What is the next step in engine design?

what is happening under your noses is next. direct injection, overhead 4 valve VVT, and twin turbocharging. its gonna be big.

volkswagen is working on this now.

The overhead valve engine is a lot more than 60 years old. I don’t Know who first designed it but Buick had ohv straight eights in 1931. Also, there were ohv conversion for model T and A Ford 4 cyl. flatheads for racing. The most widely known was the Ardun head. There were also Overhead cam conversions for those engines in both single and double cam versions.

Agree; our very first car was a 1929 Chevy and it had a flat head 6 engine. By the early 30s GM cars started having overhead valves. Our 1941 Chevy had the “stovebolt 6”, which was in production till GM changed it in the 60s with 5 main bearings. Chrysler was the last big car firm to have flat heads; it was not till the early 60s with the slant 6 that they left flatheads behind.

Engine development is EVOLUTIONARY; the next step will be wholesale application of Direct Injection and fully variable valve timing. This will allow much higher compression ratios and much larger output from relatively small engines.

Ford is betting on small, tubo-charged engines to power their big cars. Large V8s will die a natural death in cars, they will live on as truck engines.

Diesels will also be part of the scene, but the added cost of tail pipe gas cleanup will make it a difficult sell for small cars; hybirds will keep coming down in price, and will be fully competitive with diesels, while giving better mileage.

In Europe diesels are popular because the tax structure is manipulated to make diesel less expensive, something that might be difficult here because the fuel tax is too low to start with.

What about turbocompounding? got to be some potential there,how about a turbocompounded ICE with thermoelectric waste heat recovery?-Kevin

I’m not trying to be mysterious. I posted a link to a site that has information about five stroke water injected engines. If it came across as weard, oh well.

As for your first question, I am not sure what you are asking. I started the topic so I could hear the upcoming news, not that I already know of i
t.

Thermoelectric is only about 10% efficient. BMW tried something similar to turbocompounding, by combining coolant heat with exhaust heat to drive a steam engine. The steam schematics looked very complicated. I think exhaust heat powered Stirling engine is much simpler than BMW’s approach.

The last year for the Chrysler flathead 6 was 1959, the slant 6 came out in the fall of 59 as a 1960 model.

I always expect people that post these type of questions to have done some home work and have somekind of a idea as to where we sit right now.

I just don’t like clicking on links that people don’t explain (even in the briefest terms) where this link will take me and why I should be looking at it.

Seems like a lot of effort to reduce battery weight. There’s still a lot of low hanging fruit in the area of weight reduction IMO. They’ve been talking for years about increasing the bus voltage. This would reduce wiring harness weight and also the weight of a lot of the motors/actuators in the car. What about using gear reduction starters? A common upgrade on vintage hot-rods to reduce weight, size and increase cranking power for higher HP applications. Another approach that has been used is a compression release mechanism to allow the motor to spin up with less resistance. My 1400cc motorcycle uses this approach and it works quite well. Hopefully, any new approach is a step in the right direction :wink:

Thanks for the correction; I now remember the 1960 Valiant as having one of the first slant 6 engines.

If the series hybrid design catches on where electrics do the driving, you may see reverse engineering. OHV pushrod of older designs do quite well efficiency wise compared to OHC motors when used in generators. I could see flex fuel motors of older design or 4 stroke diesels doing quite well. Who needs a motor with a broad power band when an old designed can be tuned to high efficiency in a narrow rpm range ?
So if the goal is to milk the public of service $$$$$ and convince them that more complicated IC motors is the way to go, then you’ll see more advanced motors. If the IC is used as an efficient mule for electricity generation, the way I feel it should be, you may not.

Thanks CA,actually what I had in mind was an exhaust turbine geared to the crankshaft and thermocouples or whatever downstream-Kevin

Wow. Thanks for the link. I’m glad I kept an open mind

Turbocompounding isn’t new; it was used in the Lockheed Constellation. It was notoriously unreliable, though: termed the “power recovery turbine,” it was snidely termed the “parts recovery turbine” by those who flew with it. Note that this system only had to operate in a steady-state “cruise” environment–an automotive application would be more demanding.

It will be interesting to see if, 60 years’ hence, it’s finally “ready for prime time.”