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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: 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.