Originally Posted by
Troux
I remember reading about this almost 2 years ago, but was actually thinking about it today! I just heard of a new design (that's probably still just on paper) which tries to get the benefits of a 2 stroke engine with a 4 stroke design. Basically,one piston constantly intakes air/fuel on one stroke, then compresses it and exhausts it on the next stroke, pumping it into a piston that only takes in the mixture and ignites it. Basically, 2 cylinders each getting half the uty of a 4 cycle engine. I immediately saw flaws in it though...
I've seen that. I think it was on a motorcycle in Australia. The vast majority of these weird alternative engine designs aren't feasible mass-market engines because of overcomplication, durability issues, emissions and a host of other reasons. Occam's razor in engine design. Hell, there's still a debate over the viability of the rotary engine design and that's been around for almost a century
.
This one seems to be pretty simple, though, and based on a good principle. Most of the energy in an ICE is wasted through heat; this engine uses this heat to do work. As for reliability- the bugs in steam engine technology were worked out two centuries ago. I'm sure they can make this work now. BMW has been fiddling with a system that uses heat from the exhaust manifolds to run a secondary steam power generator to supplement engine power- this is one step further, but doesn't seem very far fetched.