Pyrocatalytic Method “pyrocatalytic converter” Gasoline piston engines, as they are designed today, do not work well with mineral spirits, fuel oil, or even pure alcohol. Petroleum distillates detonate too easily in today's engines, resulting in rapid destruction of the engine. Slowing down the burn to avoid detonation results in poor fuel economy (as much as 40% of the fuel in your tank is simply blown out the exhaust port), which is why catalytic converters are mandated -- to burn the wasted fuel.

This brings us to the next point. To utilize all of the energy in fuel we have to pre-process the fuel into a near 100% burnable state. Liquids do not burn -- only vapor or gas phase fuels burn! While carburetors and fuel injectors work to convert liquid fuels to vapor state, the fuel still acts as a quasi-liquid even in a hot cylinder.

The only way we can achieve near-perfect combustion is to start with a gas phase or gas state fuel. Photo C shows one of our primary stage components for liquid-to-gas state devices. It's operation is really quite simple; a close-fitting pipe is welded (gas-tight) around a smaller diameter threaded pipe. An inlet and outlet are welded to the outer pipe. As heat from an engine or combustor passes through the center (threaded) pipe, fuel is forced through the outer cavity, transforming it to a vapor/gas phase (dependent on the heat).

Photo D gives us a brief glimpse at a parallel development project in an early construction stage. This fuel processor is designed to convert any liquid-state hydrocarbon into a gas-phase fuel for use in any type of engine -- gasoline piston, diesel piston, all types of rotary & turbine engines, etc. Well, that's it for this month. Next month we will feature a special test between a strict Tesla disk design versus a proprietary hybrid design of our own, using thin section winglets mounted between the disks. We'll also cover some of the inlet nozzle issues. Anyone interested in learning more about our fuel processor will want to link over to our PNGinc site. 'Til next time -- keep the motive power revolution rolling!

By pre-processing hydrocarbon fuels through pyrocatalytic devices into a vapor state and directly introducing the vapor into the engine, we were able to run this standard spark ignition engine on a multitude of fuels -- including alcohol, crankcase oil, and soybean oil.