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: 4, Informative) by carguy on Friday February 28 2014, @10:05AM
> Notably the Renault F1 team has used pneumatic valves for a while ...
F1 engines use pneumatic valve springs, but they still use mechanical camshafts.
(Score: 1) by dublet on Friday February 28 2014, @01:27PM
Down in flames I go..
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"
(Score: 1) by hb253 on Friday February 28 2014, @06:07PM
Hold on there, before you crash...
I knew I read something about BMW doing this years ago. Anyway, I found this article from 2003 on the NY Times site.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/21/technology/circu its/21next.html [nytimes.com]
Note that the prototype was built in 1999. Here's a snippet from the article:
The firings and offshore outsourcing will not stop until morale improves.