Why Solid State Might Save The Combustion Engine 

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99% chance its a scam

"Solid State Engine" - sounds more exciting words than photovoltaic gas lantern.

I'm no photovoltaics specialist, but I worked in a lab at a university where the people next door worked on micro-scale heat exchangers, and one of their projects was related to recovering waste heat from Concentrated Photovoltaic Cells (CPV), a system where a relatively cheap, large Fresnel-type lens diverts sunlight into a relatively expensive, small PV cell. The problem with that is that the cell efficiency was inversely proportional to its temperature, which is why they were trying to match these tiny heat exchangers with the tiny PV cells and use that heat to convert alcohol and plant oil into biodiesel. This engine obviously works at high temperatures. Low-Pressure Sodium Vapor lamps work at about 300°C, and the assembly seems too compact for meaningful insulation, so these cells would be working at high, temperatures, and therefore at lowered efficiencies. I'd wait for independent confirmation of these numbers before believing these are even in the correct order of magnitude.

Solid state combustion engine just sounds like a fuel cell with extra steps

I've been trying to conceive of an efficient "fuel into electricity" system for years, so I am also VERY skeptical that you can convert the energy twice and get even close to 80% efficiency. But I hope I'm wrong! I'd love an electric gas motorcycle that can go 1000miles on 4 gallons of gas 😊

Where does the heat go? If it is so efficient then the thing would not get hot. But there is a huge flame coming out of one end! I say BS. Total complete BS.

So you get an animation and an explanation. Still seems sus to me. Thermal efficiency claims are unbelievably high. Extraordinary claims...yadayadayada.

The only legit science in this episode is the shaver.

I feel like we’re going in circles. Burning something to make energy from a solar panel to charge something … uhhh

I like how your mind works on problem solving…. I spent a weekend with a heating engineer who would be great to capture the waste heat from the car engine using phase change materials… so that when you came home, you could dump this heat into your home water storage system. Not as fancy technically as PV but workable…. Until you look at weight being carried around. Still… always great to pull problems apart and see where you end up.

The exhaust gases carries out energy from the system in 3 forms. 1) Sensible heat, expressed in the temperature of the gases, which the thing will try to recover as much as possible (but no chance to recover fully), 2) Latent heat: any fuel with hydrogen content mixed with air and burned will produce water molecules, and there is significant energy absorbed just in the process of water vaporization (not stored in temperature but in the gaseous state), and this latent heat will be lost unless we have a condenser, 3) Kinetic energy of the outgoing exhaust gases, which could be partially recovered with yet another device, a turbine. I see too many conversions needed to even considering a 60%+ efficiency.

A pulse jet engine is a solid state internal combustion engine.

This is real. The principle is well established. But you’re overstating what they claim for efficiency. They don’t claim to be that efficient. @danielle_fong, the founder, made a comment here, but it’s not showing up for some reason.

Could this work? My sliver of engineering knowledge says 'Maybe.' But I'm really doubting their claimed efficiency numbers. Build one, Let someone else test it, and I'll believe it.

You can install this engine in a rear-engine design and completely eliminate the problem of other people tailgating you.

I could see it being used as a generator in a hybrid configuration using waste heat from standard internal combustion engine but having it as a standalone power unit doesn't seem viable.

That finish was great. Trying to efficiently use the remaining energy. Creating symbiotic engines.

Propane camping light check, solar panel check, save the planet, done 😂

The Vehicle Research Institute at Western Washington University created thermophotovoltaic power generators in the late 1990's using the technology and cells created by Dr. Lewis Fraas. The technology used gallium antimonide cells arrayed around a silicon carbide emitter. One of the national labs, Sandia (?), tested the cells at over 40% conversion efficiency vs. high grade solar cells (1990 tech) of 18% (or ~31% 2020 tech). A significant challenge is that the high temperatures, roughly 1700 k, needed to get the silicon carbide to emit photons is located within 20-50 mm of the cells which probably don't function above 400 C. Cooling the cells and recovering the lost energy is a significant challenge. The team created prototypes a bit larger than a hot pot or coffee maker that generated up to 2 kW (~2.7 hp). Eight of these units were installed in a vehicle, Viking 29. The units produced less emissions and were more efficient than a Honda genset, but not so much that it made sense to invest in a small fab plant at $100 million (1998 US dollars). Another challenge arose--physicist and engineers in this space tend to talk about efficiency a bit differently. The team found that the physicist were subtracting all of the known losses from 100% rather than the ratio of output energy to total available input energy. One has to be very careful about quoting the efficiency of these powerplants, because it is likely that the total losses haven't been properly accounted for. The early ceramics would fail after 20-30 minutes of operation. The technology does work and its amazing to directly convert chemical energy to electricity.

