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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: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Friday February 28 2014, @09:15PM

    by frojack (1554) on Friday February 28 2014, @09:15PM (#8782) Journal

    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%.

    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.

    ICE (natural gas):  3,412 / 9,991 = 34% efficiency
    ICE (petroleum)  :  3,412 / 10,416 = 32% efficiency
    Steam Generation :  3,412 / 10,359 = 32% efficiency
    Gas Turbine      :  34,12 / 13,622 = 25% efficiency

    So 40% doesn't look so bad now does it!

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