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 osiguru on Friday February 28 2014, @01:37PM
Efficiencies will be vastly improved through precise valve timing, and the reduction of parasitic drag.
Spinning all of the camshaft hardware off the face crankshaft (cogs and pulleys) significantly reduces the total amount of combustion energy delivered to the rear of the crankshaft. The rear of the crankshaft connects to the stuff that moves things like torque converters, and gearboxes and the sort.
This is why we have belt/cog systems in modern cars now instead of chains and sprockets.