Also, don't forget only light that falls directly on the band gap if the PV cell can be captured. And any heat whose black body spectrum falls below the 590 nanometers could not be used either, thermodynamic and all...

I knew Danielle when she was doing her prior clean tech start-up, LightSail (grid scale energy storage). Unfortunately LightSail didn't beat out the battery tech that hit the market, and they folded. I think her use of "LightCell" as a trade name is a riff off of her old company's name.

So many issues with this thing I don't even know where to start. The pollution alone would be extremely difficult to control. It reminds me of cheap Chinese diesel heaters, actually. * Pollution. There is no way to fully burn the fuel across a swath of power levels. They might be able to fully burn the fuel at a particular power level. * Backpressure from dealing with exhaust products to remove unwanted byproducts. * Efficiency of 60% with a hot exhaust? Not even possible. And 80% combined-cycle? I don't think that's possible either. * The high temperature of the system will greatly shorten the equipment lifespan, let alone the solar cells. * Build-up of byproducts on heat exchanger surfaces. * Multiple conversion steps... another nail in the "efficiency" coffin. The biggest red flag is having multiple conversion steps (fuel to heat, heat to light, light to cell, cell to electricity) and still claiming extreme efficiencies. That gets into "sell me the Brooklyn bridge" territory. I don't think this thing is real. -Matt

This is what I've been waiting for for sixty years when I theorised the exact same principle but most of my colleagues said "yeah only in the superman comics you keep reading mate" well guess what ..,superman just came along, I would like to meet this young man. He's a genius . He will succeed where I failed. This is the propulsion of space craft for starters. I hope I can get to support him.

Fuel cells work through combustion as well. It's just that the combustion reaction is facilitated by an electron exchange across a dielectric membrane. Recapture of waste heat from fuel cells using Sebeck units improves efficiency. Using thermo-optical conversion through a narrow band material would allow more of the heat to be recaptured using the photoelectric effect. I have a hard time believing the 80% efficiency number, but it is a good idea.

catalytic converters already get 1000 centigrade hot, so a large one built with quarts encapsulated sodium low pressure lamps & tuned band-cap matched photovoltaics could convert exhaust heat energy into HEV traction battery charging while the engine is on, radically improving overall system efficiency or radically lowering fuel consumption

I was not too impressed with the "Light Cell" until the end of the video when you brilliantly combined it with a normal piston based internal combustion engine. The problem might be in getting a high enough temperature from the exhaust to, more or less, fluoresce the sodium. Anyone interested in working on the idea might want to try an old school automotive mechanics tool called a "vortex tube" to provide an incredibly high temperature air flow to heat the sodium.

Look at each step. Combustion: Air with 20 % oxygen is mixed with assume a gas fuel and burned. It's volume is greater then the air and fuel combined by a significant ratio so it will push the air and fuel gas out of the combustion section. The solution is a vertical mounted system where the less dense hot combustion product have buoyancy in room temperature air. However the exhaust and still burning fuel and air will either speed up and create more drag or the area increases. Radiant, and convection heating occurs heating the container of the combustion. That heat needs to be conducted, radiated, and convected to a heat sink. In this concept the final means of moving thermal energy is by radiation of the sodium at 589 nm wave length. This can only occur, with neither of the other methods being significant, if the gap in which this occurs in a vacuum and the surface is pure sodium. Table salt melts at 800C and sodium at 98C. Most efficient temperature is 300C. The salt needs to react with something to combine with chlorine being a gas that is removed by the vacuum pump. The only way of obtaining pure sodium. The sodium a liquid at 300C need to be a a porous ceramic vessel with sodium wetting the outer surface completely yet held in place by surface tension. There will be losses because something has to hold this assembly in place and achieve a vacuum. The voltaic Germanium semiconductor devices will never by 100 % efficient. however; the conversion of heat to electricity occurs in a gap between the terminals at different voltages. Physical features, so some fraction of the surface seen by the radiation hits them. The germanium is going to be heated by the radiation not converted into electricity and the also heated by the current. The combustion gases lowest temperature is about 300C so that the radiation is sufficient to make electricity. The hot gas enters the heat exchanger that is likely a cross flow device which is significantly less efficient than a counter flow heat exchanger. (the image) The inlet gases are heated cooling the exhaust gas. Buoyancy is the pump that moves the gases through the system. The hot inlet gases are now also buoyant but less then the average combustion gases. More resistance to the flow in the system as the inlet is below the then heated inlet gases. Shut down is another problem because the vacuum must end and the chlorine returned and combine with the sodium to make salt. I do not think they can achieve the efficiency predicted. My guess is that they didn't calculate all the losses and energy to needed to set the conditions like vacuum. I had spent 20 years supporting Electrical engineers and know that the minor losses are not included in the models used to design circuits. This didn't improve significantly when finite element is used to design the circuits.

