all we have to decide on the combustion mechanism -- do we want a continuous burn or pulse burn? For the Tesla Turbine we settled on pulse burn as a more efficient mechanism for reaching high velocity gas states with the lowest heat loss. A pulse burn mechanism is similar to the constant volume combustion model of the piston engine, rather than the constant pressure system of conventional turbines. While conventional turbines are higher than piston engines in horsepower per pound of engine, they are less efficient (in most applications) in terms of fuel efficiencies.

Gasoline piston engines, as they are designed today, do not work well with mineral spirits, fuel oil, or even pure alcohol. Petroleum distillates detonate too easily in today's engines, resulting in rapid destruction of the engine. Slowing down the burn to avoid detonation results in poor fuel economy (as much as 40% of the fuel in your tank is simply blown out the exhaust port), which is why catalytic converters are mandated -- to burn the wasted fuel.

This brings us to the next point. To utilize all of the energy in fuel we have to pre-process the fuel into a near 100% burnable state. Liquids do not burn -- only vapor or gas phase fuels burn! While carburetors and fuel injectors work to convert liquid fuels to vapor state, the fuel still acts as a quasi-liquid even in a hot cylinder.

Now some of you may ask why we are concerned with ultra-clean combustion. Well, there are several good reasons. First of all, our main goal in working with boundary layer turbines is to replace the 100-year old I. C. piston gas and diesel engines with a new engine that delivers more power with less pollution, and a lower cost to produce & maintain.

Traditional pulse combustors use natural tube length frequencies to compress and detonate combustible mixtures. Our methods use valving, low pressure air compression, and spark timing to shape the "envelope of detonation", allowing us to create reliable pulse burn at much lower frequencies per tube length. The results, compared to continuous burn, are: more of the potential energy of the combustible mixture is transformed into kinetic gas energy, less into useless heat -- which transforms into higher overall engine efficiencies and lower NOx production.

For applications where lowest possible emissions from fossil fuels must be realized, our second approach using our ultra-clean burner technology is the best choice. As mentioned earlier, our experiments with fuel processing for gas and diesel piston engines laid the ground work for our ultra-clean burner.

Now a lot of people may say that they can get ultra-clean burn from natural gas or propane -- that's true. What we are talking about is getting ultra-clean burn from a mixture of crankcase oil and industrial solvents -- normally waste products from automotive & manufacturing industries. Some of you may have heard about these waste oil burners people are buying to burn-off waste oils in their shops. Claims of extremely clean burn are common -- but look at the color of the flame.

Hydrogen burns with a yellow flame, carbon burns with a blue flame. If you turn on your gas stove and view the flame, you will see regions of colors -- blue near the burner head, yellow near the flame tips, white between. A typical waste oil burner that produces a yellow flame is only burning the hydrogen content of the fuel. Our burner flames are identical to a gas stove flame -- complete combustion of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen -- from heavy waste oils!

This information is from our partner research group on this project.

[yipster]

ambitieus plan but really cant spy enough from the picture
have seen drawings of PDE turbines and here a RC working model

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsejet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_detonation_engine
http://www.pulse-jets.com/
hello Bruce Simpson ?