Pre-Ignition Catalytic Converter or C.R.A.P.?

It is unbelievable to me how the unscrupulous will take advantage of people and lie to try to sell something. It is only slightly less unbelievable to me that enough people are duped by their schemes that new schemes are cooked-up by these sociopaths.

Of late, it is the new ways to improve gas mileage. The Vornado, the XXX and now, the leader in the category of "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with Bull$#!t! A recent addition to the art form of the latter has come upon the internet scene. I'm talking about the "PICC" or "Pre-Ignition Catalytic Converter.

Here's their website. Check it out. Put your critical-observer visor on and turn your skeptic shield up to "full"! Open it in a new browser tab or window so you can go back and forth between it and my re-information (as opposed to their disinformation!) critique.

This is Absolutely too good to be true.

I hardly know where to start to refute all these claims, but I'll start at the top.
They say,

"What if we could turn the gases you are throwing away via
your exhaust into added mileage and power for your vehicle?"

Well, there are lots of ways of doing that. A turbocharger. A supercharger. They use the kinetic energy in those gases imparted by the engine's "pumping action". A catalytic converter does
take large gas molecules and "turn them into smaller particles" (which is what happens when you burn something). They're burned in the catalytic converter, not the tailpipe. And the result is fewer "large gas molecules" and particulates are released. Somewhat "less exhaust", because some of it is converted in burning to more heat. But there is very little unburned gasoline molecules (distinct from gas, i.e., molecules in a gaseous state) in your exhaust to begin with. Dump a bunch of gasoline molecules into a catalytic converter and you quickly ruin it. They're made to deal with trace amounts, making them even more...trace. The point being, you're creating some more heat outside the engine--where it can do work--but not much. And not much compared to the heat that pours out of the exhaust manifold or is circulated out through the water and/or oil cooling system through fans and radiators. If the PICC was claiming to be able to use the excess heat that your car produces---then they'd have something! But that's not what they're claiming.

How about that in-car gasoline "cracker"? You could, I suppose "crack" formulated gasoline. If you were to try something like this--and it would have to be by some other mechanism than what is described on the PICC site, perhaps involving a catalytic reactor (that isn't driven by waste heat as your exhaust catalytic converter is--maybe Citgo has one they're not using--you might (or maybe not, my long-chain butyl chem is a bit rusty) create some energy. But the backyard mechanic really shouldn't attempt to "crack" formulated gasoline. Really, the best gasoline cracker you have is your car's engine. It does a really good job of "cracking" all the BTUs, or heat-energy out of that gas.

Chevron and Shell have done their very best to make gasoline clean burning and high octane for the price. There's admittedly little bit of competition in the market place, but there is enough so that one company just cannot afford to leave NINE TIMES the efficiency on the table. "I'll buy ABC Gas, theirs is so much worse than XYZ gas!" And if you think all the gas companies are doing it, to what end? Participate in some conspiracy to make you consume more gas? Pass up the 100MPG carburetor from the GM "vault" please!

What's next on PICC's list of BS? Well, converting a liquid to a "plasma" could only effectively be done with the magnetic resources and heat resources of, oh, THE SUN! Or, if the "liquid" in question was, maybe, LIQUID HELIUM!! Then you might be able to get transitory plasma signatures in this very weird super-state of matter. But room temperature liquids? Good luck, Einstein (or should I say..Bose-Einstein? Heh. Physics joke.)

Nearly all industrial plasmas (TV sets, fluorescent tubes, those cool "lightning globes") are created by introducing electrons into a gas, not a liquid, where it is MUUCH easier to dislodge other electrons to create the plasma at low energy levels. Output of this electron interaction with the plasma is...photons!

You're not going to be able to turn your gas-burner into Star Trek's Plasma Drive with a little box.