I like how for this episode you went more to the drawingboard giving your own ideas to the mix

Combining this with a modern Sterling engine of some kind (like Karno), to make electric power directly from the waste heat would really squeeze the extra efficiency out of it.

fun tangent fact: "this orange light is the superior green + blue screen CGI replacement that Disney used back in the old times where CGIs weren't a thing.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="860">14:20</a> I think you answered your own question earlier. We'd need the engine to be made out of copper to take the raw heat and get sodium up to temp. As it is we need to cool the aluminum engine blocks to keep them from melting. At these lower temps, you'll need to find a different material to glow and of course the appropriate PV material. You're essentially down in Peltier element territory, and while I've long wondered why we don't strategically strap peltier elements to car engines to recapture heat energy as electricity, I think the overwhelming answer is that you can't put them close enough to the heat to be effective while keeping the engine easy enough to manufacture.

I think the key to making this work is transparent solar cells. Seems that with germanium you can stack multiple layers on top of each other, that could greatly increase the efficiency in a cilinder, and maybe cap it off with a mirror too.

they would need to keep the solar cells cool too. The temprature of a solar cell greatly effects its efficiancy and at that power density they would definitely need an active cooling solution.

Heat is accelerating the aging proccess of pv-panels. Ageing is lowering the efficiency through lifetime exponentialy and the heat lowers the lifetime.

If it worked you would be showing us a concept car with this engine driving down the road for a number of miles and then you could see how much fuel is used to go that number of miles

I do love the thought of merging it into a traditional combustion engine. Even if the efficiency gains are too small to contribute to forward motion, it may at least be able to replace or at least supplement the alternator, freeing up some load on the engine and being able to reap the benefits of that extra efficiency with minimal effort, possibly easily enough to be swapped into existing ICE powered cars. It would also mean, depending on how much heat is absorbed, that your cooling system doesn't have to work quite as hard when the battery is being charged from this system.

pn junctions are inherently thin so that most of the light passes through without exciting electron-hole pairs. The bottom material is mostly reflective so that the light passes back through and generates more electricity. The reflection coefficient is 90% or so. If the reflected light excites more sodium, then a little less than half is emitted toward the photocell again. The rest is absorbed by the heat exchanger surface and converted back to heat. This (sufficiently) hot surface does excite sodium, but it also emits significant blackbody radiation to be radiated away and to heat up the photocells and reduce their efficiency.

Thank you for providing enough details to know that this is likely a pipe dream. Seems like too much energy would be lost between them different energy exchanges. I’ll wait for the more dense batteries

Very intriguing and thought provoking. Thanks for sharing and explaining this. I’m always blown away by what I learn from you.

As a long time owner of a Hyundai Sonata hybrid (before they got cheap) I've been trying a hundred ways to increase range and efficiency. Capturing the heat from engine exhaust just makes sense. Build an adapter that can transfer the heat from engine exhaust and stand up to the environment of a car engine or exhaust system and a way to store the extra energy then you got my vote. Need a car to test it on?

If this is actually as advertised, a 1 gal size lawn mower should be available for christmas.

perhaps i'm missing something, but i don't see a recent innovation here, they are lighting a candle next to a solar panel?

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="573">9:33</a> two things come to mind here A) one is a product the other is a company or B) Lightcell is the research company to improve the patented product.

Use that exhaust baffle as a "reverse Peltier" thermal electric generator and have TEG's on the backside of the PV cells to help keep those cool while also generating more electricity.

