Straying slightly on this one.
Re: A better diesel engine
But it doesn't really matter.
I will just bring you into the real world, without piddling on your shoes too much.
If you can think of an idea that gives just 0.01% efficiency increase, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone has already thought of it and slapped a patent on it. Awaiting the day someone comes along with some similar idea and starts to market it.
Then you get a letter from some slimy corporate lawyer stating that if you don't pay the patent holder X squillion bucks, they will drag you thru every court in the land and make sure you end end up hanging yourself thru frustration.
Unless you aim for improving very modern technology, you can almost guarantee anything to do with old technology has already been thought of and covered.
You maybe hoped that by throwing ideas around, you would come up with an easy solution. It doesn't work like that in most cases. Homework is the key to anything like this, hours upon hours of frustrating research, followed by heartache when you find something the same or very similar has been done before. If you do find a small niche, you have got to keep your mouth shut and share it with no-one, not even the dog. Only releasing the results when you have it proved and covered by the legalities of a patent. Even then, unless you have squillions in cash to fight legal battles, you can find your ideas stolen and into production before you can even get someone interested in your design. By the time the robbers have been tracked down, they have made their bucks and disappeared into the night.
I worked for a small American company for a few very unhappy years, and as usual, they had you covered under contract, that any ideas you came up with while working in their factory, became their property. I had to catalogue everything I did to the machinery in there, and the boss would check my workbook each weekend. I am sure he patented a lot of the ideas I had come up with to get his machinery running more efficiently. His office wall was covered in metal plaques, engraved with all sorts of patented ideas. If I had took the time to look closely, I am sure a lot of them would have been mine, as the wall started to fill up with each passing month.
It is great having discussions of this type on here, but you take the time to reflect, unless you are the one in a billion, you just will not be able to realise your dreams of ever getting anything truly inventive into the marketplace.
Just resign yourself to helping out a few modellers who take the time to read your ramblings.
I made that decision a few years ago, and it gives me great enjoyment and satisfaction seeing one of my ideas being used. When I see someone post, 'I pinched this idea from a chap called Bogs', you know you have been recognised as someone who has helped others along their way.
Bogs
I think I have three main points here - both of which may seem critical, but are not intended to be personal in any way. They are just my views
First - and thank you to all who posted in a thread triggered by a rant of mine a few weeks ago - the original post was about MODEL sized diesel engines - for planes and boats. The reason being that they have the potential to be hugely useful, and if a good design - or even just a LARGER design - was available - a lot of new people would enter the hobby just to be able to skill up enough to build one.
Somewhere there is - either on paper or in someones head - a design for a good 15cc or 22cc diesel engine. were the general R/C modelling public aware of this there would be a lot of clamour to go and build it.
A MODEL diesel engine is a very different beast to a diesel engine in a car or train - especially if it's a "home brew". It doesn't have to last forever, just for 20 minutes at a time. It doesn't especially matter if it needs completely stripping down after every use, as long as there is some level of benefit to be had from a better design. It doesn't have to be a huge lump of cast iron, as the volume under compression is far smaller. It doesn't have to be in the order of billions to research - it's enough to have a play with when your bored in the workshop. Etc etc etc. A model diesel engine runs under an almost totally different set of "rules" as a full sized engine in a car, but they seem to be designed with exactly the same mind set. So my question was "Could this not be done differently..." becuase the rules DO seem to be different.
Second - the issue of patents. If you want to give an idea to the community then there is the full recourse of CopyLEFT to use, and the full gament of open source licenses as well. You can - for no money and no real effort - "copyleft" a patent - it means it can't be used commercially without the ENTIRE commercial design also being given away free to the community - a huge disincentive to "borrow" for big business. You can declare any work Public Commons, and ANYONE can use it, but they have to attribute the work to you.
This site uses PHP as a coding language. Some of my own code is inside PHP - I added very minor pieces to the language a few years ago. ANYONE can use PHP, but no-one can claim to own it, or change it and sell it without giving their changes back to the PHP group, as they use a CopyLeft license on their work. Other lanaguges have "evolved" out of PHP, but THEY have to be free to the world as well, becuase they are built on an originally free language.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleftand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_licensesfor more information.
