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Koenigseggeigeig's combustion engine without... a camshaft?

Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2014 6:08 pm
by Squint
The Freevalve engine gets rid of the camshaft and the throttle body, replacing it with pneumatic actuators on top of each cylinder. This is something that has also been toyed with for a long time with electromagnetic valve openers, some ships use them now. That means the concept is proven, but now it's about reducing that scale to something smaller and more usable than a huge ship.

What that does is give completely independent control over each cylinder and each valve. If you have four valves, sometimes it only opens two. You can't do that with a regular camshaft, since the lobes are set to open all the valves. In order to get that sort of variability that Freevalve has, you'd have to totally switch cams. Freevalve can also shut down one cylinder, two cylinders, three cylinders, etc. It has that square cam profile that makes engineers all wet in the trousers.
See the rest of the article from Jalopnik here.

Read the article, it's worth it. Also, one of the pictures shows that their test Saab 9-5 Wagon is a manual.

Re: Koenigseggeigeig's combustion engine without... a camsha

Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2014 6:38 pm
by tankinbeans
I could swear Shadow posted something similar awhile ago. Sounds interesting though.

Re: Koenigseggeigeig's combustion engine without... a camsha

Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2014 11:16 pm
by AHTOXA
I was thinking the same. Thought I remembered us having a discussion on that.

Re: Koenigseggeigeig's combustion engine without... a camsha

Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2014 11:20 pm
by ClutchFork
Fascinating. Saw something about electronically actuated valves in one of those popular mechanic type magazines back in the 1990s. But nothing is as beautiful as full mechanical stuff like the model T and no battery in the T either, get spark from a magneto. Simple and reliable.

Re: Koenigseggeigeig's combustion engine without... a camsha

Posted: Thu Feb 27, 2014 5:22 am
by Bawked
Watch the video guys!