"Frozen" Hybrid gets 120 mpg

Maybe by the time I need a new Prius I can have the new one delivered to the local engine freezer before I pick it up...

 

Cryogenics: Not just for freaks anymore!!

Herb

 

I'm curious what this does to the properties of the metal to make them last longer.

 

wait... why would doing that to your engine increase fuel economy... and also, is it permanent? if you make something cold, it'll get hot again wont it? plus freezing your engine like that.. wont it make different metals become different sizes? this doesnt make sense to me

 

If I'm not mistaken, the benifit here is that the molacules get all compressed because of the cold. This means bearing become super polished and super dense. This causes reduction in ware and added strength. Gw

 

I'll believe this one when I see it. Even if I believe that this process can make steel harder and more resistant to wear, why does it follow that better milage would result? I think this is a case of either fraud or wishfull thinking. More likely the second. Don't you think toyota/honda/GM/Ford/etc would chuck their engines into the cold for a few hours if it really doubled the milage?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(ohthetrees\";p=\"93078)</div>

I think they'd make them out of plastic if they could get away with it. Anything that makes the car last longer means fewer cars sold over time, no matter how nice for the customer...

 

It'd probably work really well on Titan if you could get the car up there in the first place and had really really warm clothes.

 

Think about it, Crank Bearings, Valve Seals, Piston Rings all will have less friction and save MPGs. Here are some other related links.
[hr:9a23bb0b7b]
http://www.onecryo.com/onecryo/motorsport-...t-prijune98.htm
http://www.300below.com/site/racenrally.html
http://www.metal-wear.com/Cryo_Racers.htm
http://www.hekimianracing.com/cryomain.html#cre

There is a lot to this, and the technology has been around a while.

 

interesting to hear more about it, but i really dont see this as being valid. saying he gets "up to 120 mpg" means nothing to me. in my "warm and fuzzy" Prius, i can get "up to" 100 mpg.

 

ok i have studied topics like this extensively as I am a senior in materials science at NCSU. I am very skeptical as to this man's claims, although this post has piqued my curiosity and i will do some further research on this topic; but until i find some legitimate journals with quantitative results on cryogenic tempering for both steel and aluminum (and titanium??) i am not going to put any faith in what these news reports claim. All three metals have an extensive number of different alloys which change the properties dramatically depending on what is added to the metal and how much. There are thousands of phase transformation graphs for each metal showing how the properties change when different elements are added. To think that there is some magical cryogenic process that makes aluminum as strong as steel and benefits all metal alloys the same seems entirely bogus to me, and my olfactory is indicating a scam, but i will look into this with the help of some metals experts (i work with microelectronics) and repost what i find.

 

thanks annaeus, let us know. and if you're in town sunday, the raleigh/durham/chapel hill Prius club is having a meeting. PM me if you're interested and i'll give you the time/place/etc.

 

Back in 1989 I was on the team doing a major rebuild of a paper mill in northwestern Ontario. All new process control equipment including new control rooms.

Due to all the wood fiber laying around, Pine Beetles were everywhere. They're sort of like cockroaches but have the nasty habit of biting you too.

The lab QA guys taught me a really cool trick: they'd pick up Pine Beetles with tweezers, then dunk them into liquid nitrogen. They used liquid N2 as a coolant for the absorb/desorb phase of particle analysis for paper coatings.

Scary fact: sometimes the Pine Beetles came back to life.

And the maintenance guys would sometimes dip the large bearings from the centrifugal compressors in liquid N2. They claimed the bearings lasted twice as long.

I think some of this claim is hocus-pocus and some of it is legitimate. I'd guess 60/40.

 

the pine beetles came back to life after being dipped in liquid N2?

ewwww.

my dad works in a paper mill, i'll have to tell him about that.

 

Well, out of 10 Pine Beetles I personally dunked in liquid N2, only 2 of them showed signs of life after a 15 minute thaw.

That was nothing a steel-toed work boot couldn't handle: CRUNCH!

 

Oh, make sure to tell your dad that normal Cryogenic handling precautions apply: face shield, apron, gloves, etc. Sometimes if you put something at room temp into a cryo flask, like a Dewar flask, it can explode.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(jayman\";p=\"93273)</div>

I used to work around liquid N2 also. We had a bad fly problem for a while - guys started catching flies, dunking them in liquid N2 for a minute, and then throw them on the floor. Result - shattered fly. (These were big flies, mind you, around 1.5cm body length) Our flies didn't come back to life.

I'd like to see some real data from the cryo/metal experiments as well.

 

i've used insulated ice buckets with N2 without incident many times. we don't bother with cryo flasks. but i imagine that could happen.

i worked with liquid N2 and fetal pigs for a while with no particular protective equipment and never got so much as a speck of blood on me. but it was still pretty disgusting.