New Clean-Combustion 'Ducted Fuel Injection' Could Eliminate Soot From Diesel Engines (sandia.gov) 102
Thelasko shared Sandia's report:
Ducted fuel injection, developed by Chuck Mueller at Sandia's Combustion Research Facility, is able to fine-tune the amount of diesel used in an engine to the point of eliminating between 50 and 100% of the soot... [H]e and his team, Christopher Nilsen, Drummond Biles and Nathan Harry, began experiments that have now resulted in an assembly of four to six small tubes, or ducts, directing fuel mixture from the injector right to the points of ignition. Chuck said that injectors in a traditional diesel engine create local mixtures containing 3-10 times more fuel than is needed for complete combustion. "When you have that much excess fuel at high temperature, you tend to produce a lot of soot," he said...
"Soot is second only to carbon dioxide in climate change, and it's toxic, so its emissions should be minimized," Chuck said. "In the past, there's always been this problem called the soot/nitrogen oxides trade-off. That is: when you do something to lower soot, emissions of nitrogen oxides -- or NOx -- go up, and vice versa... Now that we've got soot out of the way, there's no more soot/NOx trade-off," he said. "So we can add dilution -- taking some of the engine exhaust and routing it back to the intake -- to get rid of NOx without soot emissions becoming a problem. It's like a two-for-one deal on reducing pollutants... This gives us a path to much lower emissions for diesel engines, solving a long-standing problem for this highly efficient technology," he said.
The article also notes that two major diesel engine manufacturers, Ford and Caterpillar, "recently signed a cooperative research and development agreement with Sandia to help advance the technology."
"Soot is second only to carbon dioxide in climate change, and it's toxic, so its emissions should be minimized," Chuck said. "In the past, there's always been this problem called the soot/nitrogen oxides trade-off. That is: when you do something to lower soot, emissions of nitrogen oxides -- or NOx -- go up, and vice versa... Now that we've got soot out of the way, there's no more soot/NOx trade-off," he said. "So we can add dilution -- taking some of the engine exhaust and routing it back to the intake -- to get rid of NOx without soot emissions becoming a problem. It's like a two-for-one deal on reducing pollutants... This gives us a path to much lower emissions for diesel engines, solving a long-standing problem for this highly efficient technology," he said.
The article also notes that two major diesel engine manufacturers, Ford and Caterpillar, "recently signed a cooperative research and development agreement with Sandia to help advance the technology."
Neat idea... for now (Score:5, Insightful)
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You do know that all transport ships there use diesel engines do you? Yes it is bad for us. So is life.
This is Diesel (Score:2)
This is Diesel. This is still about burning stuff at each cycle.
Each cycle thus producing CO2 (green house) gas.
So no matter how much more efficient and less soot emitting you make it, you're still speaking about an energy production that has a set amount of CO2 per set amount of energy.
IT WILL NEVER BE A "LOW GREENHOUSE EMISSION TECHNOLOGY". At best only a "slightly less emitting than coal or unleaded gas".
Parent poster compared it to nuclear. Which virtually burns *nothing*. It does not produce CO2 in its
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The can doe this because of the opposed pistons longer stroke and lower burn and exhaust temps..... so less particulates due to running lean, and less NO2 due to lower temps since they have nearly double the expansion of a normal diesel.
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Do you understand fine particulate pollution and it's impact on human health? This is no comparison here with nuclear energy
First of all, I do. That is why the most complex part of my diesel engine is a particulate filter. Particulate from diesels are really a problem of yesteryear.
What is more interesting here is that this engine makes diesel EVEN MORE FUEL EFFICIENT (by a factor of 2 or more by the look of it). Sure it will generate NOX like there is no tomorrow - even more than todays diesels. That, however, is something we know how to deal with too - by adding diluted and purified piss to it.
Second, you are missing all o
Re:Neat idea... for now (Score:4, Interesting)
Your implication that science is some sort of universal parent, deciding what people should and shouldn't do strikes me as patently absurd. I'm sorry that things that you like might not be safe/healthy, but that's nobody's fault. That's how the universe works. So maybe quit with the childishness, huh? It makes you look silly.