Then there's the final claim in the second main paragraph, "...the gasoline you pay for goes further and the exhaust is so negligible that it hardly registers." Okay, bunky. Pull out your last smog check certificate (for those of you unlucky enough not to drive a classic car that is exempt). Look at the numbers. We're talking "parts" (meaning measurable particles--usually in the micron range) per MILLION. Sometimes, on the most modern and "SULEV" or "P-ZERO" rated cars, many of the numbers are already practically zero. One part in a hundred million. I think that goes to "hardly registers" without the intervention of a PICC. Your nose is a sensitive machine, and you can sometimes smell exhaust--more when the engine is old, or cold, or needs a tune-up. But most of what you feel is carbon dioxide (C02)that is really hot. Guess what? Aside from the heat, it is really, really hard to "crack" energy out of CO2. The sun does it. Plants do it, but it takes them a long time...oh, and the sun, too. C02 is your major greenhouse gas, and there are a whole bunch of smart people trying to figure out what to do with it. Burying it in the ground is a more feasible option than burning it in your car. Really.

What about their claims for increases in efficiency? On the face of it, look at the counterfactual to those claims. There just isn't 9X the energy available in the gasoline over what our cars burn now to "crack" out of it! Think of how inefficient your engine would have to be to only be able to extract 1/9 of the energy available in the gasoline-- and that it would some how be available to be merely "broken down" or "cracked from" the fuel to be used. Here are some fuels and their BTU stores. You'd be better off burning a pound of coal than a gallon of gasoline (10% of 125K BTUs) in your car if gasoline internal combustion engines were as inefficient as these guys claim.

Looks like, if anything, they should be starting with diesels as there's more energy in #2 fuel oil than in gasoline. But there aren't as many truckers as there are desperate people with 80's cars and '08 gas bills.

As to their test of a V8 318ci engine running at 50% load for an hour at 3,000rpm. That is equivalent to a "van...traveling up a 30 degree incline for one hour"? This is Wonder Woman's Invisible Van? How much does this "van" weigh? Where does that fit into the calculations? An engine floating up a hill on its own doesn't have to pull much weight. Even so, 200mpg, or their claim of 2 pounds of gasoline per hour is absurd.

Okay, I've been throwing a lot of arrows. Here's my concrete calculation using their meager data posing as engineering, if not science.

1. Three thousand RPM in a V8 engine, is 24,000 ignition cycles per minute. Or one million, four hundred forty thousand ignition cycles per hour.
2. In that hour, they claim 2 pounds of gasoline used. That's 907 grams.
3. Dividing those 1.44 million sparks into those 907 grams of gasoline, that's 0.00063g of gasoline per spark. Wow. That's a really small number. Sixty three hundred thousandths of a gram.
4. Hmm.. Or about 2 parts in a MILLION per GRAM! You know, that's less than the amount left over in the exhaust? Wow. These guys are good. They're not just getting all the energy out of the exhaust, they're getting more energy than is in the exhaust! Maybe its nuclear. wow.

1. Okay, that last was a bit snarky and unscientific. Back on the beam, we check our table of energy in gasoline, and have to do some more math to convert teir BTUs from 125k/gal to something per gram. That's a volumetric gallon, and our fuel gram is a weight. So it depends on the density of gasoline. Assuming 60 degrees F., these folk in England tell us that's 737.22 kg/cu.m or 0.073722 grams per ml.
2. (Getting there, bear with me.) A gallon is 3,785.41178 ml. So a ml of gas has 0.0302832942
BTUs of energy.

Multiply that by #2 results and you get, out of each spark in that super-dooper
(de-dooper-de-booper!) engine, 0.00223254502 BTUs of energy. Let's round, okay? I'll be REALLY generous and round to twenty-three ten-thousandths.

My friends, you're going to have to take my word for it (but I'm happy to continue down this rabbit hole) that 23/10,000 of a BTU is about 1.2 ft/lbs of energy. To frame it another way, a horsepower is approximately 2,544 BTUs an hour (they did this for an hour). A horsepower is thirty three thousand ft-lbs/min. Or 500 (more or less--we can start really rounding now) ft-lbs/hour. A Chrysler 318 engine has nominally 180hp, but can make much more. We're interested in economy, so that's a good starting point. So that's 9,000 ft-lbs/hr.

What did we calculate? 1.2ft/lbs? But a 318 cubic inch engine should be making FOUR THOUSAND TIMES that amount of energy. Basically, the light wouldn't stay on in the engine. It couldn't get out of its own way, even tethered to an invisible van! It can't be done. There isn't enough raw energy in 2 lbs of gasoline to run a V8 motor at 3,000rpm for an hour. You'd need something that would get you a 4,500% improvement on efficiency. Can't be done. QED.


