Magnetic Valves & Laser Ignition

[cfg83]

Neil -

I was thinking that magnets + heat wouldn't be good, but electromagnets sounds more robust.

CarloSW2

[ngrimm]

I don't know. Engines and transmissions have plenty of solenoids these days. Fuel injectors, idle air control etc. which seem pretty durable to me. By using pwm you can precisely control the current just like you do with dc motors avoiding excess heat. What I like is you could switch the engine from power mode to economy mode really easily, disable cylinders for better mpg. Maybe even some advantages no one has even thought about when using direct injection.

[Christ]

I like solenoid valves, without springs or with, simply because there is no physical contact holding the valve in the down position... Far less chance of damage to the piston, should it make contact, as it will just push the valve back into the solenoid windings.

Why would anyone have to pull the head to change a solenoid, Joe? They'd be right there under the valve cover...

I also don't agree with "the more things change the more stuff to go wrong"... This may be the case at times, when the new product is only an illusion of an upgrade, but in most cases, new products are designed to move away from the frailties of the existing system. Often, in this day, it's geared toward efficiency loss.

With a cam, you've got high speed rotation, a 2:1 reduction, and reciprocal actuation, to which I personally believe the valve springs do not return that which they take in energy to compress.

With electronic valves, the engine management can precisely control valve movement based on flow, velocity, O2sat, load, tps, engine temp, etc. It can precisely meter airflow to provide the best possible combustion characteristics for a given set of parameters.

Cams are so last decade... Time for a change.

[Joenavy85]

Originally Posted by Christ

Why would anyone have to pull the head to change a solenoid, Joe? They'd be right there under the valve cover...

with the way the auto industry as a whole designs some things we'd be screwed by this, if someone with common sense designed it you'd be correct

designed to move away from the frailties of the existing system.

with multiple ecomodders going 200,000+ miles on a single engine(512,000 miles in the case of Basjoos in his aerocivic) i'm failing to see a frailty there

With a cam, you've got high speed rotation, a 2:1 reduction, and reciprocal actuation, to which I personally believe the valve springs do not return that which they take in energy to compress.

With electronic valves, the engine management can precisely control valve movement based on flow, velocity, O2sat, load, tps, engine temp, etc. It can precisely meter airflow to provide the best possible combustion characteristics for a given set of parameters.

Like i said, i'm not doubting the huge gains that could be had by implementing this system, but then all of us need to buy cars that have it, or find a way to swap the engine into our current vehicle, in order to benefit from it. More than likely, until the bugs are worked out of the system, it wouldn't be worth the extra money.

Cams are so last decade... Time for a change.

So are most of the vehicles on this site, where's your point on that. why go out and buy something brand new? there are so many cars that get plenty good mileage that you could buy that would give a much better ROI.

[Christ]

For the record, Joe, people like you and I represent the minority in the auto buying world. Likewise, just because you or Iwouldn't but a new car expecting the type of ROI we're currently getting with our respective auto choices, doesn't mean that the rest of the world at large isn't interested in a new car, and that being the case, shouldn't that new car benefit from technological advances not afforded to older generations of automobile?

Remember - fuel injection was new at one time... Dvd players... Television... Cars... And guess what? Nobody needed or had use for those things, either.

Regarding the frailties of the current system, they could also be referred to a simple down falls, or what-have-you... The point is that cams and related components aren't perfect, nor would be the new tech, but its a step closer, surely?

Often, the failure of a single component in a modern cam system end with catastrophic damage to the system, or worse, the engine as a whole. Where do you NOT see a frailty there?

[dcb]

The nice thing about non-hard coded valve timing/profile (i.e. cam) is that you can make a given engine more efficient under various conditions.

I mean if there were zero benefit, then it wouldn't make sense to get rid of camshafts. But with complete control of the valve timing a lot of other possibilities arise, i.e. Atkinson on demand, easy cylinder deactivation, and improved power to weight when appropriate.

Instead of having to install a high lift lumpy cam that can barely idle, it is a software function when you need power. Instead of installing an RV grind cam for low end torque, or an economy grind for better mpg, those become different "modes" if you will.

I think in retrospect it will be the simpler system. Right now you need crankshaft socket, camshaft socket, specific camshaft, rockers/shims/hydraulic lifters (clever but complicated), and if you want to do anything to adjust the system at runtime you need several extra components to tweak the timing (i.e. vtek) or deactivate cylinders.

Nowadays I consider fuel injection far simpler than carbs for example. What is going on with the injector is quite transparent, you can pull it out and activate it and see if the spray pattern is right, and measure how much it sprays in a given amount of time, with a cup and a stopwatch and a couple jumpers, as well you can measure the voltage from the input sensors and see if they are sane, and it results in a system that provides nearly constant mixture under a wide variety of conditions. With carbs, it is almost a complete mystery what is happening inside, with fudge for low/mid/high speed circuits, and it has to sprout various tubors when they try to make it provide a somewhat constant mixture (and even then it couldn't compete with FI).

[ngrimm]

A couple other problems I see with camshaft engines are timing belts which have to fail some time. Most all engines are of an interference design and the belts often don't get replaced in time. The other is springs which not only require a fair amount of power to compress but they generate quite a bit of heat which is part of why oil is sprayed on them. That is why if you rev the engine until the valves float the extra heat generated by high speed oscillation of the springs weaken them allowing them to float at a lower rpm each time. To think I used valve float as a rev limiter when I was younger.

[some_other_dave]

I would hope the potential benefits would be obvious to anyone with a grounding in how internal combustion engines work.

That said, solenoid-operated valves have been "just around the corner" for at least two decades so far. I'm not holding my breath for them to show up this decade, either.

As far as I know, the BMW Valvetronic system used a combination of changing the cam's rotation, and changing the lifter or the pivot point of the valvetrain's rocker arms to control the timing and lift of the valves. The information is pretty foggy in my head, though. The rotation part was actuated by oil pressure in a passage that twisted the cam pulley relative to the cam itself. I don't remember how the other was actuated.

From the videos I have seen, the Fiat Multi-Air system also uses oil pressure to work. In this case, the pressure is provided by the motion of a cam follower pressing on a reservoir. The pressure in the reservoir can apparently be bled off or directed by solenoids. It is one step closer, but is not a solenoid-operated valve. It sill has the camshaft and some fairly conventional valvetrain components. But the benefit of being able to (more or less) select from an immense variety of cam profiles for those intake valves is pretty darned sweet.

-soD

[dcb]

some links here
Camless - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

hmm, combined with direct injection, I wonder if the starter could be replaced with a more accurate crankshaft position sensor (squirt an appropriate amount of fuel into the pistons ready to travel downward, close the valves, and light it), heck for that matter I wonder if you can get some torque at 0 rpm (basically the same question), or close enough to 0 rpm that the difference is inconsequential.

[Frank Lee]

Originally Posted by dcb

hmm, combined with direct injection, I wonder if the starter could be replaced with a more accurate crankshaft position sensor (squirt an appropriate amount of fuel into the pistons ready to travel downward, close the valves, and light it), heck for that matter I wonder if you can get some torque at 0 rpm (basically the same question), or close enough to 0 rpm that the difference is inconsequential.

I read about this some years ago...

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