internal combustion engine

The spark plugs driving combustion in your car may soon be getting an optical upgrade, thanks to a team of Japanese researchers. Laser ignition systems, which are exactly what they sound like, could replace spark plugs as the primary means to ignite the fuel-air mix in engines, boosting fuel efficiency and cutting down on carbon emissions.

Michigan researchers have built a prototype of a new auto motor that does away with pistons, crankshafts and valves, replacing the old internal combustion engine with a disc-shaped shock wave generator. It could slash the weight of hybrid cars and reduce auto emissions by 90 percent.

Imagine driving 500 miles nonstop in an electric car, then quickly re-charging if you want to extend your trip. Sound impossible? It might be. Either that or a Texas company called EEStor has come up with a battery replacement called an ultra-capacitor that could make the internal combustion engine obsolete.

The company's claims have spurred the occasional debate on the Web for the last year. EEStor has said that it plans to "replace the electrochemical battery" in everything from vehicles to laptops. But experts are wary, and have been left to an advanced sort of guessing game, as EEStor hasn't been leaking out too many details about how its amazing technology works. The general impression, though, is that what they're claiming is probably impossible, or at least not as wonderful as it sounds. That said, a whole bunch of drivers would love to see the critics proven wrong.—Gregory Mone

Via Yahoo News

If you aren't yet ready to give up your SUV but feel a pang of guilt every time you pass a Prius, then a new technology under development in Canada could soon soothe your conscience by
providing a bridge between the internal combustion engine of today and the clean-energy world of tomorrow. The H2N-Gen, from Innovative Hydrogen Solutions, Inc.,
in Winnipeg, Manitoba, will be an after-market add-on the size of a cable box. Its inventor, Joe Williams, Sr., claims that it can cut fuel consumption by up to 40 percent and reduce emissions by at least 50 percent.

India is booming. The expanding population has overwhelmed the Bangalore-Mysore road the way a river floods its banks, and the flow of two-way traffic is choked with a living history of human transportation. There are belching herds of diesel trucks, diesel buses and iron-framed diesel tractors. There are wooden-wheeled carts pulled by brightly painted Brahma bulls, and two-stroke-motor rickshaws fueled by kerosene or cooking oil or whatever else is flammable and cheap. There are mopeds and bipeds and bicycles and motorcycles, and every conceivable type of petrol-powered, internally combusting automobile, from doddering Ambassador cabs to gleaming 16-valve Mercedes miracles. But there's only one car like the one Somender Singh and I are riding in right now.

Gentlemen, show us your engines.

This inquiry concerns the means by which engineers from four nations put massive horsepower under the right feet of a small number of lucky drivers, where it waits, begs to be used; the means, in short, by which enough torque is produced to pin heads against headrests when a car's in fifth gear.

Steam locomotives, aircraft carriers, and weed whackers have one thing in common: They are powered by engines that convert heat into motion.
Unfortunately, such engines are not terribly efficient. But physicist Marlan Scully of Texas A&M University in College Station has a radical idea that could substantially improve them. By adding a laser and a maser (a microwave laser) to an engine, he hopes to squeeze extra energy out of the hot engine exhaust-a "quantum afterburner," as he calls it.

The automobile has been on the verge of being reinvented practically since it was invented. Cars that would float and fly, cars that would walk, cars that would cruise like bubble-shaped VIP lounges: Surely a brand-new car was right around the corner, or at least a couple of years away. Problem was, the irreducible requirements of engine, transmission, suspension, and fuel tank, and all the mechanical linkages involved (pedal to throttle, driveshaft to wheels), dictated much about not only how a car would function, but how it would look.

The most promising feature of the Honda Dualnote prototype, shown here, is the least apparent: Under its cool-kitsch skin, which looks like a computer-generated CAD drawing come to life, is a hybrid powertrain. In other words, a big electric motor helps this car's internal combustion engine.