How do engines really work? (IQ test contains nuts - yessss!) | Auto Expert John Cadogan

Internal combustion - one of the most commonly misunderstood processes there is. The TH-cam troll dickhead - one of the lowest classes of human existence there is. It’s a nutbag marriage of educational opportunity made in Heaven.
"Even if scientists somehow succeed at producing cheap AND green hydrogen, we come to problem number 2: millions of cars in a dense city spewing water vapour out of their exhaust pipes. In summer we'll get constant equatorial climate. In winter, a constant sheet of ice on streets and pavements alike." - gvaley
It takes a special class of moron indeed to concoct an absurd hypothesis such as this. This is a kind of spectacularly uninformed nut-job position to take on hydrogen cars - drowning us all in their watery exhausts.
Perhaps we should buy Noah some fresh lumber and a power saw. Even though that never happened.
What do you think happens when you burn gasoline/petrol? One litre of petrol (that’s about 700 grams) sucks in about nine cubic metres of air and goes ‘boom’. (It actually only needs about 1.9 cubic metres of oxygen gas, but a whole bunch of nitrogen comes along for the ride because … air.)
It all burns, producing about 1200 litres of CO2 (that’s what it would be at one atmosphere and room temperature, once it cools down) and about one litre of water (if it was a liquid - but it’s really coming out the exhaust pipe as saturated steam - so about 1700 litres of saturated steam).
So - ballpark - one litre of petrol burns and releases one litre of liquid water, once it cools down. Because water is exhaust ... #entropy.
If you’re standing on a busy road and one car every second is passing you by, over an hour or so, near you, about 250 cubic metres of saturated steam is being pumped out, all around you. You’re standing in it. That’s how this already works.
For the year ended 30 June 2018, we proud former convict arseholes burned about 17.5 billion litres of petrol here in Shitsville, and once all that steam cooled down and condensed, we go about 17.5 billion litres of liquid water.
If you want to put it in a box, you’ll need - say - a football field as the base, and the box will stretch about 1.8 kilometres into the sky. That’s a pretty big box - more than double the height of the Burj Khalifa (that’s the big glass building Tom Cruise jumped all over in Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol.)
So - essentially - pretending that the production of water is going to be a problem if we switch to a hydrogen economy for transport is just spectacularly ignorant of the status quo. We’re already drowning in it.
"The first law of thermal dynamics is garbage together with the rest of them, use your common sense. The internal combustion engine is the most inefficient engine ever invented." - John B
Pro tip: When criticising a fundamental pillar of science, it’s a good idea to be able to spell the subject of your dissertation. If you want to be taken seriously.
Modern gasoline car: about 30 per cent efficient. Modern diesel: Early 40s. Steam locomotive (a good one): up to about eight per cent. So John B’s claim here - quote: internal combustion / most inefficient engine ever - is pretty much total bullshit.
Incidentally, internal combustion doesn’t stack up too badly in the efficiency domain. Human muscular efficiency is only about 20 per cent efficient. Single junction photovoltaic cells (the ones on people’s rooftops) are about 33 per cent efficient - if they’re really good ones.
So, they’re on par with internal combustion. (Of course, it doesn’t really matter because the sunlight is free - until the government figures out a way to tax that.) Gas turbine power station: About 40 per cent efficient.
Photosynthesis: two or three per cent efficient.
My challenge to you - the non-nut viewer - is: If just two per cent of energy is lost in an engine via unburned hydrocarbons, and only 30 per cent (or thereabouts) of the energy in the fuel actually gets to the crankshaft, where does the other 70-odd per cent of the energy in the fuel actually go?
Riddle me that.
Let me know in the comments feed below. Thanks for watching - and if you get a sec, smash that subscribe button and the bell notification icon. If you hated this report, beat the thumbs-down button into submission - in some ways I’d enjoy that even more.
If I get enough interesting answers on this - ‘Where does that energy go’ - topic, I’ll fill in the blanks for you in a report next week on just how good your engine is at wasting energy, and how hard it is for the brainiacs to fix that.