Turbine Wheel

So I was writing about driving an old Buick through the flooded streets of Houston. It was practically submerged, but it kept going. Which reminded me of my idea of making a boat out of a car. There are two problems with that idea:

1. Cars are heavy, which means they displace a lot of water, so if you are going any speed at all, you are constantly pushing this big, heavy weight up hill.
2. You have a lot of wetted surface, which is a big drag. Literally.

Which reminded me that Art Arfons built a jet boat to break some kind of speed record and he put wheels on it, because when you are traveling 150 MPH water is as hard as concrete. The rolling resistance of the wheel would be less than the resistance of a pontoon sliding along the water.

So this got me thinking about why they use jet engines for all the high speed land records instead of driving the wheels, and I realized that the drive train must be the weak link. All those shafts and bearings and gears whirling around with these tremendous loads and speeds, it is just too expensive. And then I had an idea!

How about we drive the wheel directly? And just how would we do that, you ask? We make the wheel a turbine, and we direct a high velocity stream of air at the fins to make the wheel spin. Mechanically the only connection between the wheel and the car would be the bearings, the same as in a jet propelled car. You mount a series of cups inside the rim of the wheel. These cups would also function as spokes. You would mount a nozzle so that is pointing forward at the top of the wheel and into the cup. The force of the gas entering the cup will try and turn the wheel forward. The cup will redirect the gas to the rear of the car, effectively doubling the useful work of the gas.

Now where do we get the high pressure gas? Now this is the genius part: we the use the exhaust from a conventional automobile engine. Normal engines exert all their power turning the flywheel. This engine will exert all it's power pushing the exhaust gas out the nozzle at a very high velocity. Turbocharged engines use a somewhat similar principle to spin the turbocharger, but that is small potatoes compared what we are trying to do. This will mean high pressure in the exhaust manifold, and may even cook the exhaust valves, but this is for the world speed record, and sacrifices will have to be made.

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.