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germanbird writes: "Jalopnik has an interesting article up about Koenigsegg's Prototype Camless Engine. The engine uses pneumatic actuators rather than a cam to open and close the valves in the engine. The engineers behind this claim that it can provide "30 percent more power and torque, and up to 50 percent better economy" when applied to an existing engine designs. The article and some of the comments also mention that some work has been done with electromagnetic actuators to accomplish the same task. It may be a while before this tech is mature enough for passenger vehicles, but maybe if a racing series or two picked it up, it might give some of the manufacturers the opportunity to work the bugs out?
Not sure this is on topic for SoylentNews, but the article brought me back to my introduction to engineering course in college. One of my classmates was a car nut and I remember a discussion with an EE professor one day about the potential (or actually lack thereof due to performance issues) for using electric actuators to open and close valves."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 28 2014, @10:22AM
This rather strikes me the same way a similar article would on how to get 30% more efficiency out of a steam engine. Great improvement, but being entirely eclipsed by another form of locomotion: electric. It's cheaper, faster, quieter, more powerful, and greener by far than any ICE. My brother is an automotive engineer at Ford. He recently went to Chicago to test drive a Model S, came home, and immediately put together his resume to apply to work at Tesla. Yes, anecdote != data, but voting with your feet seems the sincerest expression of intent. Wait until the next generation of batteries hits the market--you'll see millions of others doing the same. Me, I'm trying to time things so I can dump my ICE while I still can and jump to an electric I can afford.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @11:57AM
You are aware that modern power plants (with the exception of hydro, wind and solar) all run on modern, highly efficient versions of a steam engine?
Even if one day no car in the world uses an ICE motor any more, that doesn't mean ICE motors would completely become irrelevant. For example, I can imagine that they continue to be used for emergency backup generators.
But frankly, I'd not be surprised if the future turned out to be not electric cars, but petrol produced from carbon dioxide and water using electric energy from renewable sources. After all, the problem is not burning carbon, the problem is burning fossil carbon.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Friday February 28 2014, @04:16PM
Petrol/gasoline, no matter where you get it, is still horrifically inefficient. Most of the energy goes into producing waste heat. I don't care if you come up with a way of producing it entirely from renewable sources, you'll still waste most of that energy as heat in an ICE engine. What's why they need to be phased out. You'll never get over about 40% efficiency on an ICE.
Electric motors, on the other hand, are between 90 and 98% efficient.
The only problem with electric cars is the battery tech. If we had inexpensive, safe, reliable batteries the size of a car's gas tank capable of storing 1/3 to 1/2 of the energy stored in that same volume of gasoline, we'd be golden. (You only need a fraction since, as I said before, most of that gasoline's energy goes simply to producing waste heat.) We're getting closer, as exemplified with Tesla cars (range: 200+ miles), but we're not there, most particularly on the "inexpensive" property. If we could make Tesla car batteries for $1000, we wouldn't have ICE cars any more.
How fast we're going to get to that point is up for debate.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Friday February 28 2014, @05:19PM
True, but until we do get there ICE's have their place. Also, in cold climates that "waste" heat can be rather useful.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Friday February 28 2014, @05:50PM
Even in cold climates, the waste heat thing isn't that useful; the problem is that it takes a little while for the car engine to warm up enough for your heater to start working. In a Tesla, the car starts blowing hot air from the heater into the cabin and onto the windshield as soon as you start it up. Obviously, this takes a toll on your range, but still, it's a lot more convenient. With a gas car, either you freeze your ass off for 5-10 minutes (depending on how fast you can get on the highway vs. sitting in traffic; car engines don't warm up quickly when idling), or you can remote-start your (automatic only) car and let it idle for 20-30 minutes and warm up, wasting a bunch of gas and also wearing down your engine (engine oil gets contaminated faster at idle, or so I've read).
One thing that helps is to get a car with heated seats and steering wheel. That makes the cold air much more bearable for those first 10 minutes, since heated seats don't take much time to get warm.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday February 28 2014, @07:15PM
Well Electric motors produce waste heat too. You do work, you will invariably waste some heat.
And, given current storage capacity of battery technology, that probably has a much greater effect.
A rich man can lose a 100 dollar bill and not worry, but a poor man can't afford that.
The energy density of Gas/Diesel allows some waste heat, and quite frankly I don't think the industry has even focused on that aspect of efficiency.
If this guy can in fact get 30 percent (which I doubt) it puts us that much closer to wringing as much energy out of gas as is possible.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Friday February 28 2014, @08:43PM
Well Electric motors produce waste heat too.
You've got to be kidding. You do realize that ~95% efficiency is far better than ~30% efficiency, right? No one ever said electric motors were perfect.
And, given current storage capacity of battery technology, that probably has a much greater effect.
Tesla has cars with almost 300-mile range now, largely thanks to that massive efficiency difference. The storage capacity of batteries is not a big problem any more. Their cost/Ah and recharge rates are.
The energy density of Gas/Diesel allows some waste heat, and quite frankly I don't think the industry has even focused on that aspect of efficiency.
