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Post by the light works on Apr 18, 2014 15:28:17 GMT
It varies from state to state, but here, all they do for your 2 year inspection is plug into the OBD connector. If the ECU says the car is fine, it passes. I'm sure it wouldn't take too much of a genius to program the ECU to always give the correct answers. On the other hand, if your car is too old to have an OBD-2 connector, you are exempt from having to have it tested. So old polluting clunkers are exempt and newer cars are just asked if they are feeling OK. Same here, all cars built after 2000+something are just plugged in. Those have two lambda sensors monitoring the catalytic converter. I have an OBD-II Port, just plug in a 9V battery and the governmental approved computer is told that this is a VW Passat GL built in 1990 feeling extremely well. While the exhaust emission test is passed, I haven't quite figured out how to pass the other automatic tests. The odd part is that the car ID and OBD-II data is accepted even if the CAN bus wasn't even invented back then! On related news: The lastest Chinese cars which have to have OBD-II have just the port without wires. The pre-series model which became EU certified must have had a working ODB-II connector, but the series model doesn't have anything connected to the OBD-port. What do the Chinese think what the owner should do after 4 years when the car has to be TÜV inspected the first time? Just buy another one? the spec just said it had to have the port... it didn't require it to be functional.
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Post by silverdragon on Apr 19, 2014 9:03:20 GMT
I already know how it works.... I just do not understand the use of MORE fuel through a cold cat to get it working quicker.
As for my own car, it fails the quick test every year, because something the Toyota engine does "Purges" the system or something like that?... But the longer test, I have seen them test the test equipment because my Cat passes air so clean even I dont quite believe it.
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Post by c64 on Apr 19, 2014 10:42:02 GMT
I just do not understand the use of MORE fuel through a cold cat to get it working quicker. It heats up quicker because the engine produces more heat. This has two effects, when the engine is hot, it burns the fuel better which makes it easier for the catalytic converter to handle while the cat heats up faster working earlier. It's not just the cat that needs the heat, the engine does, too. But what I don't understand is, that if CO₂ emission is the declared evil of the 21th century, why produce more of it than you have to? That's why my car has a totally different strategy to handle fuel. My car doesn't produce much gasses the catalytic converter can work with. The catalytic converter stays pretty cold and the engine takes ages to heat up. During winter, it takes at least 10 miles until the heater starts working properly. I made several modifications to the engine. Originally it was a common "atmospheric medium compression" 1.8 liter grey-cast engine with simple injection and basic dynamic mechanical ignition system. Since regular fuel isn't available here in Germany any more, there is no point in running an engine at low compression since you have to buy the more expensive high octane fuel. So I turned the engine into a "high compression" engine which is too hard on the standard "Super" fuel but works good with E10, the cheaper alternative to "Super". More compression, more efficiency! Also, in the 80s, before the version of my car was introduced, VW was researching "lean burn engines" but stopped their research right before my car was put onto the market since lean burners create lots of NOx emissions and those became banned with the catalytic converter environmental laws. A few innovations of the lean burn system are still in place but made weak to save at least some fuel. Naturally, I restored them to their full glory along with some other tricks to make them work extra well. The lean burn engine is now back, in form of a "layer charging" system using direct injection and a NOx scrubbing system. But the old lean burn system VW came up with in the 80s still has a very good potential even using a common injection system. The main trick is that instead of creating precise layers of different fuel/air mix where a rich layer is created at the spark plug and a very lean layer at the bottom of the cylinder, the old method was to create a fuel/air mix gradient by clever injector timing and preheat the intake air. Hot air is less dense so it has less oxygen inside so you need less fuel for the optimum λ=1 mixture. Also more heat allows a much leaner (λ<<1) mixture which is still combustible. And with the gradient, parts of the mixture are still combustible with the rest burning along due to the increasing heat and pressure of the burning richer parts. The intake air runs through a heat exchanger on the engine outlet manifold cooling the exhaust gasses while heating up the intake air. Modern cars can't do that since this cools down the catalytic converter while denying it CO to eliminate NOx while at the same time, the lean burn creates even more NOx. The trick of the 35i series of cars as it was intended by VW was that if you need more power, there is a valve switching between the hot air intake from the manifold and a cold air scoop in the nose of the car. Even in the original setup, you feel a sudden increase of acceleration when the valve in the air filter box flips to cold air. The pneumatic actuator system is set that you run on hot air while driving inside a city using a virtually smaller engine but switching to big engine mode as soon as you want maximum acceleration or highway speeds. This wasn't working that bad but with the λ-gradient in place, the engine can simulate an even smaller engine. Modern "green" cars use a 1.4 liter engine rated as powerful as my 1.8 liter one. Those really save fuel while city driving and especially while idling. Their problem is when you need more power, then they reach insane RPM and turn absolutely inefficient. Full throttle at high speeds, they consume more than twice the fuel the 1.8 liter engine requires! So I have an engine capable to save fuel like the "green" 1.4 liter engines at low power throughput but which doesn't start wasting fuel at high power throughput. The major problem I have is that the λ-gradient and the lean burn in general fails at idling so I can't have the low fuel consumption in stop and go traffic at all. There, this large crude greycast guzzles almost 2 liters an hour doing nothing. I have no idea how I could fix that problem - except like I always do using the bus or streetcar inside cities as much as possible. Also I didn't stop there. Since the throttle flap reduces compression dramatically, I had installed a system to keep the throttle as wide open as possible. This is based on an AI system I had designed for such purposes. It experiments with the injector timing and ignition to figure out how to save fuel and keep the engine running smooth. The power is controlled by the injection and ignition. Since the throttle flap is directly connected by a common cable to the accelerator, driving the car is a bit odd since it doesn't do much while depressing the accelerator 3/4 of the way since it reduces its power throughput as much as it can to save fuel. The last 1/4 of the accelerator is then used to control the actual power of the car electronically. I would love to get rid of the throttle but without, the engine can't idle, you couldn’t control power when the engine is still cold and you can't have a very low power throughput. Also depending on lots of factors, the electronic power reduction can't work far enough so you need to use the throttle often, especially during city driving. I had several people test drive the car, even a lot of professionals I briefed on the system. It drove them all nuts that the throttle position doesn't seem to be related to engine power and you often need to wiggle the pedal very far and often to prevent that the car slows down or speeds up out of a sudden. I would need an electronic pedal, but such a major modification is illegal. I have to admit, the car is very moody and tricky to control the engine. Also it can happen that the engine dies for a few seconds until the AI figures out how to make the fuel burn again. What will always happen is that if you follow a slow farming tractor for a while and then surprise the engine by trying to pass it out of a sudden, the engine will always die and then return with decreased power for a minute and then it wants to race, you need to throttle it hard to prevent speeding. A professor had put it this way: "My wife becomes ratty, too whenever I kick her out of a sudden!" But I love my car. Which relative large and comfy car in the world is capable to drive 1000 kilometers within 8 hours (including coffee breaks) with less than 70 liters (one fuel tank)? OK, statistically it uses up 0.6 spark plugs doing this, I am still working on this problem.
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Post by the light works on Apr 19, 2014 10:46:51 GMT
I already know how it works.... I just do not understand the use of MORE fuel through a cold cat to get it working quicker. As for my own car, it fails the quick test every year, because something the Toyota engine does "Purges" the system or something like that?... But the longer test, I have seen them test the test equipment because my Cat passes air so clean even I dont quite believe it. its not more fuel through the cat - it is more fuel through the engine to make the exhaust hotter.
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Post by silverdragon on Apr 20, 2014 6:05:02 GMT
I wrote that wrong, I should have put it the use of more fuel to heat the cat.
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Post by c64 on Apr 20, 2014 8:57:23 GMT
I wrote that wrong, I should have put it the use of more fuel to heat the cat. It's not just the Cat, it's the engine, too. In order to make the cat work well, it needs a special CO, O₂, and NOx ratio to exchange oxygen in order to create H₂O, CO₂ and N₂. Unlike the old engines, modern engines must create a lot of CO aka "bad burned fuel" in order to remove the NOx. And this decreases the mpg of the engine.
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Post by the light works on Apr 20, 2014 14:27:31 GMT
I wrote that wrong, I should have put it the use of more fuel to heat the cat. I heard a story about a wastewater treatment plant in Alaska that was required to remove a certain volume of contaminants per volume of inflow - the problem was that because it also processed stormwater runoff, there were not enough contaminants to remove. (I believe the expression was "their inflow is cleaner than most cities' outflow") the solution they finally developed was that they required the local fish processing plant to grind their waste and flush it down the drains. the meaning of the parable is that sometimes poorly written rules are put into place, and rather than fix the rules, government agencies tend to treat the rules as sacred and do silly things in order to uphold them.
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Post by c64 on Apr 21, 2014 8:45:56 GMT
I wrote that wrong, I should have put it the use of more fuel to heat the cat. I heard a story about a wastewater treatment plant in Alaska that was required to remove a certain volume of contaminants per volume of inflow - the problem was that because it also processed stormwater runoff, there were not enough contaminants to remove. (I believe the expression was "their inflow is cleaner than most cities' outflow") the solution they finally developed was that they required the local fish processing plant to grind their waste and flush it down the drains. the meaning of the parable is that sometimes poorly written rules are put into place, and rather than fix the rules, government agencies tend to treat the rules as sacred and do silly things in order to uphold them. The same method is used in the electronic business. RoHS requires that electronic components may not exceed certain percentages of poisonous materials. They often combine non-RoHS compliant parts with very clean RoHS compliant parts and call them a "unit" which is then barely RoHS compliant. To do that, they often mix in "dead" parts which has the advantage that factory rejects cost a fortune to dispose and using them to make other components RoHS compliant saves also money by avoiding disposal costs since the customer will dispose the stuff for free.
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Post by silverdragon on Apr 21, 2014 12:52:46 GMT
For information..: Fish waste is officially a hazard product, its ADR rules to transport it, full orange plate.
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Post by the light works on Apr 21, 2014 14:19:19 GMT
For information..: Fish waste is officially a hazard product, its ADR rules to transport it, full orange plate. has anyone told the fish they are carrying around hazardous materials?
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Post by c64 on Apr 24, 2014 19:18:34 GMT
For information..: Fish waste is officially a hazard product, its ADR rules to transport it, full orange plate. has anyone told the fish they are carrying around hazardous materials? Statistically, 60% of all Fish is highly contaminated (especially mercury), most also by very dangerous to human parasites. Think about it the next time you eat Sushi!
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Post by GTCGreg on Apr 24, 2014 23:07:07 GMT
Water can be said to be a hazardous material. Not only is it corrosive, bit it can kill you if you drink too much of it or get trapped under it.
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Post by the light works on Apr 25, 2014 0:54:46 GMT
has anyone told the fish they are carrying around hazardous materials? Statistically, 60% of all Fish is highly contaminated (especially mercury), most also by very dangerous to human parasites. Think about it the next time you eat Sushi! I don't eat sushi. I can't stand seaweed.
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Post by silverdragon on Apr 25, 2014 5:35:14 GMT
I dont eat Fish unless I know its in a controlled environment...
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Post by craighudson on Apr 25, 2014 9:11:26 GMT
Statistically, 60% of all Fish is highly contaminated (especially mercury), most also by very dangerous to human parasites. Think about it the next time you eat Sushi! I don't eat sushi. I can't stand seaweed. Sushi doesn't necessarily contain seaweed (or fish for that matter).
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Post by c64 on Apr 25, 2014 10:31:46 GMT
I don't eat sushi. I can't stand seaweed. Sushi doesn't necessarily contain seaweed (or fish for that matter). I've just heard on the news (in my car, so it's on topic) that a new research proofed that 60% of all groundwater in China is now poisoned and not usable for human consumption. Most of the rest is also categorized as "not safe for humans" but still used.
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Post by the light works on Apr 25, 2014 13:36:26 GMT
I don't eat sushi. I can't stand seaweed. Sushi doesn't necessarily contain seaweed (or fish for that matter). 99% of all sushi involves one or the other - and I don't like either.
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Post by the light works on Apr 25, 2014 14:55:54 GMT
Attachment Deletedsnapped this on the way home from work day before yesterday. the engine is officially broken in. and yes, its dirty, and yes the fuel gauge is broken. (and, yes, I pulled safely to the side of the road to take the picture)
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Post by GTCGreg on Apr 25, 2014 14:58:30 GMT
Time to change out the break-in oil.
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Post by silverdragon on Apr 26, 2014 5:32:01 GMT
My own vehicle has just done 70,000..... Hardly worn at all, and only just on its third set of tyres.
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