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Re: [GMCnet] interesting new engine design [message #67690 is a reply to message #67682] Thu, 17 December 2009 10:32 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
GMC_LES is currently offline  GMC_LES   United States
Messages: 569
Registered: October 2009
Location: Montreal
Karma:
Senior Member
Although a bit off topic, I enjoy these sorts of discussions. I'll be
naughty and submit some interesting reading material to get our minds
thinking even harder.

A while ago, I came across an engine project I found very interesting. The
engine was called the "Captive Thrust Engine" and discussions can be found
by joining the Yahoo Group "A084Experimenters" and searching the words
"Captive Thrust Engine" or "peroxide" The inventor of the engine is the
group moderator. Her name is Brie.

The Captive Thrust Engine basically used Hydrogen Peroxide and a silver
catalyst to produce super heat and pressure.

Below are some quotes I pulled from the groups discussions. Quotes are long.

Enjoy,
Les Burt
Montreal




"Captive thrust engine

O.K. folks, here is the history of the engine.

I was aware of the catalytic reaction of 2H2O2 with alternating
nickel and silver screens since 1967. It just sat in the back of my
little brain till it was needed.
In late 1967, I learned of Bill Lear's experiments with "vapor
engines", (they used fluids other than water), when it was included as
an aside at the end of a Car and Driver Magazine article on the
Stanley Steamer in particular, and steam in general.
In 1969, I started getting interested in the Wankel engine, but did
not like several inherent weak points in the design, and started
thinking about a non turbine engine that would spin on a single
centroid, rather than a moving one as the Wankel did.
In 1974, I am stationed in Germany, and the first Arab oil embargo
hit. I started looking at non petroleum based fuel possibilities, not
for pollution control, but to free us from energy blackmail, or worse,
the very real chance of loosing a large scale war if our oil supplies
were shut off by oil producing nations aligning themselves with our
enemies. I come back to steam, but need a highly portable fuel source
that this Country can either tap into, or produce with no help from
any other nation. I pull the peroxide up from the back of my brain,
and research how it is produced, and find out it is made from sea
water. I am required to work very long hours away from home for the
next four months, and then am transferred back to the States, to go to
College full time, while commanding a Commo Section at an Army Reserve
Combat Engineer unit about fifty miles away from where I'm going to
College in Ithaca, New York.
It is while I am studying Engineering here that the Captive Thrust
Engine starts to take shape, I keep it to myself.
Fast forward to 1978, I move to the Knoxville Tennessee area and
continue work on the engine. I live in the house next door to the
Associate Pastor of my Baptist Church, and one day, he and one of the
elders of the Church, a millionaire who owns a huge accounting firm,
are visiting, when they happen to see the drafting table with a
drawing in progress on it, and eight or ten drawings rolled up in
drawers beside it. They look at the drawing in progress, and ask me
what it is, and i tell them that it is an engine that I'm designing
that perhaps one day I can interest someone with some money in, and
the Elder tells me that one of his clients owns a machine shop that
does very close tolerance work for Oak Ridge National Labs.
A meeting is set up, and I show the Machine shop owner, giving a full
explanation of the operating principal of the engine with all the
ramifications. He is floored, and jumps in with both feet, in a week,
a lawyer joins the team, I finish the assembly drawings, and draw up
the Patent drawings, along with the technical description of the
engine's operation.
A week later shares of voting stock are issued to each of the five of
us, with my holding enough shares to be able to to push through my
agenda with the agreement of only one other officer.
Several weeks later, the lawyer and I spend time in the Patent Office
in Washington D.C., and find nothing even remotely close to our
engine, and we return to Knoxville to relay the news.
While back in Knoxville, we run into the problem, that I believe,
doomed the entire project to failure. My patent drawings showed the
entire principal of operation for the engine, and everyone but me was
terrified that someone could steal our design once the patent was
applied for.
I tried for a week to make them understand that once we got our
patent applied for number, that locked in the fact that the design was
ours as of a certain date, and no one could take it.
They all insisted that we not submit the principal of operation
drawings, but only an isometric exploded drawing of the engine, along
with my description of the operating cycle of the engine to the Patent
Office.
I tried to explain to them that this engine was so different, that,
in order for the Patent Office to not think we were trying to patent
some sort of perpetual motion machine, they NEEDED to see the
operational drawings. They said that we had a running engine, if they
thought we were full of it, they could always come down and look at it
run.
After being stonewalled for several weeks, the plans that they wanted
sent were hand carried up to the Patent Office, and three months later
the Patent Office said that they could not understand what was going
on, and suspended our patent application for (I think), 90 days. In
the interim, Senator Baker saw the motor, and made a bunch of
promises, and I had to return to Europe.
They said that they would send the operational drawings if that is
what it took, and they would keep me informed, but to the best of my
knowlege, they did nothing, and I heard nothing.
In 1984, I returned, went to the elder's house and asked about what
happened, and was told that nothing had happened with it, and the
plans were destroyed.
I moved to Florida, lived on a boat, and the attempts on my life soon
followed.

Brie"


Another Quote:

"Re: Captive thrust engine

HI Brie,
> OK. I think I've got this figured out. You built a type of steam engine.
> Fueled by hydrogen peroxide. Either by injecting the peroxide over a
> catalyst, the decomposition of the peroxide produced the motive force. Or
> as a binary fuel with another fuel component. The neat part is that it can
> be a very compact design. No boiler, no preheating. With simple automated
> electrical controls the engine could be rotated to proper positon for
> starting and be started - much like a current car. Just turn a key and go.
> The high fuel pressures available give high reactive force. At a cost. The
> power spikes are quite significant.
> How did I do?
> Ron

You did great Ron, the Peroxide was a monopropellant, passing over
alternating nickel and silver coated screens, catalytically releasing the
extra oxygen atom. A tremendous amount of heat is released in the process,
heating the remaining water to 1,425 degrees. The exhaust of this process
is, by weight, 25% pure oxygen, think about what THAT could have done to
re-arrange the chemical composition of the air over cities, and 75%
supersaturated steam, NO pollution at all. The chemical reaction is nothing
new, it was discovered by a Frenchman in the 1800's and is used for the
attitude control jets in spacecraft, as well as the Bell Jetpack. Where I
come in, is in designing an engine capable of using the high velocity, high
pressure steam, while requiring much less volume flow than a turbine would.
By the way, Hydrogen Peroxide is made from sea water, and the engine's
primary exhaust proponent is water vapor, see how it would have been a self
sustaining "system"? I will go into greater detail later today, afternoon
your time, when I get off this cell, and on the laptop.

Brie"

And More

" So from your description, this is just a simple catalyzed reduction
reaction
> of H2O2 to H20 + O and the balance heat. Very simple and elegant. How well
> can you throttle the reaction?
>
> John Z.

John,
Turning the reaction on and off is how I maintain RPM.
On the front of the engine's power shaft is a flat plate that hat two holes
drilled into it, 180 degrees apart. Both had LED's firing through the holes
to
photo transistors. One set was to time the peroxide firing, the other was to
a
primitive counter/clock that would open and close a main fuel control gate
valve
to turn on and off the flow to the timing gate valves downstream that were
for
the injection timing of the engine.
There were two catalytic chambers, placed 180 degrees apart that were fine
threaded into the combustion ring of the motor. This combustion ring
surrounded
the outer circumference of the rotor that was part of the one piece power
shaft
which was machined from a single piece of 7 inch diameter 440C bar.
The only moment that was fed into the power shaft was a pure turning moment.
Brie




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Les Burt Montreal 1975 Eleganza 26ft A work in Progress

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