The Super Fucking Awesome Engine

So I just had to replace the radiator on my car. I'm more of a tech nerd than gear head, so it was a learning experience. I always thought water circulates through the car (via water pump) to cool the engine. Not so, I discovered when I tried to fix break in hose with silicone sealant and duct tape. It actually circulates highly pressurized steam, thus no such quick hacks will work. But what I really learned is that engines, as they are currently designed, are a product of times when oil was infinite and cheap. Even in my late 90's car, those same old principles govern the design. I realized a huge amount of heat escapes through the radiator, going to waste. I was shocked to look it up, and find that about 12% of the energy in the gasoline is converted to moving the car, the rest escapes as heat through various systems. This means there are huge room for advances in gas efficiency.

I always knew that the braking system was a waste, all the accumulated kinetic energy of the moving car was released as heat in the brake pads every time you stop, and re-harvesting this energy (through applied electric induction through electric motor) was a major break through of cars like the Prius. But what really bothers me is the radiator itself: I mean, before we had gasoline engines, what did we have? That's right, we had steam. We heated water to its boiling point, at which point it became pressurized and pushed a piston up, turning the motor. So why not re-harvest the steam power gained from cooling the engine? I looked it up, and that's what BMW is up to, with its Turbosteamer technology. This system increases energy efficiency by 15%, with a comparatively simple system that can be retrofitted to old beamers. Kudos, guys.

However what really strikes me is the fact that this is the tip of the iceberg. The kinetic energy of steam comes from the 100 C boiling point of water increasing pressure enough to drive a piston. The released steam from this can heat another steam engine, with a chemical with a lower boiling point that drives another piston, and is cooled by yet another chemical with a lower boiling point, in a highly insulated enclosed system that releases virtually no heat, and therefore offers a total conversion of gasoline energy to kinetic energy. Feeling an electrical system and combined with hybrid brakes, we can envision a car that gets 80% gas efficiency instead of 12%, converting your 25 mile per gallon car to a 167 mile per gallon car with almost identical performance. Too good to be true? maybe, but I have a strong feeling I'm barking up the right tree with steam.

The issue is that the above multi-stage steam engine, unlike steam engines of yore, does not release steam of any of the chemicals into the air, but rather releases the steam into a cooling system like on a car, and from there its recirculated back into the original cylinder which heated it as liquid after its cooled. (remember the cooling system for it is the heating system for the next steam system down, as well.) The reason this whole system is appealing is because it smells like carbon capture and sequestration to me. I can imagine a system where c02 exhaust is re-liquefied into into a combustible fuel using a similar mechanism, probably involving electrolysis. Wouldn't that be awesome. Though that probably only exists in fantasy land, this general framework is the right one for a whole range of things managing gas and vastly improving efficiency for fossil fuel burning, which we will be reliant on until we get a quantum leap in batteries and solar panels. So I have seen the future, and it is steam punk: