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Volvo Trucks unveiled last week its plans to launch a 13-liter heavy-duty natural gas engine featuring Westport high pressure direct injection (HPDI) technology. The engine, marketed under the “Blue Power” designation, is scheduled to launch for the North American market in 2014. The engine’s advanced high pressure diesel ignition technology will provide significant fuel efficiency gains compared with current natural gas products. Combined with the company’s previously announced offering of compressed natural gas (CNG)-powered Volvo VNM and VNL model daycabs, the new engine will provide customers with a complete range of natural gas-powered transportation solutions. Volvo is also testing another...

What is it? Orbital,non-reciprocating internal combustion engine. Piston/Cylinder structured Adaptable to all liquid or gaseous fuels Ultra efficient Patent # 7721687B1; & Patents Pending

Raw power!

You can buy anything on the internet – even, until recently, a rocket engine. NASA has since confiscated the engine, which contains technology that could form the basis of missiles as well as spacecraft. But the incident highlights security concerns at the space agency . Called the RL-10, this type of engine powered NASA's Saturn-I rocket in the 1960s. That was a precursor to the larger Saturn-V, which took astronauts to the moon. In a recent report, NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) described how in July, it confiscated an RL-10 from a man who had put the engine up...

Eurojet offers Korea chance to join consortium By Jung Sung-ki Korea has a chance to join a European military engine consortium for joint manufacturing, development and marketing. The offer is conditional to the country deciding to power its new-generation aircraft with a European engine, according to a key executive from Eurojet Turbo GmbH. Eurojet is a four-nation military aerospace engine consortium involving the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain and Germany. The consortium has already secured orders of 1,500 EJ200 engines internationally and expects hundreds more, according to Paul Herrmann, Eurojet’s vice president-sales, as India and other nations are considering buying Eurofighter...

A gallery of electric and hybrid vehicles on display at the International Motor Show in Frankfurt, Germany. Prototype and production hybrids and electric cars debuted this week at the International Motor Show in Frankfurt, Germany. Car manufacturers showed off sportier designs—and some outlandish models. The i8, shown here, is BMW's first plug-in hybrid sports car. It can reach 62 miles per hour in 4.6 seconds, has a top speed of 155 mph, and can achieve 87 miles per gallon. It weighs 3,200 pounds. A version of the car will probably be on sale by the end of 2013. Credit: Internationale...

Rolls Royce Merlin 1/5 scale model by Barrington Hares

China defense industry faces homemade engine troubles Wednesday, July 20, 2011 By Robert Karniol, The Straits Times/Asia News Network SINGAPORE -- China can send a man into space and a rocket into lunar orbit but, paradoxically, its defense industry cannot build a top-end aircraft engine. Or an engine sophisticated enough to power advanced surface ships and armored vehicles. But this broad statement requires a caveat: China's defense industry can indeed design, develop and produce propulsion systems for relatively simple military platforms — certain transport aircraft, patrol boats, some types of main battle tanks and armored personnel carriers. But high-performance combat...

An old technology could make hybrid cars much cheaper. The automakers Volvo and Jaguar are testing the possibility of using flywheels instead of batteries in hybrid electric vehicles to aid acceleration and help engines operate more efficiently. The devices could reduce fuel consumption by 20 percent and would cost a third as much as batteries. Volvo will begin road-testing a car with the technology this fall. In a flywheel system, energy from the wheels is used to spin a flywheel at high speeds. The flywheel continues spinning, storing energy until that motion can be transferred back to the wheels via...

China’s Jet Engine Future July 13, 2011 By Gabe Collins & Andrew Erickson Rapid improvements in China's military jet engine capabilities have major implications for the global defence industry. Following is a guest entry from Gabe Collins and Andrew Erickson, co-founders of China Sign Post. China's military jet engine capability is increasing at a rapid pace, with implications not only for China's independent military capabilities, but also for the global defence industry. Yet China also faces major impediments in achieving its strategic aim of establishing itself as an independent manufacturer in one of aerospace's most complex engineering technologies: high-performance turbofan...

Is the price of gasoline taking a toll on your wallet? Make your drive greener and more fuel efficient with the help of lasers. Everything else about an automobile is being retooled to be leaner and greener, so it was only a matter of time before spark plugs got a second look. While they might seem like an essential component for ignition, a group of Japanese researchers think their lasers can do a better job. "If you want save gasoline, cut CO2 and [emissions] with more power, new ignition should be required," said Takunori Taira, an associate professor of laser...

