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This article (about Toyota's not exactly original 'discoveries') sets me thinking along the lines of my old soapbox gripe - the oft overlooked point about engineering to spread the load of waste heat around (in time) rather than always engineering blindly for the worst-case scenario instantaneous peaks of thermal load.
In a gas turbine engine for example, because of the continuous flow of heat across the combustion zone, waste heat exhausted after the turbine stage can be recuperated by passing the hot gases through a heat-exchanger that heats the air just after the final compression stage.
If there was a process by which the hottest region of the cylinder wall (nearest to the exhaust valves) could regenerate its excess heat around onto the surfaces nearest the inlet valves then (if it could happen fast enough [using heatpipe tech?]) there would be an opportunity for a kind of micro-recuperation in a SI engine. The whole system would need to be designed from the ground up for this to be possible and the intake tract would need to be thermally separated from the head otherwise the thermal efficiency would be lowered by too warm air (esp. on DI gas engines).
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