The May issue of Automotive Design & Production Magazine has written a profile of the Scuderi Air Hybrid Engine.

Automotive Design & Production Overview
Formed in 1934 and focuses on the automotive industry from design to delivery. Editorial objective is to provide readers involved in all tiers of the automotive industry with insightful information on automotive product and process development and execution. Each issue focuses on the automobile from design through delivery with regular features on design, engineering, production, management, information technology and materials. Automotive Design & Production is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.autofieldguide.com.

Back to the Future: Scuderi Revolutionizes Engine Design

Could an engine design with roots that go back to 1914 revolutionize the way that vehicles are powered in the future? The people at Scuderi Group (www.scuderigroup.com; Springfield, MA) think so. They’ve developed an air-hybrid engine that, unlike traditional internal combustion engines, features a split-cycle configuration. Although the split-cycle design has been continually dismissed for the past 90 years as having inherent problems when it comes to volumetric and thermal efficiency, Scuderi says it has eliminated those issues, thanks to several breakthroughs. Chief among them: A unique disc-valve design that handles both the inlet and outlet valves of the compression cylinder, allowing trapped gases to be removed from the cylinder, which improves volumetric efficiency, while spark plug firing has been configured to occur after top dead center for improved thermal performance. This portion of the system is what Scuderi calls its silver bullet: “The key breakthrough here is the ability to fire after top dead center and still maintain overall pressure,” says Stephen Scuderi. Pressure is also a key factor in improving split-cycle efficiency. Scuderi says its design is able to achieve compression cylinder pressures equal to that of a conventional internal-combustion engine during the combustion cycle, thus creating large amounts of turbulence for improved atomization of the fuel/air mix. This results in a flame speed rate more than two times faster than a conventional engine.

For the complete article, click here.