Opinion

[Suff]

Manxie,

I gave it quite a bit of thought before I sent it. In short the new CEO will be up to his ass in alligators. His job is to drain the swamp. Once he gets the swamp drained, the hyenas are going to come after him in force and no matter how I pitch it to him the little rodent standing on the edge of the swamp offering him a lifeline is going to be a very hard sell to get through his army of PA's and mail sifters.

I sent the mail to the VW environment and sustainability unit. In short the unit which failed so miserably in this whole affair. They should be the people looking for solutions for their new CEO. If I were the CEO I would be telling them to find me a lifeline or go find a new job.

Sadly it will go to the Engineers next and unless someone has already lit a bonfire under their asses and they are fresh out of ideas, they will probably believe they already have the answers and there is nothing new.

I'll go to the CEO if this route fails, but I'm hoping the lower entry bar and lesser resistance of this route will be more successful...

Kaz, I'm quite surprised really. It was always a long shot so we'll see how it goes. What I thought up was once described as having the power and efficiency of a gas turbine without the need for constant cruise in the engine. It is that cruise requirement which is the main reason we don't all run gas turbines in our cars today.

Our current engines are mainly Otto cycle. One power stroke and 3 strokes which vary in terms of negative power. Not massively efficient.. Gas turbines are a single synchronous flow. My design is two asynchronous single stroke parts running in parallel but interconnected.

Which probably means nothing to anyone not very closely associated with engines. As far as I can ascertain there is nothing in the world like it. Although half of it was patented in the early 1970's and has now expired.

[Workingman]

Many years ago I saw a design for a modified Otto system similar to the flat-four once used by Porche.

It was two cylinders with one double sided piston in each - suck, squeeze, bang, blow - each side of the piston had a con-rod.. Two crankshafts geared to one power shaft converted the reciprocal motion to turning motion. The system gave four power strokes to every cycle of the unit.

I wonder what happened to it?.

[Suff]

Like many others, if you choose to try and fix one aspect without looking at the others, you wind up with something which doesn't meet the requirements in the long run. It probably had incredibly high power density, like a 2 stroke does, but probably could never reach high mpg. It would be interesting to see the design but if you think Wankel, it has very little torque. So whilst it's incredibly smooth and can reach incredible speeds, it does very low mpg. Effectively killing it for modern motoring. That low torque is inherent in the design.

My design is fairly simple, nothing massively complicated about it. The power take off is like a water wheel in a dam and a relatively modest 1m square block with 3 rotors can fire either once or 27 times, per cycle, with no cost on the 26 missing combustions. I split the induction/compression cycles with the combustion exhaust cycles, with a reservoir in-between. The engine will induce and compress simultaneously with the combustion exhaust when required, then it can stop inducing and compressing whilst the engine is still running.

The combustion cycle exhausts the gasses from the previous combustion cycle simultaneously. Making the whole thing a single stroke engine.

I set myself three design goals.

1. Allow the induction and compression chamber to be a different size from the combustion chamber
2. Make the torque multiplier, delivered from each combustion, constant throughout the combustion cycle and also larger than the largest value of a normal IC engine of the same size
3. Allow the combustion of the gasses to go on for as long as is required to get the maximum work out of the expanding gasses

I started this in 1984. My design, to the best of my abilities, met my goals. The closest design to mine is the Sarich engine, but he never met goal 1 which means the engine suffers from inherent and incurable overheating of the compression/pto vanes.

[Aggers]

Your design sounds revolutionary, and absolutely fantastic, Suff.,
although I find it impossible to visualise just how it could work.
I hope you meet with success.

[Suff]

I have a document which explains it quite simply but it needs revising and I can't find the word doc or the visio files, only the pdf file and it has some errors in it.

I guess I'm going to have to update it anyway if I get a further response. Which is by no means guaranteed. In fact I'll be highly surprised if they go that far. It will tell me how truly desperate they are..

But if there is any chance it is in the fact that they are between a rock and a hard place. They have a range of engines (at least 5 or 6 in the range), which only the very highest performing models can actually meet the emissions regulations. They charge a huge premium for these very high performing engines (170bhp and higher), which are pretty high for a 2.0 Turbodiesel engine.

So if you consider how they need to fix it, the only possible way, without failing to meet the performance criteria on which they sold the vehicles (power, mpg, emissions etc), would be to upgrade every engine to the highest possible spec and then bolt on the emissions control systems which make them compliant.

Of course this would devalue every engine in the range except for the top level, which they would have to sell at bargain basement price and, of course, you can't just whack a 170 or 200 bhp engine in a car designed for one which is 135bhp, you have to upgrade the suspension and the brakes and, of course, bolt on all the emissions control stuff.

All at a time when revenues are falling and you can't sell the cars you currently have in the pipeline. Also whilst being sued for astronomical figures.

Any R&D to make their current engines leap the technological gap as, say, the PSA diesel engines have, will be a long way down the road and when they do it the barrier is going to be even higher still.

What would you do in that situation???

[Workingman]

What would you do in that situation???

I would look at what F1 is doing with hybrids and ERS.

These things are more likely to make it to road cars, in the near future, than a totally new engine.

Engines, like many other things, evolve and are a progression from what went before. There are known, knowns. A totally new concept needs needs R&D funds, and at present they are tight.

Suff, your engine might be the one, but it will be a brave Tech Manager in the business to take it on. That, unfortunately, is why many brilliant inventions never get the recognition they deserve. The big players hold all the aces, ask Trevor Bayliss,

[Suff]

Suff, your engine might be the one, but it will be a brave Tech Manager in the business to take it on. That, unfortunately, is why many brilliant inventions never get the recognition they deserve. The big players hold all the aces, ask Trevor Bayliss,

[Edit] Brave or running scared and out of options.... Which is my hope in this case...

I was at Heriott Watt university when Trevor was awarded his honorary graduation. My daughter was graduating that same day. I listened to his speech.

What irritates me is that the hybrid industry has invested in this design which has far less benefits than my engine and far more problems...

Minds are closed unless you have a working model in front of them and then they want it for free. Ah well, I've been searching and you can buy a bench lathe and a hobbyist 4 axis cnc milling machine for under £1,000 today. So if all else fails, I'll probably wind up making one myself...

But first, the gyroscopes and the maker beam kit. I'll be ordering them this week.... That's a way more fun project and has some serious blue sky thinking around it. Which probably means it will crash and burn in the implementation....