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posted by Dopefish on Friday February 28 2014, @10:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the rev-up-and-burn-out dept.

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."

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by gallondr00nk on Friday February 28 2014, @12:09PM

    by gallondr00nk (392) on Friday February 28 2014, @12:09PM (#8436)

    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?

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