GE Brings Good Things To Hornet, Gripen Posted by Bill Sweetman at 4/21/2011 7:53 AM CDT If the Pentagon leadership is successful in its goal of shutting dwon the Joint Strike Fighter's F136 alternate engine program (and may I add that if they brought such zeal and sense of purpose to bear on other issues, the world might be a better place, but I digress) there will be an important consequence: the JSF program will acquire a new and powerful enemy, in the form of General Electric. Evidence of this trend may be coming to light. At yesterday's roll-out of...

A start-up, Liquid Piston, aims to greatly improve the efficiency of internal combustion.

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. The generator is about the size of a saucepot, and would replace the 1,000-pound power train in most cars — no transmission, cooling system, emissions regulation or fluids needed. Norbert Müller and colleagues at Michigan State University showed off the new motor prototype at a meeting with the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects...

(CNN) -- A Delta Air Lines flight reporting an engine problem made an emergency landing Thursday at the Colorado Springs, Colorado, airport, officials said. Two passengers suffered minor injuries during the evacuation

At least two people have been killed after a passenger plane skidded off the runway following an emergency landing at Moscow's Domodedovo airport. The Dagestan Airlines flight, with 155 passengers on board, was forced to land because its engines had reportedly cut out. Dozens of people were injured in the incident. It is not yet known what caused the engines to fail and an investigation has begun. The Russian-built Tu-154 took off at 11:07am (GMT) from Vnukovo Airport, just outside Moscow. It was heading to Makhachkala - the capital of the Republic of Dagestan. One engine failed on take-off, the...

NEW YORK (AFP) – Hollywood heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio, star of "Titanic," was among passengers on a Delta Airline jet forced to make an emergency landing in New York after losing one engine, a report said Monday. DiCaprio, 36, "avoided disaster at 30,000 feet," UsMagazine.com reported. The plane, bound for Moscow, had to return to John F. Kennedy airport shortly after take-off Sunday when an engine suddenly shut down.

Eurojet pips GE in LCA engine bid Ajai Shukla New Delhi September 20, 2010, 23:35 IST Europe has an edge over the US in the tightly-fought contest to sell India a next-generation engine for the homegrown Tejas light combat aircraft (LCA). Informed sources have told Business Standard that when the bids were opened last week, European consortium Eurojet bid $666 million for 99 EJ200 engines, against US rival General Electric, which quoted $822 million. Both engines had been earlier adjudged technically suitable to power the Tejas Mark-II. Therefore, according to the ministry of defence’s procurement rules, the vendor offering the...

Have you always wanted to assemble a car engine? If so you may want to consider buying a Corvette Z06 or ZR1, this is because there is a new build-your-own engine option available. This option will set you back $5,800 extra, don’t worry if you are worried that you will end up with an engine that does not run, as a General Motors technician will supervise you throughout the build.

Transonic Combustion, a startup based in Camarillo, CA, has developed a fuel-injection system it says can improve the efficiency of gasoline engines by more than 50 percent. A test vehicle equipped with the technology gets 64 miles per gallon in highway driving, which is far better than more costly gas-electric hybrids, such as the Prius, which gets 48 miles per gallon on the highway.

In the past year, the U.S. auto industry has reeled under market pressure, faced bankruptcy, accepted billions of dollars in government bailout money, and agreed to mandates for cleaner and more efficient vehicles. But for two brothers from Colorado with an automotive start-up company, things couldn’t be better. Levi Tillemann-Dick, 28, and his brother Corban, 24, are carrying on a dream they hatched with their late father, Denver inventor and businessman Timber Dick, to bring to market a radical new engine design that is much more efficient than a traditional internal combustion engine. The four-stroke engine used in gasoline-powered cars...

Researchers from Purdue University and Cummins Inc. have developed an advanced "closed-loop control" approach for preventing diesel engines from emitting greater amounts of smog-causing nitrogen oxides when running on biodiesel fuels. Operating truck engines on a blend of biodiesel and ordinary diesel fuel dramatically reduces the emission of particulate matter, or soot. However, the most modern and efficient diesel engines burning biodiesel emit up to 40 percent more nitrogen oxides at some operating conditions, and fuel economy declines by as much as 20 percent. Unlike conventional diesel, biodiesel contains oxygen, and the researchers have shown that this presence of oxygen...

The Ford Mustang will get not one, but two new engines next year. Ford Motor Co. announced Monday that it plans to introduce an all-new 5.0-liter, V8 engine for its 2011 Mustang GT in the spring. The V8 engine will deliver 412 horsepower and 390 pound-feet of torque - 87 more horsepower than the outgoing engine. "This is the right engine for the car," said Bob Fascetti, Ford's director of large gas and diesel engines. Monday's confirmation follows Ford's announcement in November that it will also provide an all-new 3.7-liter V6 engine with 305 horsepower in the Mustang when it...

