Aquarius builds an engine others only dreamed of
haaretz.com
haaretz.com
You have to have electrical control on all the valves. There's no camshaft and no place for one. Electrical control of engine valves has been a dream for a long time, but the actuators were a problem. Someone finally built a working engine in 2018 with total software control of all valves.[3] The valve people say "Electromechanically, you could look at it and ask 'why didn't you do that 20 years ago? The difference is in the electronics that control it. What's happened in the recent past is that there's now sufficient processing bandwidth at a low price that can tolerate top of engine conditions, so you can actually put real time control on top of these motors."
This will probably all work commercially about the time everybody switches to electric cars.
The parent article is lacking in solid "why ours is better than the other people who already did this" information.
[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a6326/out-of-turn-t...
[2] https://youtu.be/u4b0_6byuFU
[3] https://newatlas.com/camcon-digital-iva-valve-system/55827/
is something a non EE person would say about another branch of science he is totally unfamiliar with. We had 40GB consumer Hard drives 20 years ago. 20GB per platter, 7200 RPM. Now think for a second what precision of timing you need in a hard drive versus mechanical engine. We are talking ~50 nm/bit, ~250 nm/track, ~100K TPI, >500Mbit internal transfer. The level of precision required to control engine valves more accurately than mechanical means (cams) was achieved in consumer off the shelf ~$200 hard drive controllers around 1995.
Fast precision proportional valves for ordinary compressed air have been available since the 1990s. I once had to price some. Price was over $1000 each. They're now a moderate volume product from Festo and others, and precision positioning of pneumatic cylinders is available. It's still not common.
Automotive valve actuation has all the same problems, plus pushing back against big forces from the combustion process and operating through the entire under the hood temperature range. A solenoid-type actuator for this needs considerable power. Schemes with pneumatic and hydraulic power to drive the valve have been used on some race cars. Plus there are little problems; neodymium magnets start to weaken around the boiling point of water, a temperature easily reached on top of an engine block.
There's now a supercar using this technology.[1] It may filter down to less expensive vehicles.
It's an obvious idea that turns out to be quite hard to make work. Study guide: [2]
[1] https://cecas.clemson.edu/cvel/auto/systems/valve-timing.htm...
If you didn't have that, you might have to do the valve fine position control with analog hardware controlled by the digital system. That's how daisy-wheel printers controlled the daisy position. And you might have to have hardware timers for triggering events, like SOiC systems with PWM drivers. That's what you'd probably do if you were making a million cars.
If you're making 300 supercars, just throw some very fast CPU at the problem and let it do all the work. You'll never see the extra $20-$100 or so per car in the sticker price of a supercar. You can get hardware for automotive environments with that performance now. 15 years ago, you couldn't.
Modern programmer would make sure to do those floating point calculations in an ISR too ;-). Cars have been fine with lookup tables and interpolation. If you can precisely control spark, you could valves as well.
As for hardware requirements. Afaik control always outraced controlled business end. Lets take Honda for example, all their ECUs from 92 (P05) onward had full facility to drive individual coil on plug, but officially Honda switched away from mechanical distributor in 1999 (S2000?). You can trivially convert 92 car with a small adapter board, ECUs shipped with all the needed hardware sitting unused for 7 years.
This same technology is having an even more dramatic impact on High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) transmission lines where costs have been dropping very quickly.
Two stroke engines do need oil changes because you are supposed to mix in the oil with the fuel and they just burn the oil and get new oil when new fuel comes in. This is very bad for the environment because burning lubricant is very bad for pollution. It is also costly because you have to pay for much more lubricant.
Perhaps Nokia figured out that it would be much cheaper for them to burn oil rather than occasionally send people to remote locations to service engines. This may be true but they should not pretend this is environmentally friendly. It isn't.
If you are older you may remember how gross and foul smelling two stroke lawn mowers used to be back in the times. We don't need to bring this back.
Based on the article, the video embedded within it, and the Technology section of Aquarius' website, this is a double-acting uniflow two-stroke internal combustion engine. As it is double-acting, there is combustion on both sides of the piston, so I am wondering how the piston is cooled, especially given the high power density of this device.
In conventional IC piston engines, the piston is either cooled by the oil [1], or, in the case of small two strokes having a total-loss lubrication system (the sort that the parent post is concerned with) piston cooling is aided by the flow of the incoming mixture through the crankcase. Neither method seems to be feasible here. Has there been a breakthrough in materials (ceramics, perhaps?) which allow for a piston to work at high temperatures?
One other point that just occurred to me is that if you are using a total-loss, combustible lubricant design (which is what conventional gasoline two-strokes do), then the efficiency calculation must include the energy input of the lubricant as well as the gasoline (or whatever is being used purely as a fuel), as the lubricant is also a fuel.
That said, this one may need minimal lubrication since in a free-piston generator, both ends are combustion chambers, the only place there is sliding friction is between the cylinder wall and the piston, and the "secret" to their success may be some sort of ultra-hard-wearing material for those surfaces.
Tesla is the only company that insists on reinventing everything from scratch, even at the cost of grossly overpaying.
Extreme skepticism is generally wise - this engine just turned out to be the rare exception.
It is really cool to see these advancements happening in engine design.
"The total output (of the hybrid system) is a combined 1700 bhp or 1.27 MW of power and 3500 Nm of torque."
Is that torque at the wheel? If it's at the engine, who cares? It won't show up after the gears.
https://www.koenigsegg.com/gemera/tiny-friendly-giant-engine...
The gas turbine is [226 years old][0]! Computing on the other hand has seen significant change from [Charle Babbabe's mechanical computer][1], to vacuum tubes, transistors and (hopefully within the next 50 years) quantum computers.
Hopefully with progress in batteries and clean energy generation, we'll see the death of the great polluters before the end of the century. We can (and should) do better.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine#His...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer#First_computing_devic...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-specific_fuel_consumptio...
Gas turbines and 2-stroke diesels can have over 50% efficiency.
Here, however, it seems they extract electrical energy by moving a magnet back and forth in a coil.
Most people haven't heard of Tesla for solar panels. In Europe most people don't know Tesla at all.
Norway has no domestic car industry (not even major component suppliers) and about 100% (yes, you read that right) taxes on cars.
Electric cars are exempt from tax in Norway, so it doesn't matter if you buy a $20,000 ICE or a $40,000 Tesla. In addition you don't have to pay toll, annual road tax, public parking fees,and may use bus lanes.
So with all these incentives in place, it's no wonder Teslas sell like hot cakes in Norway (other EVs like Nissan Leaf and VW eGolf, too, by the way).
Every other market than BEV is practically non-existent for Tesla in Europe. Even in the BEV market, Tesla is ranked 3rd (with the exception of Norway) in terms of market share - behind European and Asian brands.
So unknown - no, dominating? Hell no!