AH challenge: turbine engines more widespread

In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a fair bit of speculation that turbine engines would replace internal combustion engines in land vehicles. The Chrysler company, in particular, tried to get on the market a line of turbine-powered cars. Here is the '61 Turboflite concept car:



From Wikipedia:

The fourth-generation Chrysler turbine engine ran at up to 44,500 revolutions per minute, according to the owner's manual, and could use diesel fuel, unleaded gasoline, kerosene, JP-4 jet fuel, and even vegetable oil. The engine would run on virtually anything and the President of Mexico tested this theory by running one of the first cars—successfully—on tequila. Air/fuel adjustments were required to switch from one to another, and the only evidence of what fuel was being used was the odor of the exhaust.

The engine had a fifth as many moving parts as a piston unit (60 rather than 300). The turbine was spinning on simple sleeve bearings for vibration-free running. Its simplicity offered the potential for long life, and because no combustion contaminants enter engine oil, no oil changes were considered necessary. The 1963 Turbine's engine generated 130 brake horsepower (97 kW) and an instant 425 pound-feet (576 N·m) of torque at stall speed, making it good for 0-60 mph in 12 seconds at an ambient temperature of 85 °F (29 °C)—it would sprint quicker if the air was cooler and denser.

The absence of a distributor and points, the solitary start-up spark plug and the lack of coolant eased maintenance, while the exhaust did not contain carbon monoxide, unburned carbon, or raw hydrocarbons. Nevertheless, the turbine generated nitrogen oxides and the challenge of limiting them helped to kill the program.

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Did the turbine engine suffer from inherent flaws that would have made it unsuitable as the default powerplant for land vehicles? If not, how could we end up with turbine engines being at least as common as internal combustion engines by the early 21st century? Failing that, could we see them used in specialty vehicles, trains, or ships?

Hendryk said:

Did the turbine engine suffer from inherent flaws that would have made it unsuitable as the default powerplant for land vehicles? If not, how could we end up with turbine engines being at least as common as internal combustion engines by the early 21st century? Failing that, could we see them used in specialty vehicles, trains, or ships?

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They are distinctly inferior in terms of Fuel Economy at that size, this is a bad thing, as the main selling point of such a system would have to be either efficiency or power in a light package. Not to mention, people tended to freak out when they saw the Tach registering ~12k RPM at normal usage.

They're quite popular in Ships however.

In Cars and Aircraft Wankel (a sort of Turbine) engines (Rotax and Mazda Rensis) tend to be a more viable alternative, but the main reason the Piston engine hasn't been replaced is because it works wonderfully, and it's what people are used to.

If you want to see turbines dominant in the 21st century, get one of the first major hybrids to have a Wankel for the main engine/generator, with the Electric motors providing the Torque.

NothingNow said:

In Cars and Aircraft Wankel (a sort of Turbine) engines (Rotax and Mazda Rensis) tend to be a more viable alternative, but the main reason the Piston engine hasn't been replaced is because it works wonderfully, and it's what people are used to.

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A rotary engine is not a sort of turbine. It just uses cams instead of pistons.

Throttling up and down of turbines tends to be very messy, they work best for long periods at a constant speed. Plus they need more maintenance hours.

My Rotary.

I think you've picked up on a lesser known aspect of fifties atompunk.

Obviously fuel efficiency is not important in an era when everyone, and especially the USA, acted like petrol would last forever and it was inexpensive. But we're talking early fifties, before the Suez crisis.

Thande said:

I think you've picked up on a lesser known aspect of fifties atompunk.

Obviously fuel efficiency is not important in an era when everyone, and especially the USA, acted like petrol would last forever and it was inexpensive. But we're talking early fifties, before the Suez crisis.

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Well, yeah, the post-WW2 decades are a fertile period for technological WIs, considering the general faith in progress and the idea that energy sources are limitless and will only get cheaper (not to mention the complete disregard for environmental issues).

The thing is, from a layman's perspective there's something counterintuitive about the internal combustion engine, which looks like a complex, finicky assemblage of delicate moving parts. A turbine, on the face of it, looks like a cleaner, simpler mechanism, and the fact that it can run on any number of fuels is an added bonus. I think it's saying something that despite the innate conservatism of US car manufacturers, a company like Chrysler seriously gave the concept a try. So I'd like to see if the turbine engine could plausibly have caught on. What if, for example, its fuel versatility gave it a second chance after the 1973 oil shock?

