Automotive Technology

Sounds interesting. My first glance makes me wonder:

1. about reliability. It appears to have many more working parts (2 pistons, to sets of valves, etc.) than a conventional I.C.E.
2. what will the power/weight ratio be (more parts = more weight)

Well an Electric Car only need 59 parts but how many 1000's of people need jobs making things for the cars we have now with 100's of parts.

Not to mention the people who depend on the spending by those emolyed making all the part, shipping them and the materials.

DO NOT expect them to stop Externalizing Cost anytime soon. People can not afford to pay the Full Cost of a product like a car.

What is the nature of the "positive press"? Self-generated press releases, praise from naive enthusiasts, or replicable dynamometer tests from recognized labs, etc.?

When it can turn a profit.

I really hate to appear as a stupid boastful guy in these forums, but let me say in my defense that in 83 years all you have to do to learn a lot is to pay attention to what happens around you.

In Spain, after the Civil War, gasoline was more expensive than whisky, so most cars used what you see in the picture. A wood gas generator. Now we laugh at such monstrosity but then it was a cruel reality. The wood was burned under poor oxigen conditions and CO was produced. By adding some water spray you could get a small amount of H2. The efficiency was really stinky!

The amount of energy obtained from the wood was only a small fraction of the energy in the wood burned in a normal way.

By 1947 I started to think that the technical situation was ridiculous and that all we needed was to modify the engine to burn directly the wood.

And so I invented what now is the Scudery Engine.

I have written to Scuderi several times and all I got is the promise of a phone call, that never comes.

I hope that somebody from the Company reads this, because all I wanted to tell them was that the know-how is very old and that I would never try any complaint, but that they better changed something in their patent.

Some of the first Diesels burned crude oil by pulverizing it by a very high velocity compressed air jet, passing through a labyrinth.

So I guessed that using the wood in the form of sawdust and injecting it at very high turbulence using compressed air would be a good idea.

But, now that you need high pressure air, Why not to use the whole amount of air not just for injection but for the whole cycle?.

But if you do this, you'll need an expansion cylinder, that being two stroke, it can be easily made uniflow by installing a single exhaust valve in the head.

But as you do not want the compressed air to enter the tube where the sawdust had been deposited (Not injected) under low pressure, at the end of the exhaust stroke, you'll need a small nonreturn valve at the outlet of the compression cylinder.

This is more or less the Scuderi.

Lately they have added an improvement that could be important.

The connecting tube has been enlarged to form a small tank thermally isolated to use it as an effective regenerative brake.

The serious problem is that they need two more valves subjected to high temperatures.-

I wish good luck to Scuderi.

Chorete.

BTW I called my engine the Straw Engine

I would like to see test results from the dyno as well as real world performance under different duty cycles. Torque, power, volumetric efficiency, specific fuel consumption and engine reliability and cost are my means to decide the promise of the split cycle engine. Recent news stories suggest that the Southwest Research Institute is involved in the testing of the engine. I would be very interested in seeing the numbers.