In northen climes, a lot of gas is wasted (and pollution created) when people idle their cars to keep the interior of the car warm. People also remotely start their vehicles 10 minutes before they leave the house so that it's toasty warm when they finally get into them.
Why not figure out a way to retain heat that's already been generated by the engine after it's been driven? A lot of heat is wasted when a car is left sitting for 20 minutes. Somehow preserving the heat for even a few hours would reduce pollution and make people happy at the same time.
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On a nuts an bolts level, you'd have an insulated reservoir conataining about the same volume of fluid that your cooling system uses. When you park, you'd pump your warm coolant into this reservoir (cold fluid being pumped into the engine), and before you go again, you'd pump in back into your cooling system (cold fliud pumped into the reservoir). You'd be using an electric pump. I figure a hobbyist could rig it up with a couple hundred in parts.
This is an excellent idea, of particulat usefulness to the commercial trucking industry, which utilizes large displacement engines. In extreme cold, it is commonplace to allow truck engines to idle continuously when not busy moving the truck/trailer. Continuous idling produces imperfect combustion which increases engine wear dramatically. This system would circulate coolant that was at near operating temperature when it was time to restart an engine that had been shutdown.
An additional benefit of this system is that having an electric pump would greatly simplify coolant changes, doing away with the mess of pulling off hoses and having coolant splash all over the place.
A German engineering firm is introducing an electric coolant pump to replace the fan belt driven pump that is common to curret internal combustion engines.
This would be a perfect addition to such a system.
There are some coolant pums for the regualr operation of the cooling system that are electric. I see them available to the custom automobile industry.
The pumps for the reservoice<>engine I propose are DC utility pumps, which I suppose could handle engine coolant (I'd have to look into the chemical compatibility of the pump in mind)
Here in Helsinki where the winters can get to 30 degrees below freezing in the winter, most people have electric plug-in points where they park and use a time actuated electric heater in the car to pre-warm their car in the morning. No pollution.
Another simpler design would be to have a large reservoir that the coolant passes through before reaching the radiator. This reservoir would just be a large, very well insulated tank. When running, the hot coolant leaving the engine would first go into the tank. The hot coolant would eventually pass from the tank to the radiator before returning to the engine. When the engine is turned off, the hot coolant in the tank stays hot, while the coolant in the rest of the system cools. The tank could hold several times the quantity of the rest of the system, so it would hold a lot of heat.
If the engine was started after cooling off completely, it would take quite a while for all the coolant to get up to temp, but the engine thermostat would allow the engine to reach normal operating temp in the usual time.
The beauty of this design is that it would only require a simple tank to be installed, plus a couple of hoses to deliver coolant to and from it. The rest of the cooling system would be stock. No extra pump or anything.