[Dimman]

Originally Posted by serialk11r

lol did you start reading from my post 2 pages back or so?



Ah I see. So the wikipedia article on turbine is pretty helpful imo, in illustrating reaction vs. impulse turbine. If you have gas going at high velocity in a straight line and it hits the turbine, it gets deflected and it transfers momentum to the turbine. An axial turbine makes it easier to add stages to more effectively recover additional energy since you just stick a new row of blades behind it, whereas with a radial turbine you'd need a pipe that bends around and channels the flow into the second turbine, which would cause the gas to lose some energy most likely, which is perhaps why they'd be thinking of doing that.

If this shows up in F1 I will be SUPER excited. However in the ultimate quest for fuel efficiency, I am not sure how useful this is vs. late intake valve closure + larger displacement, which is much cheaper to do and theoretically more efficient, although the larger displacement has additional losses associated with it. One thing that will change for sure though is that spectators won't be blasted by the scream of engines that just release all the pressure straight into the air, which might be a disappointment to some people lol.

I wonder how much power they can recover though, racing engines have pretty high compression ratio...on old aircraft they were making ridiculous amounts like 500hp on a 1400hp engine since they had pathetic compression ratios like 6:1. Or wait I think the wikipedia example was a diesel...anyways pretty low compression ratios. This can theoretically bring the efficiency of the engine well past 40%, but that needs to counteract the drop in displacement...you can only boost so much.

The article mentions something like 7.3% power gain over same mass fuel flow in simulations which worked out to an increase of thermal efficiency to 39% from 36.95%.

Quote from article regarding F1 application:

The exact specification of the new engines is yet to be revealed but it will be a 1.6 litre turbocompound V6, and they will likely appear in 2014.