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Old 03-13-2008, 06:49 PM
seattle smitty seattle smitty is offline
Tire Changer
 
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 176
Since we are side-tracked from the original topic for the time being, here's my two cents:

Water injection eliminates NOX, but only while it is being injected. If you want to eliminate NOX full-time ANNNND take out the d@mned EGR system, you need full-time water injection. Happily, this can be done in a way that doesn't require a big water tank. (I've described this elsewhere, some time back, so for those who remember, forgive this redundancy).

DV, did you ever encounter an engine-builder named Pat Goodman? Maybe twenty years ago, while he had a shop in Virginia, he built a Ford Fiesta (Kent engine) with very high compression by street standards, and took a Popular Science writer (it wasn't Yunick) on a long run during which he was getting highway mpg figures well into the 50s. Goodman, who has aviation connections, and was a dealer for Franklin aircraft engines for a time, had found an aerospace injector that was cheap and which would atomize water at very small flow-rates. The secret was a second port that admitted low-pressure air which was injected at the water outlet, breaking it up into a mist. As a pressure source, Goodman tapped into the 4psi air from the "smog-pump." He mounted the injector in the air-cleaner top, above the carburetor primary side. Awfully simple, but it worked! It ran all the time, but used little water. Popular Science did a good article on it, which I will try to locate. Even Mother Earth News, which has approvingly offered up some of the crudest, most cobbled-together amateur plans for homemade water injections, helped get the word out about Goodman's system. But it disappeared, as the American public lost interest in fuel economy for another couple of decades . . . .

By the way, does anyone else find the EGR system inherantly offensive? I have learned to accept, and even appreciate, most of the emissions systems on street cars, but for an old racer the very idea of PURPOSELY adulterating the fresh intake charge with exhaust gases really rubs me the wrong way!! (I probably have said this somewhere else, too. Old men repeat themselves because we figure nobody pays any attention to what we say . . . which is probably merited!!)
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