I'm a Smokey Yunick fan so I really dig the alternate fuel hocus pocus stuff...We would all be driving around in Smokey Yunick hot vapor engine powered Deloreans if John wouldn't have done the old coke dealio you know! Budnick and Iacocca each had over $100K wrapped up in Smokey's engine and were betting on it. GM couldn't figure it out. Everyone called it a hoax! I have seen the engine in one of the research labs at Florida State University.
Twenty years ago, the late, great racing mechanic and inventor Henry “Smokey” Yunick left the automotive engineers shaking their heads when he invented and patented his hot vapor engine. Based on the familiar four-cycle piston engine concept, instead of cooling the intake air to improve efficiency, he used coolant heat and exhaust waste heat to significantly warm the intake air. The purpose was to fully vaporize the fuel and to make the intake air expand in the intake system to generate positive pressure, like a supercharger. A small turbocharger was used as a “mixer” and as a check valve to prevent the expanding intake air from backflowing out of the intake system. With the heated, pressurized, homogenous mixture, the engine ran at air/fuel ratios considered impossibly lean, such as 22:1, on pump gasoline. The hot vapor engine made incredible power and was highly efficient, responsive, surprisingly emissions clean, and delivered fuel economy of 45-50 MPG in a compact car, and it did it all without computers, smog pumps or catalytic converters. Although initially denounced by the automotive world as a hoax, several prominent SAE engineers later published papers validating Smokey’s theories and design. It was no hoax to Smokey. He considered it his greatest achievement. However, the automotive giants had their own designs for increasing fuel economy and controlling emissions, and Smokey’s simple and cost-efficient engine package was ignored. Today, Smokey’s designs are buried somewhere in the U.S. Patent Office (
www.uspto.gov, patent numbers: 4,503,833; 4,592,329; 4,637,365; 4,862,859) awaiting someone to take this technology to the next level. So just when you think you know the rules of how things work, somebody comes along and breaks the rules. It’s only fitting that it was Smokey Yunick.
Oh well, it's way way off topic I just thought burning salt water was cool!