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Of course you can argue that it'll always emit some soot... technically correct, but in the end it's all about degrees of pollution. Diesel vehicles produce less CO2, and at some point the tradeoff between CO2 and soot emissions will work out favourably for diesels. Perhaps this technology will tip the balance.
Re:Neat idea... for now (Score:5, Informative)
Diesel vehicles produce less CO2, and at some point the tradeoff between CO2 and soot emissions will work out favourably for diesels.
We have already discussed here on Slashdot how gasoline vehicles put out just as much soot as diesels [slashdot.org], and what's more, it's all very small soot which makes it the most hazardous kind. If it's smaller than cilia the lungs can't remove it, and stable (like carbon) persistent irritants are carcinogenic. But somehow that fact has gotten lost in the whole debate over diesel vs. gasoline. The only thing diesel produces more of than gasoline is NOx, and even gasoline vehicles make NOx now... when they are GDI (gasoline direct injected), especially with a turbo to bring temperatures up.
If this really halves diesel soot emissions, then this will mean that diesels produce substantially less soot than gasoline vehicles. But because the gassers only make invisible soot (when running correctly) they are perceived as not making any, when they make plenty.
Add to these facts the additional fact that it takes more energy to make gasoline than diesel, and that gasoline contains ethanol which is topsoil-based, and it's clear that diesel is far better for the environment.
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That Achates engine design is pretty slick (I saw it on Autoline) but there are packaging issues there. It would be great for buses, though, and for Porsches... both with the engine in the ass end.
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Weight is not the problem, the tires are the same all around and the rears have to be able to sustain a load, and there's plenty of heavy suspension parts available. It's the height of the motor... or the width, if it's packaged that way.
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at some point the tradeoff between CO2 and soot emissions will work out favourably for diesels
Assuming you continue to outsource your costs, yes. Unfortunately people are trying to insource your costs back to you, which means you will have to pay to clean up that soot and fix the resulting damage to health, which will make diesel and fossil cars in general uneconomical.
Re: Neat idea... for now (Score:1)
Re: Neat idea... for now (Score:3)
The, âoeparentsâ are the various activists that hijack and then twist science to support their radical agendas.
Just look at the European activist that gave a thing called, âoeFlight Shamingâ...attacking people who fly.
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It's nothing like nuclear, diesel has always been and still is actually bad. Unlike nuclear power, which is cool and good.
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The problem I see with your assertions is that they are not supported by science. Nuclear waste is currently a problem, partially due to the fact that we have banned reprocessing.
Nuclear material is always radioactive, true. So are Bananas. The dose matters greatly. Highly radioactive material has a short life span. Some of it is as low as a few fractions of a second, others a week or two. Those materials will rapidly decay to less emissive forms. That's because the radiation is the loss of energy fr
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Note that popular banana equivalent dose calculations are widely misleading, as they assume lifetime contribution from radioactive potassium isotopes in bananas, valid if the body stored infinite amount of ingested potassium, instead of it being roughly constant.
Radioactive caesium is also excreted, but concentration is much slower to return to equlibrium and is much much more radioactive, even if directly compared to the ~0.01% of K that is actually radioactive.
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The military and walmart and tyson are investing heavily in them. The military will get 50% more power in the same powerplant size, and big trucks will
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By the way, this is not just EGR; it's a new injection system that makes for cleaner combustion and thus less soot to begin with. The inventors merely state that the system could be further improved by using EGR as well.
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Diesel costs more than gas here so any mileage savings are negated. Plus they accelerate like shit.
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Diesel costs more than gas here so any mileage savings are negated. Plus they accelerate like shit.
Lolwaffles. Who told you that? My 1982 300SD (3.0l) is a bit slow off the line, but it's got an antique slush box based on a 1930s Chrysler design, without even a locking torque converter. But our 2006 Sprinter (2.7l) beats most vehicles across an intersection... it's got a five speed auto, and a VGT. Granted, it tops out around 80, but it's a 3/4 ton tall top cargo van. Something's gotta give, and in its case it's top speed that you don't need in a cargo van anyway.
It also gets more than 10% more mileage t
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I don’t know if you get the Mazda dual turbo 2.2l diesel in the US, but with 420nm/300foot/lb torque it accelerates very well indeed in my CX5.
