Stroke It Up For a New Engine Base don An Old Idea

This article from Wired Magazine has me excited. What happens if you're in the back pocket of big oil and you made Detroit into Motor City; and the whole world is tired of gasoline engines superheating the world and belching out carcinogens. Sure, oil revenues funded 9/11, but let bygones be bygones. Oh, and Hugo Chavez is awash in American money so he can live large as a burr in the side of the White House. It seems like gasoline engines are passe. But, wait! What if engines could get twice the mileage and emit just an inkling of lung disease? If the Scuderi Group have their way, this could be the future of automobiles.

From Wired:

Carmelo Scuderi, a Massachusetts engineer and inventor, started tinkering with the fundamentals of the internal combustion engine when he retired in the mid-1990s. The result was a radical new design that could make engines for anything from gas-powered lawn mowers to diesel locomotives lighter, far more efficient, and a whole lot easier on the environment.

Scuderi died in 2002, shortly after patenting the basic concept for his engine. Since then, his children have made it their mission to bring the engine to market. Five of them now work full time for the family startup, the Scuderi Group.

Scuderi began by splitting the heart of the internal combustion engine -- the chamber where air is compressed, mixed with fuel and then ignited -- into two separate cylinders, linked by a passage. Air is compressed in the first cylinder, and then shot through the passage into the second cylinder, where it mixes with the gas and burns.

The general idea of a split-cycle engine has been around for a century, but none have ever matched the efficiency of traditional engines. Scuderi believed he could solve the problem by pumping highly pressurized air from the compression cylinder into the combustion chamber, and then allowing the fuel and air to ignite when the head of the piston was already moving away from the top of the combustion cylinder.

The method was counterintuitive, because it creates a condition known as firing after top dead center, considered a cardinal sin in engine design since at least the days of Henry Ford.

"In a normal engine, firing after top dead center doesn't work, because the piston will outrun the flame, so you can't build up any pressure," says Scuderi's son, Sal. In the Scuderi engine, however, the combination of highly pressurized air and firing after top dead center creates a highly turbulent environment where the fuel and air ignite explosively, producing far more power than conventional engines.

So far, the engine exists only as a computer model. Two real-life prototypes -- one diesel and one gasoline -- are under construction at the Southwest Research Institute, an engineering research lab in Texas, and are due out next year.

While it is possible that engineering problems may yet emerge, those involved in the project believe the prototypes will work as planned. Computer-generated models are universally used in the automotive industry to design new engines and other parts, and are considered extremely accurate in predicting performance.

Those models show the combustion in a Scuderi engine will be not only more powerful than conventional engines; it will also, surprisingly, be cooler. That means it will spew out far fewer pollutants than today's engines do.

The Scuderi engine could even boost mileage by recapturing energy normally lost during braking, as do hybrid cars. "Unlike current electric hybrids which store the energy in a battery, we are able to store energy in the form of compressed air," says Sal Scuderi. That can be done by simply adding a small air-storage tank, which costs far less than the generators and banks of batteries gas-electric hybrids need.

While working models of the Scuderi engine won't see the light of day until next year, the radical design is already attracting a lot of attention in the automotive world. The company is in talks with big automakers, and when it showed off the new engine at a major automotive-engineering conference in Detroit earlier this year, the Scuderi booth was mobbed.