Then they ask a real relevent question:

"What does this Mean To You?"

Here's what it means: this website and their claims are snake-oil. They're trying to hide it in pseudo science meaningless graphs and "testimonials" and mumbo-jumbo. BTW, I love how none of their mechanics quotes actually have names attached to them. I wonder if an ASE-certified mechanic could lose their license if they really put up something like this? More likely, the quotes were just made-up. I hate to think certified mechanics would be trying to pawn this crap off on their customers.

Here's a good one.

"we believe...you will be evaporating fuel out of
your tank faster than you are using it for your travel."

Uh. Meaning...you "believe" that you're going to eat a hole in the bottom of my gas tank with your crappy "covalizer" agent? Or, in a more mundane interpretation of "believe", that you
actually have no facts nor evidence to back up your idea, so your claim can only be a "belief".

And on that "covalizer". Wow, they should just trademark that name. Someone is going to want to buy that from them when we are all driving electric cars. I mean, "engergizer" is taken, so you've got to have something that sounds scientific.

The videos on this site are really just too absurd to take on point-by-point. Just suffice to say when they say things like, "mechanically, it is just like your car engine", they're not lying--COMPLETELY. What they're using is a Sterling engine. Which has some mechanical similarity with your car engine--and about the same mechanically as a 1900 train engine. A sterling engine will make mechanical energy out of anything that will burn and has enough water to make steam. That's why they're in use in the third world. Low-grade fuel sources and you can still make power and it won't ruin the engine. It'll be hell to clean up afterwards, but it can be done.

We won't even go into why they put this absurd video on this PICC site. I didn't see a demo of any of the products (okay, I could only stand it until 5:30) wearing a tie or being in a garage doesn't make you an expert nor a mechanical nor fuel engineer. More evidence of snake oil.
Oh, and water injection into engines for cooling has been done for a long time. No magic, but that doesn't mean you'll get the same power as if you were running 100% gas, rather than 60% gas and 40% water. I'm guessing you'll get something like 62-63% of the energy.

Perhaps the only "real" thing on their website is the "HAFC Optimizer". Sure. I could probably make one of these--or at least buy it somewhere else on the internet. It could very well be a module that remaps your ignition and injection. Most people who get these use them to get more power (and attendant LESS gas mileage) out of their performance cars or work trucks. It's not hard to do, as the manufacturers have to balance between fuel mileage targets and the market place of horsepower and speed claims. But the "UCSA" (Mitchell Enterprises of Clovis, CA) will probably set it up to put the car's computer into super-lean-almost-knocking mode all the time. Better gas mileage, sure, for a while. Because a super-lean firing will destroy your car's power and destroy your engine in no time.

But I concede you might see some percentage (maybe even double-digits, if your car is out of tune) increase enough to be sold on their snake oil and to spread the word for them. They'll be long gone by the time your engine goes, "KA-BLAMMO!"


What about that evil catalytic converter that the auto industry was forced to put (thoughtlessly) downstream of your engine's combustion, rather than upstream where the smart people of PICC would put it?

Maybe the converter used to do a great deal to combat smog, but its role has been reduced, though not eliminated. It is still an important step, the last one, to destroy all the smog left in the exhaust gas as possible. The catalytic converter of 1971, around when they were widely introduced, was grossly inefficient compared to today. Today there is so little non-combusted material due to hyper-efficient combustion chambers (VVT, hemispheric chambers, multiple valves, multiple spark) that catalytic converters can be the last link in an emissions control chain to put out "SULEV" emissions. Which is practically zero. As low as 0.1g per mile. Less than
1/2 oz. of NOx per 100 miles!!! See this EPA chart on outputs from different "classes" of vehicles.

There is some great wastes on Internal Combustion Engines. Some inefficiencies that someone (not likely the UCSA) will figure out how to exploit. For instance, figure out how you can retrieve the up to 50% of engine energy wasted as heat, and turn that into kinetic energy. Then you've really got something! Maybe a stirling engine run off steam created by the excess heat generated by the gas motor? Just an idea. That many have had.

Other charlatains, other pitches.

These aren't the only guys that are trying to separate people from their money faster than their right foot which is attached to the gas tank which is attached to their wallet.