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Looks like we got it this year. I'd heard Mazda had committed to diesels in pass cars even in the US, but I hadn't been keeping up.
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Except of course it's not great technology, it's high CO2 and emits a whole cocktail of nasty things such as carbon monoxide, ozone, NOx and lung disease causing dust particles.
No matter what improvements are made it's never going to be non-toxic and it'll always be a CO2 emitter.
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Diesel is like nuclear power these days: great technology with low greenhouse emissions, but it has been Deemed Bad for Us. And is therefore banned. No matter what improvements are made.
Err false. It has been deemed bad for us precisely because advancements across all fuel sources has proven others are bad. You sound like my mother "but they used to say petrol was bad"! Yeah no kidding, we used to fill the damn stuff directly with lead, and combust it at low compression.
Diesel in its craving for good mileage has lead to horrible NOx emissions because there's no such thing as a free lunch. But since you speak so facetiously and somehow think that diesel is not actually bad for us, I suggest
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Not everybody can use electric cars conveniently, lots of people live in apartments and/or park their cars in the street so overnight charging simply isn't possible..
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B. There's no reason that parking meters, or street lights, or any existing urban infrastructure can't easily be fitted with electrical outlets for car charging. It's not a difficult problem to solve.
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Your point B doesn’t necessarily solve anything - on a lot of residential streets in 1800s factory worker towns in the UK you have no off street parking, and no assigned parking, no street furniture you could convert, and lamp posts perhaps every 500 yards, which isn’t enough to support the dozens of cars between them. And you won’t find the funding for councils to fit millions of charging points on these streets.
Until we get fast charging, akin to current gas station fill ups, electric c
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Not everybody can use electric cars conveniently
Then they should be prepared to pay to clean up the pollution they create.
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Boat/Ship engines are where this is really needed. As you say, the writing is on the wall for cars and soon afterwards trucks.
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Why wouldn't boats/ships go electric? It would seem like the whole weight/power ratio thing is especially moot for ships.
... said the person with no idea of the scale of the problem.
Batteries today have 1/100th of the energy density of diesel fuel. If we were talking about 1/2, or maybe 1/10, the energy density then that would not likely be much of an issue. With batteries being so low on energy density by comparison the issue of size and weight is something that makes electric ships far from being feasible.
Oh, and before someone even thinks of replying, this is not something that the next generation of batteries will fix.
G
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Or we could drill a tunnel under the Bering Strait and build a railroad line between Asia and North America so we can use electric high speed freight trains to get the goods to the other side of the world a lot faster and with a lot less pollution than ships.
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Why wouldn't boats/ships go electric? It would seem like the whole weight/power ratio thing is especially moot for ships.
The whole range anxiety thing is a bigger problem for ships, which have to go further without refueling. But it's conceivable that we might build floating solar arrays along the route, so that ships could be recharged in mid-ocean, so it's not an utterly insurmountable problem. It's just complicated, and won't happen overnight. Also, we can't produce enough battery capacity to fill the demand for cars, container ships have to get in line. Hopefully some new battery technology will solve this problem (glass
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Y'know, they've got these things called "sails" for ships. Used them for centuries. They don't use any fuel, and they're not even necessarily slow (clipper ships, for example, were faster than steamships for a good while). Unless what you're transporting by sea is time-sensitive (cantaloupes?), it hardly matter whether it's wind-driven or powered these days....
And the really great thing about sailing
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"Soot is second only to carbon dioxide in climate change, and it's toxic, so its emissions should be minimized"
So carbon dioxide is now worse than Methane, water vapor etc.
However looks like a great breakthrough.
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https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
"Huge quantities of man-made soot enter the atmosphere every year. Around 7.5m tonnes was released in 2000 alone, according to estimates. It has a greenhouse effect two-thirds that of carbon dioxide, and greater than methane.
The biggest source of soot emissions is the burning of forest and savannah grasslands. But diesel engines account for about 70% of emissions from Europe, North America and Latin America.
In Asia and Afri
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Also there is Achates power engines... which could make sense in smaller cars since they produce about 90Hp per cyl
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The return on investment is rapidly disappearing though. Many countries have announced the end of fossil car sales after which the combustion engine will be relegated to special cases only. There's still some mileage (pun intended) in hybrids but even Mazda is releasing an EV now.