Now I understood the context of bandgap and photoelectric energy. What if we made photovoltaic cells (for roofs, not light cells) with multiple layers of photoelectric materials, each having its own bandgap? The layers would be thin so unused light can be captured by the layer below with the corresponding bandgap. The layers would be laid on a mirrored surface, so light reaching the mirror is reflected again towards the different layers and hence increase efficiency.

I'm not smart enough to even begin to understand the little details, but the optimist inside me is always looking for "the next evolution".... Great video.

A really big problem I see here is that the best photovoltaic cells are only about 25% efficient and those are very expensive, most common cells are only about 15%-20% efficient. So it doesn't matter how efficient your combustion is so long as it is reliant on photovoltaic to produce the output usable energy. As far as quantum dot photovoltaics goes those are a long way from being usable in the real world and certainly from being anything produced on scale.

It takes a long, long time to make a reputation, and apparently <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="913">15:13</a> to break it.

Practically speaking, fuel type will be of critical importance. Pre-circulation of fuel (as in rockets), can get you pretty low heat loss at the cost of only being able to print it, if that. And without pre-circulation - as maybe with solid fuels - you will lose efficiency. Also, how the fuel burns will make a difference. Any build-ups on those complex interior heat-exchange surfaces will degrade efficiency, and possibly force unforeseen wear on the exhaust system. Also, super-efficiently tuned-bandgap gallium or germanium or silicon or whatever seems a bit of a hand-wave. Let's actually see it. Lots of devilish details lurking.

The problem, assuming the claims are valid, is that automotive engines have highly variable power needs. This system seems likely to be tuned to a very specific power output level to achieve its very high efficiency. That is the opposite of what a car needs. At best, in a car, is you use this as a means of recharging a depleted battery array. At that point, this power system is in competition with fixed point public utilities. So instead of comparing its efficiency to a cars IC engine, you should be comparing it to the efficiency of grid scale coal, natural gas or nuclear power plants.

Sounds great, I reckon the only thing left to figure, is how to make the dang thing bust two weeks after the warranty is over!

Sodium light has a color temperature of 2200K. This means that the Sodium needs to have this temperature to be able to emit light, (or if electricity flows through the sodium gas in a lamp at a lower temperature 900K, this is a different principle were electrons are knocked out of orbit creating a photon) .The glas tube needs to be even hotter due to the thermal resistance between the combustion chamber and the Sodium compartment. Melting point of Quartz is around 2000K, wonder how they fix that. If you want to reuse the heath from a combustion engine (40% power; 30% low temperature heath from the cooling system ; 30% heath from the exhaust at around 1100K) you need heath of at least 2200K, this is not the case for a combustion engine. In general the higher the combustion temperature the more mechanical energy can be generated. But... there are "no" materials available with high melting temperatures that can be used for (transparent and other)parts. The principle could work but I can't think of a solution to have a colder quartz tube sandwiched between a much hotter combustion camber and sodium compartment, while maintaining a good transparency for the 580nm Photo voltaic cells don't like high temperatures, sitting "close" to the sodium compartment requires a solution.

It's another pipe dream that we'll never hear about again.

but about which temperatures are we talking about? what is the efficiency of the thermo-photo conversion at different tenperatures?

The moment you said "photovoltaic", you debunked the efficiency claims by a margin. That was quick. Thanks for saving me the time to watch the rest.

A problem is that sodium won't emit 589 nm light unless it gets much, much hotter than you can achieve by harvesting waste heat from an engine. Sodium vapor lamps work by heating it to well above 1000°C. That's why they need to use quartz or sapphire: those temperatures would melt glass and copper. (Even quartz is marginal.)

I don't think exhaust gas from a regular engine would be hot enough to melt salt and make it glow bright. You definitely raised many interesting points that got us all thinking about it.

Thanks for covering this Ricky. As micro-turbine gas-electric generators already are capable of about 70% efficiency, are very compact and simple, why not use them instead combustion photovoltaics? In regards to your concept of photovoltaic ICE exhaust power recovery, I'm thinking that if you were able to recover 50% of the waste energy from an ICE exhaust using photovoltaic generator, you would be recovering about 15% of the total engine thermal losses. Having worked with large Exhaust heat exchangers (stack robbers) to capture waste exhaust heat, but due exhaust restriction and back-pressure reducing engine power, we typically only recovered about 30% of exhaust heat. If similar was the case with photovoltaic recovery, you would only be recovering about 15% of the waste energy in the exhaust stream, and something like a exhaust power recovery microturbine, adapted from a turbo-charger to drive an electric generator might be as efficient and less expensive. BTW: Back in the 80's when I was working for in the Oil and Gas Industry and dealing with HPS and Mulit-Vapor lighting systems, the thought of using high temperature combustion gas to produce combustion based lighting using a multi-vapor tubes for remote off-grid locations occurred to me. I mentioned it to some engineering colleagues, and we estimated the efficiency could be considerably higher than electrically excited tubes but the maintenance, cost and complexities of producing such a system would likely be practical and affordable, plus having combustion sources in flammable environments is not suitable.

