Bill Gates Applies for Patent on Electromagnetic Engine

At first I was pretty skeptical if the usefulness of such a device. The crankshaft in an engine transfers power to a load, but it also performs an elegant and complicated synchronization task for multiple cylinders and ancillary systems (like lubrication, cooling, fuel supply, ...).

But the crank also imposes a practical limit on stroke length because a long stroke in a small space gives you pretty high angles and less efficient power transfer. The short stroke puts an artificially-low limit on the fraction of energy from the combustion that can be recovered.

Attaching a kinetic-to-electric conversion device directly to the cylinder allows the stroke length to be longer (basically unbounded) so a larger fraction of the energy can be captured, and less wasted as heat.

Then a multi-cylinder engine basically becomes a computer program, where it's easy to implement fine timing, synchronization, load-balancing and load-prediction tasks using sensor networks.

I'm skeptical that it would be more useful than just dropping the mechanical conversion and it's relatively high losses, and using something like a fuel cell instead.

However, I couldn't figure out whether the article was accurate so I decided to post the patent application instead.