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It's too bad something like this wasn't invented a lot earlier.
It was. Diesel fumigation - dilution and improvement in the "spread" of the diesel mixture by adding propane to it. Also known as Diesel Blanco.
It reduced soot by 10 times or more, but it also resulted in the rather obvious side effect - NOX. That is why it was abandoned - we did not know how to remove NOX at that point (30 years ago).
The more SOOT and the less efficient a diesel engine, the less NOX it produces. For example, my Isuzu Diesel is capable of complying to Euro 6 by generating soot like craz
Both internal combustion and EV have their roles (Score:3)
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Use a green carbon neutral fuel
Sounds like an electric car with extra steps.
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It could be fewer steps, if we could figure out biofuel from algae or something like that.
Biomass fuels are a waste of effort. It's just solar power with terrible conversion ratios.
Solar power has a hard limit, at least on Earth, of about 1000 watts per square meter. To turn this into fuel we can use means using some conversion process, a process with losses. With some kind of biological conversion by means of biomass fuel this conversion is very poor. This is sunlight, water, and effort, put to better use growing food and producing energy that doesn't compete with food for sunlight, water,
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Sounds like an electric car with extra steps.
Electricity from where? That would be important, no?
If the electricity is from natural gas then it would seem to me that using electric cars is not much of an improvement, if there is an improvement at all. Certainly a combined cycle natural gas power plant can get 60% efficiency, and an internal combustion engine in a truck might get half that. Add in the transmission losses from the power plant to the charging point, losses in the batteries, and perhaps other losses, the gain would be minimal. In addi
Ok, but (Score:2)
will this tech stop idiots from installing devices on their diesel trucks which spew insane clouds of toxic black smoke?
I doubt it.
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Will this tech stop idiots from installing devices on their diesel trucks which spew insane clouds of toxic black smoke?
I doubt it.
No, but it will allow environmentally-conscious Confederate hicks to be Clean Coal Burners -- to mix several incredibly bad euphemisms.
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Is this a real thing? I've never heard of it this side of the pond.
It would be straight illegal in the UK - the annual car test includes soot emission levels from diesel engines.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The tech is great but the industry sucks. (Score:2)
The problem today is that to quickly change over to new cars and trucks is going to be financially too difficult. It is hard to justify junking by obsoleting all the vehicles on the road the way Japan does to force the public to
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The problem today is that to quickly change over to new cars and trucks is going to be financially too difficult. It is hard to justify junking by obsoleting all the vehicles on the road the way Japan does to force the public to buy new.
California is doing it for diesel commercial vehicles over... 14k GVWR? I'm not sure. Maybe it was a bit higher. By 2020 sometime they will all have to meet the 2010 CA spec. That means they'll all have DPF and DEF. The rest of the fleet can be replaced in the natural process of attrition.
Hush! We're THIS close to finally getting it (Score:2)
Could you please shut up? The very LAST thing we now need is a way to make diesel fuel clean and those pesky consumers can continue driving diesel cars. We need them to burn the other gas where we can dump a shitload of tax on without endangering the transport of goods. We need cheap crap in our stores and the last thing we need is them to be expensive because the trucks have to buy expensive fuel.
15 Years Late, for VW (Score:5, Insightful)
If only VW had done this type of research, rather than figuring out how to cheat.
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DPFs suck rocks. If you don't do enough highway miles they have to inject fuel to regen. And no matter what, they eventually clog. Some of the soot turns into CO2, and the rest turns into smaller soot particles that are more carcinogenic. We're actually better off with no DPF, because you produce less CO2, and less highly carcinogenic (PM2.5) soot.
SCR with DEF for NOx reduction is a good idea, but sadly every single implementation seems to be garbage. Every part of most DEF systems except the catalyst (and
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Only 20 mpg? My cx5 2.2 diesel gets over 30 city and country, and no DPF problems at all. When it does a regen burn no soot comes out at all. Old tech you got there.
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Only 20 mpg? My cx5 2.2 diesel gets over 30 city and country, and no DPF problems at all.
Not yet.
When it does a regen burn no soot comes out at all.
Wrong. You just can't see it, because it's PM2.5.
Old tech you got there.
