New Breed of Engine - Duke Axial

[c7scayman]

http://www.gizmag.com/duke-engines-axial/33631/

I would like to see this in hot hatch's



"New Zealand's Duke Engines has been busy developing and demonstrating excellent results with a bizarre axial engine prototype that completely does away with valves, while delivering excellent power and torque from an engine much smaller, lighter and simpler than the existing technology. We spoke with Duke co-founder John Garvey to find out how the Duke Axial Engine project is going.

Duke Engines' 3-liter, five cylinder test mule is already making a healthy 215 horsepower and 250 lb-ft of torque at 4,500rpm – slightly outperforming two conventional 3 liter reference engines that weigh nearly 20 percent more and are nearly three times as big for shipping purposes. With an innovative valveless ported design, the Duke engine appears to be on track to deliver superior performance, higher compression and increased efficiency in an extremely compact and lightweight package with far fewer moving parts than conventional engines.

The Duke engine is an axial design, meaning that its five cylinders encircle the drive shaft and run parallel with it. The pistons drive a star-shaped reciprocator, which nutates around the drive shaft, kind of like a spinning coin coming to rest on a table.

The reciprocator's center point is used to drive the central drive shaft, which rotates in the opposite direction to the reciprocator. "That counter-rotation keeps it in tidy balance," says Duke co-founder John Garvey. "If you lay your hand on it while it's running, you can barely detect any motion at all, it's quite remarkable."

[thunder_lizard]

There was an article on something similar to this in Popular Science sometime back in the 90's iirc; It uses a swashplate drive design; there was a variant that allowed for variable displacement by moving the drive plate front/ backwards via a solenoid on the centershaft..You could conceivably pack a lot of power in a tiny engine.