I love learning about different technologies! Thanks for sharing this and making it easy to digest. Keep shining ☀️

Nobody ever seems to factor in energy used not to propel a vehicle but cabin comfort... In EVs you spent a lot of energy in the North just keeping the cabin warm enough to be comfortable. In the South we do it to keep cool... You should work on the 20% loss to warm the cabin... And also to use it to cool the cabin much in the same way you use a propane flame to make a refrigerator/freezer!!! Or creating fresh water straight out of the air... Which is good for still even more parts of the planet with scarcity of portable water!!!

Could also be geothermal - all you need is a high temperature for sodium. Bury the sodium PV cells in the mantle, instead of steam generators. But current ones slso need cooling and thermal management. No pv cell can just perfectly function at high temp long term.

About 20-25 years ago, I can't remember who did it(I want to say Smokey Yunick but I'm not sure). Did an experiment on a 4 cylinder Ford engine where he heats up the F/A mixture to 440 degrees F. This completely dried the mixture allowing much more complete combustion increasing fuel mileage and horsepower exponentially from about 130 HP to about 300 HP. With about half the fuel consumption. I don't know why it was never developed more, but it looked very promising.

Love the video man, you have a great way of making things easer to describe... well done

There's no way in hell they will work with any efficiency. Lighting a candle and then trying to gather a miniscule amount of light energy with a solar panel is the stupidest way to do it.

whole chain sounds extremeley stupid to be efficienty more than 0.3%

that ending idea was amazing

Like the concept of compounding a heat-light generator with an ICE.

I realy enjoyed the new style... finaly you start to dig into those projects and not only read the advertisements they make... this explanation was perfect...

Weichai in China is building Diesel truck engines with over 53% thermal efficiency (World record)

Again another Great show/presentation /Analysis . Rick ,Thanks so very Much.

I thought this might of been converting existing ICE vehicles by swapping the transmission with a generator, a small solid state battery, and electric motor transaxle. You get the sound of ICE, the cost effectiveness of a simple conversion, and no range anxiety of EVs. Edison Motors has done this with diesel pickups.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="100">1:40</a> This falls apart with the knowledge that photovoltaic cells works SIGNIFICANTLY better when cold, not hot (thermo).

The passion and effort you put into your videos is very admirable!

It amuses me when people who have terrible ideas create a fancy animation set to motivational music and then think their idea is suddenly viable.

Even with lower efficiency this is still a practical technology, the no moving parts and light weight is a big plus. Thanks for the Mesodyne link

70-80% efficiency... I will only believe it when I see it. Efficiency that high has me doubting its efficacy hard

With all that heat escaping out of the exhaust, it can't possibly be that efficient. Heat is energy.

50% would be insane efficiency but 80 -90 is taking it to impossible levels

Fascinating approach and with the right material and engineering it looks doable. The problems are always in the details and the engineering tolerances and efficiencies.

Highest photovoltaic efficiency is 45% for multijunction cells. Getting 90% is just wrong.

Moving parts are what makes the internal combustion engine exciting.

On the internal combustion engine idea the Catalytic converter creates lots of heat while catalyzing. Using that waste energy would be awesome. Im sure it would be possible to pull the heat from the cooling system and air conditioning and concentrate it too. Imagine how small an internal combustion engine could be if it were 90% efficient having the extra power made into electricity to assist driving the wheels.

This is the first time I’ve heard that moving parts were the problem with combustion engines.

It is still burning stuff. There I was thinking we were in the middle of a climate crisis and burning stuff was chiefly to blame. The oil companies must love this sort of tech, spin it out enough and they might buy themselves another 5-10 years of profits!