Lastly - the attitude of "if it was possible, someone would have already done it" drives me insane. More than anything else, it's this thinking that has destroyed the innovation culture within Britain, and will turn the country into a second world country. Why has it become unacceptable to ask "stupid" questions which sometimes hit a jackpot? Even if only 1:20 idea's is a winner and you have 40 idea's a year, your still flying by the end of year one, while buggins who is sitting back waiting for someone ELSE to have a "cunning plan" has got no-where.
Strong words I know, but my make my money from going into companies and asking "why not?" a lot until things change. My present contract is at a company where they truly believed that they had tuned they systems ( I design computer systems ) to the maximum - that if there were any other idea's left, someone would have had them.
So I start to ask "Why" a lot. "Why do we use these systems?". "Why do we sell these products?". "Why don't we throw our entire, £200m computer system away and start again" "How do we know the mathematicians we employ are actually right?" "How do we know that digital computers are the right type for us?"
One year later - a frustating year without doubt - the company has removed over £100m in cost, we employ nearly 70%
more people, have more than doubled sales, we found that the maths that we'd based 20 years of previous work on was wrong, and we're just about to start hunting out enough retired electrical engineers to see if they can build us an analouge computer. One of the absolute fundentals of our system was wrong. We were using a computer that "talked" in "1's" and "0's", when actually we needed a computer made from WWII bomb-sight technology.
I didn't do it all - not even most of it - I just made it OK to ask if there MIGHT be some cunning plan somewhere - and once people realised it was OK to ask "stupid" questions, then a revolution - and it really is a revolution - took place.
If your happy to settle for "there's nothing else left" or "Someone else will have beaten me to it" becuase it makes for an easier life, than that's OK. But I have NEVER seen any mechanism, any system, any idea, any tool or computer platform that can't get benefit from someone stepping back and saying "lets ignore the fine tuning, and look at the big picture - and be willing to ask stupid questions. Can we make this better?" It could be that the benefit is "yep - that's about as good as it can get" - which is always nice to know, but usually there is at least scope for a discussion about improvements.
I drive Circlip - Ian H to his admirers, of which I am one - demented with my "how can this be better" questions. Most of the time - maybe 19 out of ever 20 times - he has a strong, reasoned argument as to why something is the way it is, and after some grumbling I drop the question. About one time in 20 though, the answer is "erm... that's the way it's always been", and then the long e-mails happen about different idea's and possible cunning plans.
OK, so here are my "stupid questions" on an improved, R/C sized diesel engine:
1) Why does the piston head have to be smooth? What happens if foamed brass was used on the piston? Would it create a lot more turbulance, and so better mixing? Would cataylsis occur ( because it SHOULD ) - if not, why not? What about other foamed metals? What about something like wire-wool, on the piston itself? Wouldn't last long, but perhaps enough for 1 race, and it would impove ( could improve??) more complete ignition? - the glow plug on the piston, and not the top of the engine space.
2) Could a diesel version of a bourke engine be created? Would the inherant torque and "solidness" needed for a diesel engine over-come, or partly over-come - the issues with Bourke's petrol engines?
3) Is it possible to create a "model sized" injector system at an economiocal price? A mechanical one rather than a highly electric system? Or perhaps - could a bubblejet printer be canabalised to make a fully electric injector system?
4) Ford have a standing $1m prize for the person or firm who come up with a way to reliably chill air prior to the injection cycle without condensation occuring. VERY hard in a full sized car. But what about on a 20cc model engine? Perhaps it's easier? Small peltier elements are now getting into the £20 region. SMALL amounts of air are much easier to dry as well.
5) Why don't the standard Porting and Gas Flow tuning techniques which work so well on full sized engines - including diesels - seem to have any effect on model sized diesel engines? What's different? Why? Can that difference be exploited?
6) Seeing as it's already well mixed together so well, would there be any benefit in feeding back some of the exhaust, which is carrying a good amount of unburned fuel-air mixture, into the inflow?
I know this is a very long post, but let me just re-make one point:
This forum contains posts by some of the most intelligent people I have ever encountered. And each of THOSE people knows a whole raft of OTHER very clever people who do not post on this forum.
Baring the likes of Google and Xerox, very few businesses have EVER been able to assemble to capacity for new thinking and cunning plans that this forum could - could - wield when it comes to the world of small mechanical devices. So is the idea of coming up with a cunning plan that MIGHT make a small model engine slightly more efficient really so crazy?
Steve