Plug-in hybrids may generate more eco-buzz when the calendar flips, but diesels could prove more powerful in revving up the automotive economy. Those of us who remember diesel-powered hatchbacks of the '70s as loud, dirty and troublesome may have to adjust our thinking to see them as "Green Cars." But the diesel-powered Audi A3 TDI won the title of Green Car of the Year at the 2009 Los Angeles Auto Show, following in the tracks of Jetta TDI, another diesel from Audi's parent Volkswagen. And there are more where those came from. In truth, diesels have become quiet, strong and...

According to an unnamed senior company source quoted in Autocar, Mercedes-Benz is currently deciding if it will launch a new range of three-cylinder engines. According to the source, if the German automaker chooses to go the three-cylinder route, the engine may be one cylinder bank of the company's well-regarded V6 line. If MB does go with an inline three, it will join fellow German automaker BMW in lowering its cylinder count. Apparently, though, taking this route is thought to be an expensive proposition that would require extra engineering in the form of a strengthened bodyshell, additional sound deadening and redesigned...

Eurojet proposes thrust-vectoring upgrade for Typhoon By Andrew Doyle Eurofighter and engine supplier Eurojet are stepping up their efforts to interest Typhoon customer nations in a thrust-vectoring upgrade that promises to bring substantial operational benefits and pay for itself through lifecycle cost reductions. Equipping the twin-engined Typhoon's EJ200s with thrust vectoring nozzles (TVN) could reduce fuel burn on a typical mission by up to 5%, while increasing available thrust in supersonic cruise by up to 7%, the engine consortium says. Eurojet partner ITP benchtested a TVN several years ago, and EADS earlier this year equipped its Typhoon cockpit simulator to...

Video of Engine Test Using traditional chemical rockets, a trip to Mars – at quickest — lasts 6 months. But a new rocket tested successfully last week could potentially cut down travel time to the Red Planet to just 39 days. The Ad Astra Rocket Company tested a plasma rocket called the VASIMR VX-200 engine, which ran at 201 kilowatts in a vacuum chamber, passing the 200-kilowatt mark for the first time. "It's the most powerful plasma rocket in the world right now," says Franklin Chang-Diaz, former NASA astronaut and CEO of Ad Astra. The company has also signed...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 26, 2009 – The F-22 Raptor and F-18 Hornet fighter jets are fast, screaming through the air at twice the speed of sound, but the SR-71 Blackbird was faster, flying Mach 3 until mechanical problems and exorbitant operating costs forced it out of service in the late 1990s. Now, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is striving to build an engine that will propel a hypersonic jet at Mach 4 and faster, while also bringing new efficiencies to ships and ground vehicles. DARPA's Vulcan program kicked off this spring and aims to create the supersonic capability needed to...

<p>DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - Cummins Filtration has announced plans to move 400 jobs at its Lake Mills plant to a factory in Mexico.</p> <p>The division of diesel engine manufacturer Cummins Inc. announced Tuesday its oil and fuel filter assembly operations in Lake Mills will be moved to San Luis Potosi, Mexico, beginning in November.</p>

ARLINGTON, Va. —The Truck Writers of North America (TWNA) announced Detroit Diesel Corporation’s DD15 engine turbo compounding as the winner of its Technical Achievement Award for 2008 during TMC’s 2009 Annual Meeting in Orlando, Fla., Feb. 9-12.

The world frets about the rise in fuel prices and the environmental damage caused by motor pollution. An inventor in Kiryat Gat says he has the solution. Hugo Tour, a retired Israel Air Force officer, claims the engine he's been working on for three years is the biggest breakthrough in motor technology since the invention of the internal combustion engine by Nikolaus Otto in 1876. At his home laboratory in Kiryat Gat, Tour has built a working bench-prototype of a split cycle engine, which he predicts will improve engine efficiency by up to 100 percent and reduce carbon emissions by...

President Obama may have singled out a General Electric-Rolls Royce engine for the next-generation fighter jet as wasteful, but House defense authorizers will have none of that. The House Armed Services Air and Land Forces Subcommittee on Friday agreed to authorize $603 million for the production of an alternative engine for the Joint Strike Fighter F-35. The GE-Rolls Royce venture is going head to head with engine maker Pratt & Whitney, which is building the primary engine and has been eying to be the sole contractor for the new fighter jet. When Obama announced his budget request for 2010 in...

