Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

Just out of curiosity, what kind of emmissions do these little engines put out. I am sure that the big gasolines are pretty bad but how about our methane based engines?

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

They put out the same stuff all combustion engines do; carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, water, unburnt oil and so on.
But you will spew out more pollutants from your car than you will ever from your model airplane engine. Even your lawn mower will produce more pollution.

Its a matter of scale. We modelers are on the almost unmeasurable level. If you are concerned go electric -- oops I forgot about all those coal fired power plants needed to provide the energy to charge up the batteries. And the batteries, where to dispose of them? Pollution everywhere!

So I guess you are dammed if you do and dammed if you don't. I guess you will have to go in for slope gliding.

Cheers,

Chip

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

I remember reading that lawn equipment and motorcycles and whatnot have been reported to emit much more pollution per unit of fuel burned than the worst of the street legal vehicles we drive. I would imagine if this is the case the gassers on our models are even worse. I have no idea how bad methanol would be, though I've always been under the impression it is cleaner burning than petrol.

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

Yes the methanol is clean burning, but try to breathe below a hovering helicopter or close by[X(], they spew out alot of smoke and most of it is oilfumes, but it is peanuts in the big picture

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

....it's the hydrocarbons from our oil that is bad. If you measured a car burning gasoline
going down the street, and a model aeroplane flying along right beside it.....the aeroplane
would be putting out about a hundred times more pollution than the car. [X(]

EDIT>>>...a clean burning California car that is. ;)

FBD. ;)

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

....if you scaled up the size of our tiny engine displacemant, say a .60 size engine
( 6/10 of one cubic inch) up to ths size of a 350 Chevy engine.... which would be
about the equivalent of 500 .60 size engines.....

....it would put put out more smog than a few thousand auto engines. [:@]

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

Yes, a friend of mine is creating smog on our field when running his raptor 50 on 30/23 fuel. I never stop beeing impressed by how much smoke those heliengines can spew out. I will not get too surprised if my greedy government some day put a new tax on glowfuel here in Norway and cover behind the environmental case.

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

Interesting, i figured because our exhaust pipes have no kind of catalitinc converter and emission regulations that they would be much worse (to scale) than our conventional car engines. I am a little more curious as to the difference between methanal and gasoline. Lets say we have a 30cc glow and 30cc gas. What would have worse emissions. Also, does the longer flight times of gasoline dampen any differences.

I am not worried but thaught of it this morning and didn't really no the answer. Should be an interesting thread no less.

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

The cleanest burning gasoline engine, such as ultra-low emission engines(thank you Honda) still produce CO2 as much as cars from the mid 80's. They have just managed to get rid of most of the other crap that was in the exhaust, so now we breath clean air but will die from global warming. Oh, and our rc engines would put out a itty bitty fraction of the CO2 produced by the Honda.

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

I do not know which of the thousands of potential causes will bring about my death, but I am quite sure it will not be global warming;).

jess

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

....let's keep the topic on nitro engine pollution. ;)

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

I don't think that's gonna kill me either, but do you differentiate between a "nitro engine" and a "glow engine" running on 0% nitro?[8D]

jess

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

With regards to heli engines and fuel, I was under the impression that heli fuel is designed to produce more smoke so that you can tell if your engine has quit.

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

I recall the AMA interacted with the EPA some years ago on this matter and convinced the EPA that we were small and insignificant and not worth regulating. Sometimes it is good to be small and insignificant.[8D]

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

If I am right on this California does not allow the sale of 2 stk lawn equiptment any more has to be 4 stroke no gas/oil mix ,martin

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

If I am right on this California does not allow the sale of 2 stk lawn equiptment any more has to be 4 stroke no gas/oil mix ,martin
bottom line however I do not think our little engines create an issue here and I fly diesels and 4 strk glow martin


the "least problem" may be with FAI fuel no nitro

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

california wont allow little 2 stroke engines anymore which was widely used for lawn equipment, but those big huge refineries can belch out 30 tons
of soot in the air and thats ok. im so glad im gone from that hell hole. hope it falls in the ocean. L.A. was just voted number 1 worst place to live. it was in last weeks paper. good bye for ever

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

Thank goodness that O.S. Max is coming to save us all with the .55 AX biofuel edition!

http://image.rcuniverse.com/forum/up...93/Ay74387.jpg

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

I gotta wonder what puts out more pollutants, all the model airplane engines ran in a year or a G5 taking Al Gore cross-country...

