White Diesel

tdihopeful

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Has anyone seen White Diesel? (Hydro Diesel) may be a Brand Name. This fuel is a Stabilized or on demand emulsion of H2O and Diesel fuel. This and variation of is what I am looking at using.

I have a few thoughts on why it could be an excellent fuel and at least one concern regarding its potential use in a Pump Duese engine.

In regards to using this fuel in the PD engine my fear is being that H20 is non-compressable from what I understand and with the extreme pressure of the PD's injections there could be injection damages in quick order.
 

Geordi

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All liquids are non compressible (That doesn't mean that you can't generate massive pressure loads with it however) but in all cases WATER is not combustible in an engine. I've never heard of any kind of "water emulsion" idea but since oil and water don't mix - this seems destined to cause major problems if the fuel is allowed to sit quietly for any length of time - like say while you are sleeping through the night - and the water will naturally want to find other water molecules and settle out to the bottom of the tank - right where the pickup can collect a slug of pure water as you are leaving to go to work the next morning.

This sounds like snake oil that doesn't pass the logic test.
 

philngrayce

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Nevada_TDI

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I will ask this here: water and diesel don't mix we know, but Biodiesel will absorb a small amount of water; I do not know the exact percentage. I just thought of another question: will the water separators in our fuel filters separate the water from Bio-D, or just D2?
 

philngrayce

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I don’t think they will. They work because the oil and water are separate, with the water on the bottom. Once the water is absorbed, it won’t drop to the bottom of the filter.

Iif the water really is absorbed, it may not be a problem. But I’m just guessing there. If anyone knows, please join in.
 

tbones

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As a sailor the LAST place I want an experimental fuel is in my boat! When I need my motor there are times I REALLY need it... let’s getting away from problems I can’t sail around.

I love running WVO in my vw based diesels, but I HAVE to have my boat motor start instantly to get me out of trouble...

still, I’d love to hear more on this and the why/ how’s

regards
Steve
 

NewTdi

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Sounds as a similar fuel to Propel Fuels HPR (high Performance Renewable)
 

nicklockard

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No, it's not like Propel's fuel. Propel converts esters to fully hydrogenated alkane blends. This is a stable emulsion of water and diesel fuel, and there is a mountain of papers (see Southwest Institute, etc..) to support it. I'd give it a try if I could find it.
 

jmodge

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steam probably, a pint of water makes nearly a cubic yard of steam
 

jmodge

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Water is cheap, I don’t know if the process to combine them is, or how it’s done. Going to ask my good friend Captain Combustion about this, licensed boiler mechanic and architect of my avatar
 

turbobrick240

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This idea has been around for over 20 years. Also gasoline/water emulsions. I don't see it going anywhere so close to the end of the ICE era. One major problem I'd imagine is fuel stability. Water and fuel combined gives the microbes and algae an all they can eat buffet
 

tdihopeful

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240 the control of microbe proliferation is a potentially useful point for me to consider in design/modification of a fuel system.
 

tdihopeful

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Jmodge the steam is perhaps a good presumption. It could also have to do with the hydrogen of the water molecule though from what I understand extremely high temperature is needed to break Hydrogen-Oxygen bonds. Perhaps in the presence of Carbon-Hydrogen fuel chains and under high pressure there occurs a higher ratio of cleaving of these bonds. There is one thing that I'm pretty sure contributes and that is with water in diesel emulsion not diesel in water emulsion. Increase the surface area of the diesel while providing a lean mixture water providing cooling to the lean burn.
 

Andyinchville1

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HI,

While not exactly the same , wouldn't water / water meth injection kinda be kinda sorta the same except the 2 items are introduced into the combustion chamber separately?

Admittedly, the injection would probably be larger droplets when compared to the water mixed directly into the diesel

Maybe the comparison between the two is the water in diesel is like a good fuel injection pattern VS the water / water / meth injection stream which may be likened to a dirty injector with a bad spray pattern?

I like the idea of thinking out of the box as far as the fuel tho .

Andrew

edit : actually a side thought .... rather than water / water meth injection , how about water / water meth fogging (fog being much much finer than a spray).
 

tdihopeful

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Yes that's an experiment that I have started working on. I have successfully "fogged" diesel. Though this was experimentation with the purpose of allowing diesel use in spark ignited engines. I have a while to go before having a working engine using "fogging". The primary challenge(s) have to do with metering of the fuel. Making an "on demand" un-stable water/diesel emulsion is far easier it looks like.
 