A radical twin-fuel engine from Ford, code-named “Bobcat,” that variably blends gasoline and ethanol on demand to realize diesel-like performance continues to make steady progress in its development, according to presentations made by the automaker to the Department of Energy and Society of Automotive Engineers in April. The presentations also provide a first look at the engine’s architecture and make some remarkable claims about “E85-optimized” engine efficiency versus size.

Anyone interested in a car that gets 110 mpg, 400 hp, and 500 tq? Of course you are, but where can you get such an automobile? What if I told you that you just need to get the engine, and put it in your car? Awesome huh? A man has invented an E85 engine that gets all those stats. E85 is known for being very inefficient, but it delivers more horsepower to engines that can run on it while reducing mpg. All we needed was someone to make E85 efficient. Well, now we have.

Here a good news energy story from one of the few countries in the Middle-east not trying to screw us via petroleum costs Agam Energy Systems, an Israeli company has developed a piston-less turbine engine, featuring a new kind of compressor that has the potential to revolutionize the automotive industry. The engine will consume 1/5 of the gas and emit 1/10 of the pollution. The engine is compatible to engines presently being used and could be retrofit into today's models: American automakers are already taking notice, the company reports. Agam's chief technology officer and visionary is Dr. Gad Assaf, a...

Volvo Cars is introducing an entirely new 2.4-liter 5-cylinder diesel engine in the Volvo S80. Sharing only the D5 badge and the 5-cylinder configuration with the previous generation, the new D5 is Euro-5 compliant and is more efficient than its predecessor. Featuring sequential twin turbochargers, ceramic glow-plugs and piezoelectric fuel injectors, the new engine applied in the S80 delivers 205 hp (153 kW) of power and 420 Nm (310 lb-ft) of torque, with fuel consumption of 6.2 liters/100 km (38 mpg US) and CO2 emissions of 164 g/km. The previous engine generation has undergone constant development in a series of...

Pilots usually think of airplane flight performance in terms of gallons an hour—not miles per gallon. AOPA member and aeronautical innovator Klaus Savier, owner of Light Speed Engineering based at Santa Paula Airport (SZP) in Southern California, has been setting speed and efficiency records for two decades in his experimental, Rutan-designed Vari-EZ—a plane that serves as a technology demonstrator for products that hint at possibilities for improving the efficiency of the GA fleet. “Efficiency and speed go hand in hand,” said Savier, a German-born engineer, glider pilot, and composite materials expert. “They’re so closely related that it’s really a matter...

harles Babbage (1791-1871), computer pioneer, designed the first automatic computing engines. He invented computers but failed to build them. The first complete Babbage Engine was completed in London in 2002, 153 years after it was designed. Difference Engine No. 2, built faithfully to the original drawings, consists of 8,000 parts, weighs five tons, and measures 11 feet long.

Basic design of a two-piston RoundEngine. The external combustion chamber. Canada’s VGT Technologies, the developer of the RoundEngine, has started development of a “plug-in” compressed air hybrid vehicle using the RoundEngine technology. In this application, “plug-in” refers to connecting to an external air compressor to top off the storage tanks. The RoundEngine is a novel variable geometry toroidal (VGT) engine. The gasoline/air hybrid vehicle is similar to a gasoline/electric hybrid vehicle but uses compressed air instead of electricity for an auxiliary drive. In the first phase of development VGT will focus on the air drive using the RoundEngine technology...

[snip]. Well, we do have such a power plant and at the moment it is sitting doing not a lot really, in a Gold Coast workshop at Southport. It is a four-cylinder, 2.4 litre engine which has been independently certified as being the world's most efficient petrol engine. In other words, for a given amount of petrol burned this engine will do more work than any other anywhere in the world. During testing, the engine achieved a repeatable Brake Specific Fuel Consumption figure of 212g/kWh or 38.6 per cent efficiency, best figure achieved being 207g/kWh or 39.5 per cent efficiency....

Johnathan Goodwin can get 100 mpg out of a Lincoln Continental, cut emissions by 80%, and double the horsepower. Does the car business have the guts to follow him? “Check it out. It's actually a jet engine," says Johnathan Goodwin, with a low whistle. "This thing is gonna be even cooler than I thought." We're hunched on the floor of Goodwin's gleaming workshop in Wichita, Kansas, surrounded by the shards of a wooden packing crate. Inside the wreckage sits his latest toy--a 1985-issue turbine engine originally designed for the military. It can spin at a blistering 60,000 rpm and...

MUSIC engine on the test bed. Side view of the MUSIC cylinder head MUSIC system schematic Cylinder head design layout and prototype for the four-cylinder engine. Recent testing of a 2.0-liter, four-cylinder implementation of the Merritt Unthrottled Spark Ignition Combustion (MUSIC) engine, initially developed at Coventry University, (earlier post) showed a 19.8% improvement in fuel economy compared to a baseline Ford 2.0L Duratec. MUSIC is an un-throttled, high thermal efficiency, lean-burn, spark ignition system that uses an indirect combustion chamber to produce charge stratification by means of controlled air management. During the compression stroke, the piston forces air to...

