Designing a heat pipe to improve the exhaust emissions from petrol engines

The national engineering Laboratory and the Shell research laboratory have co-operated in applying the heat pipe to the problem of exhaust emission from petrol engine. It is known that the carbon monoxide CO, un-burnt hydrocarbons (HxCy) and oxides of Nitrogen (NOx) content of the exhaust will vary with air to fuel ratio as shown in figure (1), in a conventional car engine the maximum efficiency is achieved at 15:1 and maximum power is obtained at 12:1. It's known that as the air fuel ratio increases, the CO content decreases and HxCy, NOx go through a minimum and maximum respectively. A considerable important in both CO and NOx content could be chivied by selecting a very weak mixture, but this not possible in a standard engine carburetor system due to the ignition difficulty, because the fuel is not fully vaporized, and because the fuel is not distributed equally between the cylinders and the vapor content is not as high as it should be due to the pressure of liquid fuel. This problem could be solved by designing a heat pipe that can transferring a certain quantities of heat from the exhaust to the induction manifold at the carburetor outlet as shown in figure (2). Under this condition a mixture as lean as 22:1 will ignite with out difficulty. In this paper, a complete design of heat pipe is carried out, taking into account the necessary criteria to decide various geometrical parameters. The design has been carried out using basic formulas in thermodynamics, heat transfer and physics. The result of this design have been checked for various practical limits. (author)