Chrysler was known for its innovative engineering, particularly under K. T. Keller. Some of the innovations included the first all steel body, the Sherman tank, making a useful tank (though complicated) engine by wedding five truck engines, led development of hemispheric combustion chamber in commercial/passenger application, and were among the early advocates of the torsion bar suspension in mass produced passenger vehicles.

Hendryk said:

Well, yeah, the post-WW2 decades are a fertile period for technological WIs, considering the general faith in progress and the idea that energy sources are limitless and will only get cheaper (not to mention the complete disregard for environmental issues).

The thing is, from a layman's perspective there's something counterintuitive about the internal combustion engine, which looks like a complex, finicky assemblage of delicate moving parts. A turbine, on the face of it, looks like a cleaner, simpler mechanism, and the fact that it can run on any number of fuels is an added bonus. I think it's saying something that despite the innate conservatism of US car manufacturers, a company like Chrysler seriously gave the concept a try. So I'd like to see if the turbine engine could plausibly have caught on. What if, for example, its fuel versatility gave it a second chance after the 1973 oil shock?

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a turbine-powered car would have been splendid for highway travel.

lots of American cars with big motors do nicely on highway mpg and are atrocious fuel-hogs around town.

the turbine would have done nicely with this.


dig this: Chrysler had viable turbine-powered prototypes up into the 1980s!

afaik the main reason Chrsyler's turbine-fangs were pulled was that Chrysler was compelled to divest itself of the Abrams tank division... at that point, the folks developing powertrains for Abrams tanks were essentially the Chrysler brain-trust for turbines. once that was gone from ChryCo... alas!

now the major land-vehicle with turbine power is a tank with the powertrain being the heir of decades of Chrysler engineering development.

("In February 1978, Chrysler delivered its first turbine-powered vehicle to a waiting buyer: the XM1 tank, delivered to the United States military, which was already buying M-60 series tanks from Chrysler Corporation. While Chrysler never sold a single turbine sedan, it did sell M1 series turbine tanks.")


fyi,
"Why the turbine program ended

Bob Sheaves wrote:

in the early 1960s, Chrysler made 50 turbine cars and rotated them among selected members of the American public to drive them as their normal cars and gather resultant data etc.

overall, the study went well, with only four percent downtime and 1.1 million miles covered by the cars involved.

if you want to be depressed, ponder that at the end of the study, for insurance reasons and following industry practice for concept/experimental cars, something like 40 of the cars used were scrapped. (The same thing happened to the GM Impacts.)


oh yeah:

"Fuel requirements: what've you got? diesel, unleaded gas, kerosene, JP-4, others. No adjustments needed to switch from one to the other."

Turbine varieties

"Turbine" is a very broad range of technologies. You have steam turbines, which could burn almost anything, as boilers are relatively easy to adjust. With some work and care, one could even be made to burn wood or coal, as well as gasoline, oil, propane, kerosene, alchohol. It is an external combustion engine, and won't be all that fuel efficient, expecially at this small scale.

You also have gas turbines--essentially similar to jet engines, that are used on many medium sized warships. They are very powerful, but need a narrower range of fuels, and the fuel would have to be liquid. I'm not sure about efficiency, especially scaled down to this point.

Assuming you have a turbine prime mover that's going to work, the diffuculties of throttling it up and down--and the horrible low speed inefficinecies--are going to bite you HARD. That's not to say it's insolvable. Infact, using an old US Navy technique might just do the trick: Turbo-electric. The turbine doesn't turn the wheels, but turns a generator, which turns electric motors in the props--or wheels, in this case. For the car, add batteries that drain when the car's really moving fast, and charge at slower speeds, and have the turbine run at a single speed--or at most, "slow" and "fast." For short, cross town hops, just use the battery.

Deciding when to turn on the turbine would have been one of the driver's tasks with the tech of the time, and might have led to stranded motorists--and customer dis satisfaction--back then, but now, computers could do it.

I don't know if this applies in the time period in question, but nowadays there seems to be a backdoors connivance between governments and oil companies to suppress technologies that allow multiple fuel use because that makes it harder to tax. Look at that ridiculous business a few years ago with the police going around sniffing the exhaust pipes of diesel cars for chip fat.