The problem with your last idea of using a traditional ICE and capturing the waste heat to run the sodium cell is the exchange of heat would be too slow and the ICE would overheat and seize up. I don't think you could get sufficient heat removal from the engine and still make the lightcell work. Standard engines operate at 200F I'm not sure what the temperature to make sodium glow is, but I bet it's much higher than that.

While I am very, very sceptical about this "Solid state engine", the idea of creating monochromatic light from heat and converting that light with a fine-tuned PV cell is interesting. However, as a heat source, concentrated sun light seems more reasonable. No exhaust means no energy loss due to still warm exhaust gas.

I thought we had to stop burning fuel…. ??

TLDR: In a nutshell, turns out, we can capture heat as specific wavelengths of light. We only know how to efficiently capture specific wavelengths (so far), so to achieve this, we funnel energy into a system which uses heat to emit those specific wavelengths. This emission, in the form of photos of a specific frequency, is absorbed by photovoltaic panels. It is my belief that THIS IS the way forward in general, all around. We waste ENOMOROUS amounts of energy because we don't have general wavelength capture. turns out, we just need to find clever ways to funnel energy into conversion processes (in this case, chemical reaction based) that generate narrower bands of wavelength, in order to fight entropy. The general concept here is REVOLUTIONARY. Forgetting about the "solid state engine" idea specifically, the more general principle IS INCREDIBLY useful and should play a role at all levels of Electrical Engineering going forward. Entropy can be outsmarted.

Interesting, but do we need this? You can convert heat directly to electricity, if it is hot enough. Plasma temperature. Blow the plasma through a ceramic tube in a magnetic field. This will separate the + and - patrs of the plasma. A little downstream you have electrical (conductive) connections in the tube. There you are, a DC power connection. I don't know if the efficiency is better or worse than this but it is one step less.

I think the reason FuelCells haven't taken over for ICE is the energy loss in H2 production. It's either made from natural gas or with electrolysis. Both have a significant energy loss in the process.

I like this format - Both describe new concepts created by others, AND extrapolate on the concept and provide a technical rationale for why the extrapolation may be plausible.

Quartz is also a great way to filtrate bandwidth of light. Not to say it also has a higher melting point than regular glass. Glass is amorphous which makes it ineficiente to some light wavelengths.

It makes sense (based on law of conservation of energy) eliminating mechanical pistons & electric generator with light & photoreceptors. The challenge is having an efficient light source & multijunction solar cell. The technology can be a niche for submarine and/or deeps pace exploration where sunlight is not available.

I think the hardest challenge is the transfer of thermal energy from the burned fuel to the sodium.

Very awesome. Heat to electricity, peltier device. I use it on my hydrogen engine to run the fan to cool it and power lights.

I'm guessing I can build a campfire and sit my solar panel next to it. Or you know what would be better? Just put it under the sun.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="849">14:09</a> from what I've checked, typical engines don't get nearly hot enough for sodium lamp to glow reliably

Honest to god, swear on everything, I haven't been paid for this or anything related to them, in fact....i PAID them 80 or so dollars for their razor, the just...regular angle? medium? something like that...its just their standard one they had about 1-2 years ago. It is hands down the best razor i've ever used in my life. Any time they sponsor a video I make sure people know that it is SO worth the money you pay for that good of a shave. You wouldn't think it would make such a difference, (angle precision and blade depth)...but try it, it does, and the best part is replacement blades are SO dirt cheap that if you wanted you could change blades every couple days and still save money vs a "modern" multiblade razor burn creation device. ^_^ oh, i should also mention, i've used multiple brands of multiblade razors over the years, shick, gilette, etc, i've used straight razors, i've tried other safety razors, but nothing came close. closest was probably straight razor, but stropping is a pain in the arse. If you dont know how to, you may want to look up "traditional wetshave" technique, because that's what you're supposed to do with these to get the most out of them. You'll still get a good shave using barbasol, but if you want to know what its supposed to feel like buy good shave soap and do it right. It's a joy.

First of all, thank you for your videos. They are extremely interesting, I really like them. Regarding your idea about enhancing the yield of a reciprocating engine heating sodium until it glows, consider capturing heat at the exhaust pipe level rather than the combustion chamber. This approach avoids diminishing the mechanical energy of expanding gasses. High-performance engines, especially those with high RPMs or turbocharging, have exhaust pipes that get extremely hot, sometimes glowing red. By utilizing this waste heat, you can harness additional energy without compromising engine performance. Just a thought.