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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: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday February 28 2014, @04:37PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday February 28 2014, @04:37PM (#8579)

    With a camshaft, you are stuck with whatever timing and lift pattern is ground into the lobes.

    No you're not. Car engines have been employing variable valve timing for a couple of decades now. Honda's VTEC was one of the early ones; it basically had two cam profiles on each camshaft, and could switch between the two, so one set of lobes was optimized for low rpm, and the other for high rpm. Other engines have variable phasing: the position of the cam can be changed at different rpm. There's a lot of different versions out there today, which is one reason why engines in today's cars are getting such great fuel efficiency and horsepower numbers.

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  • (Score: 1) by VanessaE on Friday February 28 2014, @04:55PM

    by VanessaE (3396) <vanessa.e.dannenberg@gmail.com> on Friday February 28 2014, @04:55PM (#8594) Journal
    Which is....still the timing and lift profiles that are ground into the lobes in the former case - you just have more options than before. In the latter case, you change the base timing of the cam as a whole, but not the individual timing profiles of the valves relative to that, let alone their lift profile.
    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Grishnakh on Friday February 28 2014, @05:45PM

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday February 28 2014, @05:45PM (#8637)

      Right, but the point is, unlike older engines where you're stuck with a single profile and timing at all engine speeds, with newer engines you can change the timing/phasing, and/or the lift profile. No, it's obviously not as flexible as solenoid-actuated valves, but it's a big improvement that probably gets you most of the benefits. (Honda's VTEC only gives you two profiles, low and high, whereas the variable cam timing gives you variability across the rev range, though no lift change ability, but I'm pretty sure the newest engines (probably in more expensive cars like the 370Z) give you both now.)