SCUDERI SPLIT-CYCLE Technology - a new type of engine

If your next car gets twice the gas mileage of your current vehicle, and belches out only a fraction of the pollution, you may have Carmelo Scuderi to thank.

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.

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predict this will be important. What do you reckon? Will there be a DIY version of it?

There have been many improved engine designs, but almost none are seen in road cars. One of the most promising was a clean burning 2 stroke engine. 2 strokes are much simpler mechanically, thus cheaper, and also output around twice the power per displacement, halving ther size and reducing costs even further. Plus since it ran upto 12,000 rpm instead of 6000, it could be half the size yet again. And smaller size and weight means significant fuel savings for same performance as well as reduced build cost. But where are these engines? We dont see them. Scuderi might succeed but the odds for new engine techs arent favourable. The truth is there are a lot of issues besides simple cost and fuel efficiency, and as always new designs often dont compare with current technology in such areas. Todays engines have had a century or so of development, new ones have not.

The technical error in the article is also odd. The idea that a reciprocating piston would outrun the pressure front of an explosion seems optimistic, and anyone thats played with engines enough to set spark timing way out knows it isnt so. Why does the spokesman of a tech dev company demonstrate a basic failure to comprehend the subject properly? Given this, what does it tell us about the engine's less straightforward attributes?

It would be nice to see some of these new techs on the road, but there are many non-obvious barriers to that happening.