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The Bourke engine is a joke when it comes to fuel efficiency.
First lets look at one of its most touted features, the scotch yoke. It keeps the piston around top dead center longer. This does allow more combustion to take place before the downward power stroke and burn more of the fuel, however it also keeps the combustion gasses hotter for longer causing much more heat loss (and thus energy) to the cylinder head and piston. In fact if you look at some of the engines Russell Bourke built you will see they have giant cooling fins on the head for this reason.
The second glaring inefficiency is the fact that gasses are compressed and expanded twice but energy is only recovered once.
All the talk about it being a detonation engine and running on hydrogen are a bunch of lies too. There has never been one documented case of these engines running on hydrogen or in detonation mode as they call it.
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