C.Powell

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Water injection is used on gasoline engines to reduce the speed of the propagation of the flame front in high performance engines
(like drag racers) to reduce detonation/preignition under heavy load. I vaguely recall from uni that in diesel engines water injection can improve the atomization of the fuel spray and improve the burn, (possibly by turning to steam?). That was a couple of decades ago though and I doubt the injection pressures were similar to those in the PD engine. Could be fun to experiment with but maybe not on ones daily driver.
 

nicklockard

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Slightly off topic, but I always wanted to put an ultrasonic transducer onto the injectors or fuel rail in the hopes that it would help improve atomization (via the rail and/or injectors acting as waveguides and transferring energy to the fuel as it exits the nozzle.) But it would take a ton of development to ensure this wouldn't crack any fuel lines.

I think this could be applied to water/fuel emulsions more easily though, maybe? Take the fuel that has departed the rail on its way to the injector, and port it over to an ultrasonic mixing chamber where you carefully meter in distilled water & surfactants, vibrate the hell out of it, then send it to the injectors--on demand emulsions.
 

rocky raccoon

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I once worked on a patrol gunboat that we converted to a high speed research ship. It had an LM1500 gas turbine engine and two cruising Diesels. We ran both engine types on JP5/JP4 jet fuel. Jet fuel is cleaner than Diesel mainly because of it's storage and transportation specifications. Unlike straight Diesel however it is hygroscopic. For that application we used a centrifuge to remove the absorbed water from the fuel. We later converted to run both on Diesel fuel instead of JP mainly because of availability. We added two in-line filters after the centrifuge to further clean the fuel.

Sucker would run 42 knots. It was actually faster on the Diesel fuel since it had a higher specific energy content than the JP.
 

tdihopeful

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Yes that's an experiment that I have started working on. I have successfully "fogged" diesel. Though this was experimentation with the purpose of allowing diesel use in spark ignited engines. I have a while to go before having a working engine using "fogging". The primary challenge(s) have to do with metering of the fuel. Making an "on demand" un-stable water/diesel emulsion is far easier it looks like.
Slightly off topic, but I always wanted to put an ultrasonic transducer onto the injectors or fuel rail in the hopes that it would help improve atomization (via the rail and/or injectors acting as waveguides and transferring energy to the fuel as it exits the nozzle.) But it would take a ton of development to ensure this wouldn't crack any fuel lines.

I think this could be applied to water/fuel emulsions more easily though, maybe? Take the fuel that has departed the rail on its way to the injector, and port it over to an ultrasonic mixing chamber where you carefully meter in distilled water & surfactants, vibrate the hell out of it, then send it to the injectors--on demand emulsions.
Been away from this post for a while thought I'd check back and saw this reply by nicklockard. Not off topic at all this is exactly the realm that I had started experimenting with. My initial tests were using an ultrasonic transducer to fog diesel fuel for possible use in two stroke engines for dirt bikes and ultralight aircraft engines with spark ignition. One thing though that I had a concern with as far as fogging straight diesel would be upon compression the fog may condense, meaning the fog or very finely atomized droplets could conglomerate into droplets of a size no smaller than what standard injectors would produce thereby negating the benefits of ultrasonic fogging in the first place. I know it's doable as I read a Research Paper from Japan where a 2stroke engine was successfully run spark ignited on diesel. It's the metering of the fuel with a fogger that's tricky. I actually hadn't thought of using an injector as the actual sonotrode!

That's pretty brilliant. It would take careful implementation and tuning to get it right but probably possible for sure. In the latter of the discussion of on demand emulsion kinda a piece of cake to do that and no need for surfactants actually. Would probably be pretty simple to meter the two parts together only thing there would need to be a way to keep any emulsion that was being returned by the fuel pump from entering into either the diesel or water tank as that would throw off the metering ratios as well as without surfactants the emulsion would separate after a time. Probably a pretty simple matter of having a catch can that was routed back to the pump with priority over the freshly made emulsion.

I'm pretty certain that this is one of the best if not the best ways to reduce NoX and potentially particulate emissions as well as increase performance and maybe engine longevity.
 
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