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March 15, 2007
Check out how the boffins at MIT are doing in their efforts to make the century-old internal-combustion engines smaller and to reduce engine knock. "An engine this size," says Daniel Cohn, a senior research scientist at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, pointing out an ordinary-looking 2.4-liter midsize gasoline engine, "would be a rocket with our technology."
By combining turbocharging technology and direct fuel injection and augmenting them with a novel way to use a small amount of ethanol, Cohn and his colleagues have created a design that they believe could triple the power of a test engine, an advance that could allow automakers to convert small engines designed for economy cars into muscular engines with more than enough power for SUVs or sports cars.
By extracting better performance from smaller, more efficient engines, the technology could lead to vehicles whose fuel economy rivals that of hybrids, which use both an electric motor and a gasoline engine. And that fuel efficiency could come at a fraction of the cost.
The full report is in MIT's Technology Review.
Posted by 
at 11:28 AM to Technology
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