Yes, a 37 year old car is old tech. And it will probably still be running when your Mazda has failed, if I do the timing chain in a timely fashion.
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Nearly 100,000 miles and not one spare part fitted, and no sign of DPF problems. The earliest model had a few issues, but was fixed quickly by Mazda. Even towing a 9 metre 1000kg trailer at 70 mph I get better than 25 mpg US. I’m willing to bet it will go way past 200,000 miles without issues. Of course, I service it regularly. There are some brands that do have bad DPF problems, particularly Toyota’s 2.8 HiLux models, absolute shitbox. The 6 speed auto is great too.
The specs show no particulate
Efficiency (Score:2)
So if between 3 and 10 times of what is actually used in proper combustion enters the chamber... does that mean an engine using this principle immediately gets at least times four the mpg?
Or does the fuel that "burns badly" still produce power?
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It's not the total amount, it's the variation in concentration in different parts of the chamber. You'd only get small efficiency gains from this.
Innovation is great and all. (Score:4, Funny)
Sorry what was I saying? My neighbor just drove by in his diesel truck.
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Where's the battery? (Score:2)
Rednecks won't adopt it (Score:2)
diesel is to complex (Score:2)
a modern diesel engine is just way to complex, you have so many parts to make it somewhat performant/comfortable to be used as an engine in a passenger car and then you have way to many parts to try to keep its combustion clean. and all of these fail, all the time, it's horrible how unreliable diesel engines have become compared to a simple diesel engine what all that crap on (those basically almost run forever).
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Anonymous Cowards suck too. You're not helping either.
Leftie here--we're not done with diesel just yet! (Score:2)
Also, please don't forget that this has biodiesel applications. Maybe the fuel of the future is
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I suspect you mean electric. And I bet you that bulldozers are already electronic – somewhere.
And I wouldn't count your chickens just yet on full electric bulldozers becoming a thing. There are already full electric giant dump trucks. A construction job site seems like the perfect place to use all electric construction equipment. Use all day on site; top up a bit at lunchtime; recharge overnight.
Geography (Score:2)
A construction job site seems like the perfect place to use all electric construction equipment. Use all day on site; top up a bit at lunchtime; recharge overnight.
A construction site in the middle of a city (e.g.: rebuilding a block and other in-city improvement) ? Sure, cause you can just tap into the local utilities' infrastructure.
A construction site in a remote area (e.g.: building metaphorically a *new* city) ? Nope, unless the power generation is already running there and/or is already connected to the utilities. (Well, if the remote thing you're building is a factory, eventually at one point the factory will need power. If the power is already up, you could us
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Maybe the fuel of the future is algae based biodiesel...
Biodiesel actually sucks, except as an additive, because of its gel point which is at a much higher temperature than petrodiesel. But green diesel [wikipedia.org] (which words Wikipedia incorrectly redirects to biodiesel — they used to get it right, too) does not have this problem, and is also more compatible with existing diesel fuel systems, some of which will not tolerate more than 20% biodiesel.
5% biodiesel is, however, the most effective lubricity additive for diesel fuel. Further, in such low concentration it d
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The gel point is the least of your issues, the big problem with many types of biodiesel is that you can get "interesting" growth in your fuel system.
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The gel point is the least of your issues, the big problem with many types of biodiesel is that you can get "interesting" growth in your fuel system.
You can have that with petrodiesel, too. So no, that's not a drawback of biodiesel, it's a drawback of diesel. But there are biocides that prevent that, it's not insurmountable.
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Diesel is what brings your food and clothes to the shops where you shop.
So the technology is definitely useful since every bit that can improve emissions and fuel economy helps.
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Errr, naa, the big industrial tracktor manufacturers are all over electric kit. It's actually a excellent fit.
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Re:Stop trying to make diesels great again (Score:5, Funny)
"Diesels suck. "
No, they ejaculate oil into the womb of the motor,
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All ICEs are basically air pumps, so they all suck and blow. None more so than those which have turbochargers, as all modern automotive diesels do. (Or superchargers, like the two stroke diesels had, whether they had turbochargers or not.)
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Maybe for big construction and farming equipment, this would be OK, but for personal transport, I agree. We need to transition everyone off of diesel.
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