Very solid article on the Scuderi Engine in Wired Magazine,

Wired Magazine
New Engine Combusts Old Ideas

If your next car gets twice the gas mileage of your current vehicle, and belches out only a fraction of the pollution, you may have Carmelo Scuderi to thank.

So how does the Scuderi engine ‘combust old ideas’?

…Scuderi began by splitting the heart of the internal combustion engine — the chamber where air is compressed, mixed with fuel and then ignited — into two separate cylinders, linked by a passage. Air is compressed in the first cylinder, and then shot through the passage into the second cylinder, where it mixes with the gas and burns.

Computer-generated models are universally used in the automotive industry to design new engines and other parts, and are considered extremely accurate in predicting performance.

Those models show the combustion in a Scuderi engine will be not only more powerful than conventional engines; it will also, surprisingly, be cooler. That means it will spew out far fewer pollutants than today’s engines do.

The Scuderi engine could even boost mileage by recapturing energy normally lost during braking, as do hybrid cars. “Unlike current electric hybrids which store the energy in a battery, we are able to store energy in the form of compressed air,” says Sal Scuderi. That can be done by simply adding a small air-storage tank, which costs far less than the generators and banks of batteries gas-electric hybrids need.

While working models of the Scuderi engine won’t see the light of day until next year, the radical design is already attracting a lot of attention in the automotive world. The company is in talks with big automakers, and when it showed off the new engine at a major automotive-engineering conference in Detroit earlier this year, the Scuderi booth was mobbed.

To read the full artilce, and to watch a video expalining how the Scuderi engine works, click here.