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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: 1) by Kromagv0 on Friday February 28 2014, @02:28PM
Well fuel injector failures seem fairly rare now days unless your run some crappy fuel through them. I have had 6 fuel injected vehicles so far and have driven about 370,000 miles between all of them and never replaced a fuel injector. None of the vehicles were new when purchased and as far as I know none had an injector replaced before I got it. As far a total miles on all of those vehicles it probably is around 1,350,000 miles (like I said I get used vehicles) and there were a total of 36 fuel injectors. So it would seem that a fuel injector is fairly reliable but this may be some selection bias since by the time I get a vehicle it is usually a survivor but given how mechanical things fail (wear) it should be that I would be more likely to have to deal with a failed injector.
I would imagine that moving to similarly controlled intake and exhaust valves would be similarly reliable which would mean that for most people they wouldn't have to replace them during the average lifetime of the vehicle. And if you do have to replace the actuator it would be much simpler than replacing a cam, timing chain/belt, rocker arm, or valve on an existing vehicle and instead would be more like replacing a spark plug in a coil on plug setup on some vehicles.
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