The CORE concept for economic and environmental sustainability of mobile and stationary sources of power generation

The scope of the CORE concept is the development of an action-ready economically viable technical solution to mitigate the environmental, and societal effects of green house gas emissions (GHG) resulting from internal combustion (IC) engines. The developed and proposed technology has been deemed Combustion of Optimized Reactivity in Engines, or CORE for short. In the United States, the transportation sector consumes approximately 1/3 of all non-renewable petroleum sources. Furthermore, the transportation sector is 97% dependent on liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Figure 1 shows the United States energy source and GHG emissions distribution for both fuel stock and societal sector per Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calculations on a per barrel of oil energy equivalent basis. It can be seen that the transportation sector uses ~28 quadrillion BTUs of energy per year (i.e., nearly 40% of the total energy usage). Additionally, the transportation sector produces nearly 30% of the total GHG emissions. Finally, it should be pointed out that not only does the transportation sector make up large portion of the total GHG emissions, but this sector is the fastest growing source of GHG in the United States [1]. At the present time, nearly all transportation vehicles are powered by internal combustion engines. The fact that nearly all 40% of GHG emissions result from a single device presents a unique opportunity from a GHG reduction standpoint. That is, if the internal combustion engine can be replaced with a device that emits lower GHG emissions or improved such that the GHG emissions are significantly reduced a substantial reduction in the overall GHG emissions could be achieved by a single device. As is shown in the background section, the most sustainable (economically as well as socially) solution for reducing GHG emissions from the transportation sector appears to be by developing a highly-efficient device that converts bio-mass derived fuel into vehicle motion. That is, an internal combustion engine that has improved efficiency compared to traditional and state of the art engines and is designed to operate on bio-mass derived fuels. The CORE strategy is a new way for operating current internal combustion engines using conventional and/or bio-derived liquid and gaseous hydrocarbon fuels, to 2010 Climate Leadership Challenge Concept 2 lower adverse health and GHG emissions. For bio-fueled operation, the fuels could be ethanol and bio-diesel, both of which have distinctly different combustion characteristics. That is, ethanol is difficult to auto-ignite while biodiesel auto-ignites easily. By blending …