Isegoria

Before he died in 2002, Carmela Scuderi, an expert in thermodynamics, designed a new fuel-efficient engine:

In a normal engine, a piston moves up and down in a cylinder in a four-stroke cycle — down as a mixture of air and fuel enters the cylinder; up to compress the mixture; after a spark ignites the fuel, the piston is driven back down in the power stroke; and then up again, pushing out exhaust gases and starting the cycle over.

In the Scuderi design, pairs of cylinders work together. One cylinder does nothing but intake and compression. It is partnered with another that does only combustion and exhaust. A high-speed valve channels the pressurized fuel-air mix from the compression cylinder to the combustion cylinder.

Mr. Scuderi envisioned putting two sets of paired cylinders together to make a four-cylinder engine. According to his calculations, this setup should reduce resistance within the engine, result in greater compression of the fuel and air, and faster and more complete burning of the mixture.

Mr. Scuderi calculated that these and other changes could convert about 40% of the energy in gasoline into mechanical energy.

Mr. Scuderi suffered a heart attack and died in 2002. His children continued to refine the engine design, and now envision adding a tank to store highly compressed air that can be fed into the combustion cylinder to further improve efficiency.

The firm believes the Scuderi engine, equipped with the air tank and a turbocharger, could increase a vehicle’s fuel economy by perhaps 50%.

The Scuderi Group site goes into more detail.

The vertical friction stir welder builds rockets with friction, not blowtorches:

Gas metal arc welding is fine if you just want a truck’s bumper to stay put for a few hundred thousand miles. But if you’re building an Ares I rocket—the craft that will shuttle astronauts to the moon and beyond starting in 2020—you’ll need a more sophisticated technique: stir welding. Ares I will be made from aluminum-lithium 2195, an ultralight, ultrastrong alloy that’s nearly impossible to weld using traditional fusion methods, because melting can create small pores that weaken the metal. Stir welding plunges a rapidly rotating pin about the size of a pencil into the joint between two panels with more than 5,000 pounds of force per square inch; the friction makes the alloy pliable, and the rotation forces grains of metal to mingle behind the pin as it crawls up the joint. The resulting welds are strong, defect-free, and actually shave material (and weight) from the craft rather than leaving a bulky seam. NASA’s vertical spaceship-fusing welder stands 35 feet high, weighs 60 tons, and typically requires up to six operators. Luckily, the space agency has a pretty big workshop.

Duckweed is the tiny flower that turns pig poop into fuel, producing more starch, and thus ethanol, per acre than corn:

More than a decade ago, Cheng and fellow NC State forestry professor Anne-Marie Stomp wondered whether fast-growing duckweed, commonly seen in shallow ponds, might remediate animal waste. Excrement from the billions of animals raised every year in America’s factory farms has fouled watersheds, especially in the South, and fed oxygen-gobbling algae blooms responsible for rapidly-spreading coastal dead zones.

Duckweed, they discovered, has an appetite for animal waste, quickly converting it to leafy starch that can then be converted into ethanol. The current source for most U.S. ethanol is industrial-scale corn farming, which requires large amounts of toxic pesticides and dead zone-feeding, fuel-intensive fertilizers. When the costs are added up, corn-based ethanol may prove little cleaner than gasoline.

Duckweed could help solve both problems at once.

“We did small-scale tests in the laboratory to convert duckweed starch to ethanol using the same technologies as the fuel industry currently uses in corn,” said Cheng. “With the same technology, we can easily convert it.”
Duckweed consumes nitrogen, phosphorous, calcium and iron, making it a potential source of remediation not only for the lagoons in which farm waste accumulates, but any type of wastewater.

Because duckweed is found in all but the coldest climates, there’s little chance of it causing problems as an invasive species, said Cheng. The researchers have moved from the laboratory to a pilot-scale operation on a commercial farm.