Huh? They've been pushing for tiny fuel efficiency improvements for ages. You can only do so much with a Carnot Cycle engine, especially at small scales. Go read about Carnot Cycle on Wikipedia; the other name for an ICE is a "heat engine". The way it works is exploiting the difference in temperature between hot and cold reservoirs, the hot being the combustion and the cold being the environment, and it's limited by the Carnot Theorem; you can only get 100% efficiency with infinite temperature; real-world is 40-60% (closer to 40% for car engines).
If this guy can in fact get 30 percent (which I doubt) it puts us that much closer to wringing as much energy out of gas as is possible.
Simple math: a 30% improvement (which I agree is very highly dubious) on 30% efficiency gets you to 39%, which is still far, far away from ~95%.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Friday February 28 2014, @09:15PM
Even simpler truth: Because you move inefficiency from one place in a system to another, doesn't give you the right to disavow all inefficiency.
For instance Look here: http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=107&t=3 [eia.gov]
Follow the 2nd link to the tables, and compute the efficiency of the various methods of electrical generation.
So 40% doesn't look so bad now does it!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday February 28 2014, @08:48PM
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday February 28 2014, @09:36PM
So what? The efficiency of large power plants is far better than small ICE engines, even after accounting for transmission line losses. There's less pollution too, since power plants are regularly maintained, unlike typical car engines that may or may not be maintained properly, and are frequently kept running long after they should have been junked.
(Score: 5, Informative) by gallondr00nk on Friday February 28 2014, @12:09PM
There's still plenty of applications even if the next generation of electric cars can displace traditional ones. I'd wager you won't see feasable electric trucks for a while, for example. Marine engines and diesel generators would benefit as well.
Up to 50% economy gain at this stage is pretty incredible, considering how mature the technology is.
The idea of being able to adjust the number of firing cylinders has been done before [wikipedia.org]. But actually being able to swap between 2 and 4 stroke at will? Pretty incredible. I suppose the question now is can it cope with 100,000+ miles?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by geb on Friday February 28 2014, @12:14PM
Internal combustion will have its place for a long time to come. The big draw of hydrocarbon as a fuel is the energy density, and there are some applications where you really need that.
There have been battery-electric aircraft for instance, and they were a bit crap. (There has even been an aircraft that ran on AA cells, and that was extremely crap.)
At the other end of the scale, you've got huge cargo ships, where long distance endurance and efficiency are both absolute requirements. Engine designs there are highly varied, but there are still a lot of piston engines being built. The article mentions that this tech originated in ship engines, and is being adapted to cars just because there's no reason not to.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by emg on Friday February 28 2014, @04:55PM
"Great improvement, but being entirely eclipsed by another form of locomotion: electric"
Uh, yeah. That'll be why I see so many electric cars on the road every day.
You appear to be unaware that electric cars are an older technology than ICE cars, and vanished very quickly once the ICE became viable. Our ancestors dumped them because they sucked ass, and they still suck ass for all the same reasons.
Until there's an electric car that can travel 500+ miles on a charge, recharge in five minutes, and work almost as well at night at -40 as it does during the day in California, they're not going to 'eclipse' ICE cars.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Friday February 28 2014, @05:09PM
The issue with electric cars isn't the motor -- there is no question that is superior. The issue is the battery. Until we really solve battery issues, and by that I don't just mean energy density but the ability to make energy dense batteries from ridiculously common materials that don't require removing entire mountains to get at, electric cars are going to be for the wealthier people of the world -- those who can afford to have an extra car for local trips, while keeping a regular car for any trip beyond 45 miles(*) each way (I'm thinking of the Nissan Leaf -- $28k for base model, DIY cost of charger +$1000 (pro install +$2000 (includes charger)), 86 mile range. This is a car for people rich enough to have a spare car. People who buy Teslas are definitely rich).
(*) that would use the entire capacity of the battery which probably isn't good for its longevity.
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Friday February 28 2014, @05:43PM
The primary advantage of electric vehicles is that pollution is restricted to a single location, namely the power plant. If the power is driven by coal then there is no substantive advantage. If the power plant is driven by solar, wind, fusion, then there are substantive advantages.
subicular junctures
(Score: 2, Insightful) by githaron on Friday February 28 2014, @06:11PM
If all the pollution is in one location, you can more easily and efficiently filter it. You can also more easily pick where the population occurs. City smog and air quality would become and issue of the past.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by hatta on Friday February 28 2014, @06:46PM
City smog and air quality are negligible compared to climate change. And no, you can't filter out the CO2.
(Score: 1) by githaron on Monday March 03 2014, @01:13PM
CO2 is not the only exhaust that comes from burning fossil fuels. It just happens to be the only one that anyone seems to ever talk about.
(Score: 1) by hb253 on Friday February 28 2014, @10:11PM
True, but from what I've read, intensive lobbying by the power industry has resulted in a weakening or delay of those stack scrubbing requirements.
The firings and offshore outsourcing will not stop until morale improves.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday February 28 2014, @09:08PM
That's a good point but it doesn't solve the problem of widespread adoption, namely, limited range due to battery technology. This limited range issue makes electric cars a good choice as a spare car, but if a person can afford only one car, a not so good choice.