There was this article in the paper the other day about some guy in Pleasanton who was putting some wires in a PVC pipe, along with a cathode and an anode and some attachment plumbing. About $30 in materials. Then you hook one end to your car's alternator, the other to the air inlet and fill it with water.

"The first time I use Pelligrino. After that, you can use your Aquafina bottled water." Actual quote. Sheesh.

The purpose of this contraption was to create (or should I say, "crack"!) hydrogen and oxygen out of the water in the pipe and feed it to your car's engine as "mixing gases". Too bad the second law of thermodynamics says that the energy needed to produce the electricity at the alternator to convert the water to gas will greatly exceed the energy you could get out of that same engine by feeding the gas back into it.

They are charging $1,000 each for these things and claimed they had sold 2,000 units.

P.T. Barnum was right. Don't be another one.

However, to be fair, I should point out that if the engine is inefficient, as in a DOT test on "older diesel engines", you might get some increased burn efficiencies out of oxygen injection. Four to seven percent in their tests. Good, but not hardly enough to spend $1000.00 on. If you were spending $20,000 on gas, maybe.

I think I'll wait for a real fuel cell. It uses gas, but zero emissions as it uses the _energy_ created in the fuel cell, not the gases directly to run an electric motor. There's a lot of interest in cars and technology using this idea.

It is very much worth investigating the real thing. Real science. Real applications. Not pseudo-science, wild claims and "see how you can become a dealer" marketing schemes.

To quote a wise friend of mine, "Check your tire pressures and add a pound or two. You'll save more gas than any of these stupid gadgets!"

Last of the Air-Cooled Porsches DO command a premium

Tipped recently to the Craigslist Index site, I couldn't resist taking a look at how my favorite car's stats are doing. And here's the graph they so generously provide:



The label appears elsewhere on their page, but this is for "Make: Porsche". I love this graph. My current favorite Porsche (besides my own Legs) is the 1996-98 911. Cognescenti know this car as the "993", the internal project number for the car. The 993 was also made in 1995, the changeover model year from the previous "964" project. But that '95 911 has slightly less HP do mostly to intake manifold changes. No surprise, Porsche is known for Continuous Process (and Product) Improvement.

So look at the graph. I don't think Craigslist has that bump in the Avg. Price for the 1997 Porsche because its my favorite. And the slight dip in the 96 and 98 relative to the typical aging trend is interesting, too, eh? The 1999 911 was a new model, the "996", and it had some growing pains which explains the further drop in Avg. Price even though the volume trends up.

What is happening for 1997 is that I'm not the only one who claims that year/model Porsche as the favorite. But there's one more deeper thing going on here, which might explain the 1996 price drop and the big volume pop in the same year.

Of course there's a relationship between volume (availability) and price, but I think it has to do with the introduction of the Boxster (986) model that year, sold in 1996 as a 1997. The Boxster was a cheaper car, and as it has had benefit of Continous Process Improvement as well, the first cars are relatively less-powerful, less comforatable, less-reliable and therefore...cheaper! Which, blows the curve, as they say, for the 911 prices.

The relatively lower pool of cars for sale for the 1997 year (as reported to Craigslist), and the commensurate raise in price, shows that the demand is up, the availablity is down--fewer lovers of the car putting their baby on the block and so the price jumps.

The 1998 drop comes from the fact that there was very little 993 production for that year. It was a "short" year, with Porsche wanting to introduce the brand-new 996 model. Volume is up because the 1998 996 sold very well, but price is down because the new 996 suffered many of the teething pains that the 986 did in its maiden year. But all is well with Porsche, as the trend is up-up-up since then.

Putting aside the absolutely ghastly depreciation hit these cars take in their first year (look at the 2008-2007 cliff), I see an interesting trend in the most recent years. 2005-2006 price spikes, but volume drops. That would be the introduction of the next 911, the Projekt "997" car.

Not enough samples for 2009 cars--I presume the drop is due to "lease escapes" and the economy. Two Thousand Nine is another year for the 997, but there are Very Significant Product Improvements in '09, and it will be interesting to see this graph in a year.

In the meantime, it doesn't look good for the shoppers of 1997 Porsche 993s. Lucky sellers, though.