That’s been researched for years. I’m not sure exactly what the problems have been, but it’s one of those ideas that didn’t work out as well as one would have thought.
Another “valve idea” I’ve seen: there’s one small engineering firm that designed a rotating shaft of ball valves to replace valves. It eliminates all the reciprocating masses in valvetrains. He conquered the port sealing problem with some type of ceramic seals and built and successfully tested a few fully operational V8 engines using the new system. For some reason or other, he was unable to sell the idea to the major manufacturers. I read some articles about the design and had high hopes for it. I can only assume that either it didn’t stand up to accelerated life testing of the cost to manufacture was too high.
The rotating ball valves would not give as much benefit as the variable valve timing used today. Today’s family sedans have better cam profiles at low rpm than yesterdays farm tractors and the high rpm profile of the old Indy cars I watched as a kid. That alone has accounted for much of the fuel mileage gains of modern gasoline engines.
For any engine improvement to hit the mainstream it has to be durable, repairable and cost effective. It not only has to save money, but it has to be seen as saving enough money for car companies to believe that consumers will be willing to pay for it.
Guess wrong and you could lose your company. Remember NSU and the Wankel cars and motorcycles? They went all in, then all out.
Mazda survived because they didn’t put all their eggs in the Wankel basket.
That may be, but gifted inventors frequently become fan-boys of their own ideas and can become completely blind to how terrible conventional technology is not.
My computer locked as I was in the middle of my thought and I ended up unfinished. I was going to say that if anybody can do it, he can.
You’re not incorrect, BLE, but as he himself said, it’ll just extend the usable life by a few years. ICE engines will be obsolete in the not-too-distant future. Just like my computer!
I’ve yet to see any study that proposes that generating sufficient electricity for EVs will produce more unwanted emissions than continuing to operate them with ICE engines. If there is one, I’d be interesting in reading it.
No power source sufficient to operate automobiles will be totally emissions-free. It’s a question of which one makes the most sense.
China? All we can do is hope. China is going to do whatever China wants to do, with no regard to the rest of the world. I doubt if anything we do will have any effect on China. IMHO attempting to include it in any thesis about the impact of EVs can only obfuscate the truth.
China wants to go full into EVs, but generates much of its electricity from coal. A bad combination. Same for EVs in areas of the US with coal power. No CO2 benefit.
Not a study in itself but a good article from Scientific American supporting @texases point.
As for the quote from @BillRussell Can you believe China when they make such a statement? Not an indictment of what you posted, simply a question of China’s honesty.
And don’t count out the IC engine quite yet. Mercedes’ hybrid Formula 1 engine just reached 50% thermal efficiency. More efficient than the best combined cycle coal plants and near the 60% natural gas plants can achieve not including transmission and charging losses.
I visited China in 2008, right before the Olympics.
The air pollution was so bad in places that you could stare at the sun on a cloudless day.
OTOH there were many electric vehicles, with 2, 3 and 4 wheels.
I even saw one of their electric buses.
China is making serious efforts to get away from coal, including thorium.
Here’s a short video I made of the vehicles I saw while touring:
I get that power generation from coal is typically a large polluter, but I still believe there is some CO2 reduction through economy of scale if nothing else, by using power generated at a power plant instead of generating it on the fly.
Also, by using differential absorption LIDAR to measure smokestack emissions, coal power plants have found ways to reduce harmful emissions. It’s still not “clean,” but it’s getting better.
There are 1,600more coal power plants being built, and coal use is expected to increase 43% around the world. And the Canadian study make the point that government subsidies to buy EVs are a very poor use of taxes.
I think that argument, that government subsidies are generally a poor use of tax dollars, is a pretty easy one to make and is difficult to dispute if your’re not a lobbyist working for companies who receive the subsidies. I also agree that increased use of coal power generation is moving in the wrong direction, and we should be reducing our dependence on fossil fuels by increasing renewable sources.
While we’re on a point we agree on (that is related power generation for electric cars), another waste of taxpayer money can be found in government grants. One local university received a federal grant to build a prototype underwater generator that utilizes the motion of tidal currents. A small portion of that grant money was used to build a prototype that is sitting, un-utilized in a shop, and I’d sure like to know what the rest of the grant money is being spent on.
Most of the push for EVs is to reduce CO2 emissions. What I’ve posted shows they do a poor job of that in many, if not most areas in the US, and in the huge China market. MPGs are a excellent measure of CO2 emissions. As for other pollutants, I’d bet something like a new Prius would be VERY low in HC/NOx pollution, too.
