Has anyone ever run across, experiment with, or read about distilled water vapor injection or preheating of the main fuel line to stimulate better fuel atomization? I've been toying with the ideas and I think I've got the setup all figured out. Here's my general scheme of things...

For preheating the fuel; I was thinking of using the output hose from the water pump that goes into the heater core to use as my heating line. Idea is to extend that hose and use that extra legnth to coil around my fuel line for a few feet before the fuel line runs into the fuel rails.

Yes I'm aware that there may be some power loss since fuel won't be as dense as normal, and yes I'm aware that my engine may start to run lean and possibly overheat but seeing as how the O2 sensor detects such situations, I thought that the PCM might just adjust accordingly. If not, that's where the distilled water vapor injection comes into play.

For distilled water vapor injection; idea was to have that same heater hose that would preheat the fuel line first go into a stainless steel container. The container would be made to have two sections, one lower for coolant and one upper for water, both with in/out fittings for proper flow. When coolant completely fills the lower chamber it would continue on to preheat fuel or to just go about circulating through the cooling system. After the engine warms, the water in the upper chamber would begin to boil and eventually build pressure which would pass through a vacuum control valve to prevent flooding the engine when off and then either be released into the air hat or intake manifold where the steam would absorb heat, steam clean engine walls, and increase compression. Also, there would be some sort of toilet bowl float in the upper water chamber to allow the chamber to automatically refill through the use of a small pump and large tank located somewhere in the bed of the truck.

These ideas are still in concept stages as of right now but any suggestions would be welcome and if anyone has worked on anything like this before, please tell of your experience.

 

sorry to tell you, your water vapor idea will not work. your coolant does not get hot enough to boil water. unless you overheat your truck and risk blowing your engine. the water vapor injection uses an injector to vaporize the water into a fine mist and shoots the mist into your intake. this is done to introduce a cooler, denser air charge into the cylinder. it does not create much extra power. you would be better off getting a 25-50hp nitrous fogger. these smaller foggers require no modifications to timing. you would then just have to introduce extra fuel to the fogger to prevent lean conditions. and as for the heating the fuel, bad idea. leave the fuel alone. the injectors do their job extremely well on their own. just maybe put some injector cleaner into your tank every 1-2000 miles. this will keep em residue free and they will last for a long time to come. keep on truckin!!

 

Ok, so maybe the coolant will not boil off the water if there is a gallon sitting in the upper chamber but who knows. If not coolant, then maybe exhaust heat. I could always wrap an exhaust pipe in 1/4" copper line to preheat the water. Main thing that I would like to is wheter or not anyone knows of any do`s or don'ts for steam injection or water vapor injection.

And nobody ever said that injectors do a poor job of getting fuel to the chambers. I just simply believe that a injector could do a better job of vaporizing fuel. That's where the preheating is supposed to come into play, but like I said, these ideas are still just concepts so suggestions or warnings are definately going to be taken into consideration for the final design.

 

Water injection has been used for years. You can buy kits specifically designed for it. I wouldn't worry too much about "preheating the water" it will vaporize pdq once it is injected. This is a good way to clean the combustion chambers and it increases compression, but I would not do it all of the time. It would severely detract from your motor's longevity. At the very least, you will be changing head gaskets.

 

I've heard that copper gaskets are very good and that they're reusable. Is it possible that if and when I pull my heads to do porting work I could eliminate this possible gasket problem with copper gaskets?

 

I could see preheating the fuel in a carbed situation but, even then I doubt it would work. The fuel will get plenty hot when it goes into the intake. I doubt that preheating it would heat it any warmer then the intake could.

 

I don't think that the fuel heats up too much in the intake... When going 60 MPH and getting roughly 15 MPG, it takes 15 minutes to burn 1 gallon of gasoline.

So...

128 oz. or 1 gal. / 15 min. = 8.533333333333333333333333333333 oz. burned per minute

8.533333333333333333333333333333 oz. / 60 sec. = 0.142222222222222222222222222222217 oz. burned per second.

28.357 g. = 1 oz.

28.357 g. x 8.533333333333333333333333333333 (number of oz. of fuel burned per minute) = 241.979733333333333333333333333324 grams per 8.533333333333333333333333333333 oz. of fuel

241.979733333333333333333333333324 g. of fuel burned per minute / 60 seconds = 4.0329955555555555555555555555554 grams of fuel burned per second.

4.0329955555555555555555555555554 grams of fuel = roughly 4 cubic centimeters of fuel going through the engine per second.

If there are 8 cylinders and that 4 cc. chunk of fuel is divided by all eight of them evenly in a 1 second time span, how much heat can that fuel possibly absorb when it's sprayed into the engine? I don't believe it's too much, which doesn't allow for much more if any additional atomization taking place thanks to ambient heat.However, if preheated to around 200 degees, there very well may be more atomization that takes place allowing for more fuel economy, better emissions, and possibly a little more power. But like I said before, it's still a concept so comments are always appreciated until I get my truck back since my mom's been using it for the past 2 weeks.

 

If it's better to have the fuel warm, why do people wrap the fuel rails?

 

For more power people insulate their lines. But for efficiency I think that hotter fuel vaporizes into gaseous form easier thus realeasing more chemical energy when ignited.

 

I've read some about some experiments where fuel was heated to improve atomization.
but they were heating it to several hundred degrees and injecting it under high pressure as a vapour.
The results were promising but very dangerous.