The California Air Resources Board has revised a draft regulation that will require retrofits and engine replacements for the estimated privately owned 300,000 diesel trucks and buses on California roadways beginning in 2012. The proposed regulation now calls for truckers to retrofit pre-2007 model year trucks with soot filters and then requires a gradual modernization of trucks beginning in 2012, so that ultimately all trucks are the cleanest, 2010 or newer models. Staff re-worked an earlier version of the draft regulation, presented in January, to eliminate the need for truckers to replace two trucks in a nine-year span, instead relying...

BMW’s 2.0-liter four-cylinder diesel (earlier post) was named Best New Engine of the Year 2008 at the tenth annual International Engine of the Year Awards at Engine Expo in Stuttgart, Germany (6-8 May). The top six contenders in this category included two twin-turbos (one gasoline, one diesel), a V10 with 580bhp, the world’s first diesel boxer engine (from Subaru), and a fresh version of Volkswagen’s TSI. BMW’s 3-liter Twin Turbo gasoline engine was named International Engine of the Year 2008, as it was last year. (Earlier post.) The judges of the awards noted that the back-to-back win also confirms turbocharging...

Researchers in the UK have developed a new kind of engine. It could be called a hybrid, but what it combines is not two power sources but rather two mode of operation: 2-stroke and 4-stroke. The goal is to be able to significantly downsize the engine and get the fuel economy benefits of smaller displacement, but to be able to switch seamlessly to 2-stroke mode when more power is required at high loads and low speeds. The prototype (seen above) is a modified 2.1-liter V6. After tests at the University of Brighton, it has been found to produced performances...

Results of the study indicate that a steam hybrid using exhaust waste heat could reduce fuel consumption by up to 31.7%, depending upon drive cycle and vehicle. A study by researchers at Loughborough University and the University of Sussex, both in the UK, has concluded that using waste heat from light-duty vehicle engines in a steam power cycle could deliver fuel economy advantages of between 6.3% and 31.7%, depending upon drive cycle, and that high efficiencies can be achieved at practical operating pressures. The basic concept of the “steam hybrid” system is that energy is recovered from the exhaust...

HST International and Tjaarda Design have announced a new partnership that they say will "change the face of electric cars." Actually, what's going on here is that the partnership is changing whats under the hood of two iconic vehicles, the Mustang and the Shelby Cobra. As we learned when we spoke with Michael Kadie and Ed Monfort late last year, these conversions aren't going to be cheap, but the Tjaarda EVX Mustang and the HST Shelby Cobra EVX will certainly turn heads. The vehicles will be on display this weekend at the 34th Annual Toyota Grand Prix of Long...

COLUMBUS, Ind., April 15, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/ -- Cummins Inc. (NYSE: CMI) announced today that it has earned a prestigious 2008 Automotive News PACE Award for innovation demonstrated by the 6.7L [409 CID] turbo diesel engine. The PACE Award ceremony, held on April 14 in Detroit, Mich., honors superior innovation, technological advancement and business performance among automotive suppliers. Cummins has been recognized for the 6.7L Dodge Ram Turbo Diesel engine which debuted in January 2007 and is available in the Dodge Ram 2500 and 3500 models. The 6.7L diesel engine is the strongest, cleanest, quietest heavy-duty diesel pickup...

International chemical company Rhodia is launching two sets of materials for the formulation of deNOx catalysts showing high performance and hydrothermal durability for NOx trap technologies. Rhodia presented the emissions control materials, along with new light weight materials for weight reduction, at this week’s SAE 2008 World Congress in Detroit. Both NOx Storage Catalyst (NSC) and Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) technologies have shown limited efficiency at low temperature (<250°C) and poor durability due to the thermal deterioration at temperatures > 750°C with steam. Rhodia’s new materials address these limitations. Materials for NOx Storage Catalyst technologies (NSC). NSC are sensitive to...

The low-cost Indian "peoples car" has finally been shown in public for the first time at the New Delhi Auto Expo. Developed by Tata Motors to a target price of $2,500, the four seater has a 624cc gasoline engine mounted under the rear seat and is called the Nano. There has been a lot concern that meeting the price target would require Tata to skimp on emission controls and safety. The manufacturer claims that the 33hp engine meets current Euro IV emissions standards and is cleaner than most of the scooters running around on Indian streets right now. They...