Dine While You Drive with the Exhaust Cooker
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 04.21.08
The Exhaustburger we showed earlier is just lame compared to this Exhaust Cooker that was cooked up in 1930. It has a steam pressure cooker, so an hour's drive and it's done like dinner. After all, "Motor tours are much more pleasant when one is assured of a well-prepared meal at the end of the trip," although the way people eat in cars these days, it might make more sense to mount it in the center console where the cup holders are so that one doesn't have to stop to eat. We are not sure about how much goulash per gallon one gets, but it makes sense to wring a few more calories of heat out of that car trip. ::Modern Mechanix
in 1967 my father and I drove to b.c.,our meals
for a large part of this journey was 1...very hot,and fresh 2 several courses,3 required very little work or attention {a watch},soup was a big easy,whole chicken a snap,fish just too easy,too fast to!!.All was cooked on top of a 1964 283 v6 pontiac engine block.
I once saw a cook book for cooking on top of a car engine while enroute.this dates back to the original
RV'ers in the fifties.I can only offer one piece of advice
if you can not tie down your food you really should
not do any sudden braking!!!!
The fact that there's enough heat left over in the end to cook a meal is evidence of how wastefully internal combustion engines are designed. All of that hot air contains utilizable energy, darn it. Strap a Stirling engine or even a thermoelectric generator to it and harvest some of that energy. Even better would be to figure out a way to run the engine that doesn't produce so much waste heat.
A series hybrid could make good use of a Stirling engine or a thermoelectric junction, but the first is really expensive, and the second inefficient.
That said, I read a paper long ago about a semi outfitted with thermoelectric junctions that completely replaced the alternator, saving lots of loss on the engine so it's been proven it's feasible.
I once pondered how much free hot water one could obtain if they had a way to "hook up" their car after getting home in the garage and extracting the heat out of the engine block and radiator. Could never think of an easy or cheap way to do this, but it would be practically free hot water if you did.