Cook said:

A rotary engine is not a sort of turbine. It just uses cams instead of pistons.

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Meh. My Mistake. Still, it's probably the closest you can get on a Semi-practical level.

Cook said:

Throttling up and down of turbines tends to be very messy, they work best for long periods at a constant speed. Plus they need more maintenance hours.

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Ooh, yeah, forgot about that. It'd produce a Massive demand for trained mechanics, and there will never be enough to go around. Especially since the Extant ones would need to be completely retrained.

Thande said:

I don't know if this applies in the time period in question, but nowadays there seems to be a backdoors connivance between governments and oil companies to suppress technologies that allow multiple fuel use because that makes it harder to tax. Look at that ridiculous business a few years ago with the police going around sniffing the exhaust pipes of diesel cars for chip fat.

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That does depend somewhat on where you are. IDK if Florida's ever done stuff like that since we don't have people using Combustion heaters as much. Of course, we regularly gave Oil companies the finger until earlier this year, so we might start doing that now, if only because Rick Scott's a Corporate Tool.

Hendryk said:

4A turbine, on the face of it, looks like a cleaner, simpler mechanism, and the fact that it can run on any number of fuels is an added bonus.

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That would have some serious knock-on effects. I don't know if I totally buy into Zubrin's flex-fuel boosterism, but there's something to it -- http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/achieving-energy-victory --

BTW, if Reagan thinks he can bankrupt the Sovs by pushing hard on alternate energy sources instead of by 'persuading' the Saudis to pump like crazy, he might do it. A strong conservative/cold warrior push in the 1980s for a nuclear/methanol economy would be extremely interesting, especially because it probably wouldn't be just the US, there'd probably be some kind of international treaty or collective energy security organization among most of the advanced western nations.

mrmandias said:

That would have some serious knock-on effects. I don't know if I totally buy into Zubrin's flex-fuel boosterism, but there's something to it -- http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/achieving-energy-victory --

BTW, if Reagan thinks he can bankrupt the Sovs by pushing hard on alternate energy sources instead of by 'persuading' the Saudis to pump like crazy, he might do it. A strong conservative/cold warrior push in the 1980s for a nuclear/methanol economy would be extremely interesting, especially because it probably wouldn't be just the US, there'd probably be some kind of international treaty or collective energy security organization among most of the advanced western nations.

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The French would probably go for it, as would the Japanese--they're pretty vulnerable to supply disruptions, and both IOTL have undertaken programs to reduce oil dependence.

Rover cars were the first to have a go at the gas turbine road vehicle http://www.rover.org.nz/pages/jet/jet5.htm and in 1961 were getting 140 bhp and 20 miles to an imperial gallon. Pretty impressive numbers for a car of the era.

Who wouldnt want a gas turbine car whoosh

Rover also looked at GTs for it's cars in the same timeframe, they even raced some at Le Mans which did reasonably well. Colin Chapman also raced GTs at Indy, or tried to I think. As others have said they work well at constant speed, prefereably revving their tits off, and when they are at idle they use just as much fuel as when they are at full revs which sucks when your sitting at the traffic lights. This is so bad that GTs were impractical as a passenger train engine in the 60s due to the fuel use in stations.

Another problem which hasn't been mentioned is engine braking. GTs don't make the car slow down when you take your foot off the throttle and you can't drop it back a gear when going down a hill to keep your speed down.

fastmongrel said:

Who wouldnt want a gas turbine car whoosh

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Apparently there was concern in the Chrysler marketing department that customers would be put off by a car that makes the same noise as a vacuum cleaner.

Hendryk said:

Apparently there was concern in the Chrysler marketing department that customers would be put off by a car that makes the same noise as a vacuum cleaner.

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Heh, I can see that.

Saab's advertising department would have a field day with it though, given their usual thing of constantly pointing out the fact that they also make jet fighters.

Thande said:

Saab's advertising department would have a field day with it though, given their usual thing of constantly pointing out the fact that they also make jet fighters.

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They do that in Britain? How... odd. I guess there might be reason why they avoid doing that around here nowadays, but...

LordInsane said:

They do that in Britain? How... odd. I guess there might be reason why they avoid doing that around here nowadays, but...

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America, too.