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

Lol, that is nifty. I wonder how it will run?

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

LOL, I wonder how it runs?

RE: Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

Ya no what i just noticed. I am aproaching post 1000. Cool :D:D

RE: Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

Hey thats not nice, I'm still stuck in this sewer.

RE: Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

In reply to cambo I prefer quality to quantity:D

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

I bet that would run pretty good though slightly less power then the meth versions. Ethanol has one additional CH3 group added to a methanol which makes the fuel burn a little slower and with a little less vigor but the difference shouldn't be really noticeable if the engine is designed for it.

RE: Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

And the coal fired electical plants are cleaner than our automobiles, not to mention that many of them are now fired with natural gas.

RE: Nitro Engine Polution?
 

The methanol burns cleaner with less pollution, but puts out more carbon dioxide for the same work. Just on the news yesterday some British person was trying to get E85 banned in Britan because it was worse for the u know what crisis.

RE: Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

It also means it has more carbon and less hydrogen so more carbon dioxide, but about the same as far as pollution.

RE: Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

Actually, more carbon and more hydrogen. Either way it breaks down into three components, water, CO2 and heat (not including the oil). Of course water vapor is the number one greehouse gas but there isn't much we can do to limit that. It is still far less pollution then gasoline with its huge complex HC's and benzene rings being broken down.

RE: Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

methanol/ethanol requires more energy to produce than it makes and
then requires farm land to produce...

The 55ax bio-fuel is a PC answer and looking for a problem...

RE: Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

A few years back NASA had a very large electric think wingspan was over 100 ft solar film panels in the wing ceiling 100,000 ft ?? drone elctric power panels recharged the batteries stayed up for months do not know if still up there or not. Anything that burns alcohol, gas. diesel, even your wood campfires give off carbon dioxide martin

RE: Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

I think that if you consider emissions by engine displacement the model engine is far more pollutant than anything out there. Consider the fact that the engines are always run rich of stoich. Glow engines use a rich mixture to hold back detonation. In such a small cylinder combustion efficiency is pretty poor. I don't know what nitromethane does to emissions, but would be interesting to find out. A 2 stroke glow engine is about 11% efficient at best. OS's move with PVC and other things is in my opinion a preemptive effort on their part to avoid regulation. One would just need to figure out how many gallons of fuel are sold to get an idea of what kind of pollution occurs. but in the grand scheme of things vehicles will always be number one pollution contributors by volume.

At least castor oil and methanol are bio products. So we are pretty much emissions neutral in that regard.

It will be quite a while before you have to buy carbon credits to fly model aircraft.

RE: Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

Think I will sell Carbon Credits to Modlers....that should make you all feel better[:@]

RE: Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

Nitromethane will add some NOx to the exhaust but is likely to be less of a factor in overall emissions then the oil mixed in with the fuel. Either way
I don't think anyone is going to be coming after us for these. I would hope not anyway.

RE: Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

I'd betcha that the fumes belched out by the "Top Fuel" and "Alcohol" dragsters/funny cars at one major drag race would be more than we as modelers put out in a whole year...

RE: Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

LOL, no kidding. Have you ever seen "tractor racing" on espn 2. I turned it on oneday and they were racing in dirt while hauling some huge trailer. The only thing was (and this was quite funny to watch) that a 10ft stream of BLACK [X(] exhaust was rocketing into the air.

RE: Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

Actually our engines don't have enough peak combustion temp to make NOx. The nitrogen in partially burned nitromethane becomes nitric acid instead, which from an environmental aspect is good, because the nitric acid burns off in the exhaust stream.

RE: Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

Sport Pilot, what is NOx?

RE: Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

At about 1800 degrees you will start to get NOx, I haven't put a thermistor on mine so I don't know if they get that hot. I know snowmobile 2 cycles push 1400 and they run at less rpm and is liquid cooled. NOx are nitrogen oxides created in combustion. They are associated with the acid rain issue as the rise into the atmosphere and mix with water vapor it creates an acid condition. Below 1800, the nitrogen gets pushed through as N2 as there isn't enough heat to force the NOx bonds.

RE: Nitro Engine Pollution?
 

Thats right and with the stoichmetric [link=http://www.derose.net/steve/resources/engtables/flametemp.html]combustion temp[/link] being just over that, it is unlikely that very many model engines ever develop NOx. You would have to have the perfect glow plug temp to do so.