Free Piston Pressure Spike Modulator receives patent
 

Bruce Crower and Will Matthews receive
long‐awaited patent:

now this is a stock i will be looking for ----- jz

On September 15, 2009, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued Patent
No.: 7,588,000 for the Free Piston Pressure Spike Modulator For Any Internal Combustion

Engine. (See diagram of this on Google.)
Necessity is the Mother of Invention
Engineers have long attempted to overcome the damage at high peak detonation using heavier
metals and massive engine components. Diesel engines especially, require rigid, heavy parts to
contain the high pressure that occurs before and after top dead center of the piston. Efforts to
preclude damage occurring under such pressures require heavy engines, and result in allaround
greater engine cost and less payload.
How It Works
The concept is based on a free piston which communicates with the combustion chamber and
is air‐pressure backed. When the high pressure spike of combustion occurs, the chamber
volume increases before the work piston descends. The Free Piston Spike Modulator then
returns to maximum position for supplementing the cylinder pressure and driving the piston
downward at more favorable crankshaft angles producing higher torque.
Standard engines have peak combustion chamber pressures at near top dead center and
slightly thereafter. However, the leverage factor on the crankshaft is at zero angle to produce
power. Utilizing the Free Piston Pressure Spike Modulator; as the piston descends and the
crankshaft leverage increases, the Spike Modulator system provides the pressure to rotate the
crankshafts, thereby providing much increased torque, resulting in a more efficient engine.
Free Piston Pressure Spike Modulator Offers Many Possibilities
Peak pressures are destructive to engine structures. Engines using the Free Piston Pressure
Spike Modulator may be as much as 40% lighter in weight. Any internal combustion engine,
especially diesels, could benefit using the system and it may be highly suited for aircraft use,
possibly offering as much as 50% greater efficiency than standard turbine engines. Because the
piston can bounce away without a decrease in power, the Free Piston Pressure Spike Modulator
provides better fuel efficiency, lower operating cost, and more choice and versatility of fuels,
making gas, alcohol, diesel, jet, kerosene, coal oil, corn oil, and others all possibilities.
The Future
I believe the Free Piston Pressure Spike Modulator has the potential to revolutionize internal
combustion engines of all kinds transforming them into highly efficient, lighter in weight
machines, especially diesels, resulting in better fuel economy, lower emissions, and giving the
consumer more choice in fuel type.

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7588000/description.html

It's a great concept, only:

1) the pressure behind the disc would have to be tremendous to hold up to the compression cycle.

2) making a good reliable seal around the moving parts is always an issue with alternative engine designs / gizmos.

Bruce Crower is one of the top racing guros on the planet i do belive they got it to work

its not unlike another idea we have used float around on his site lawnmowers go cars chevy very cool stuff and it does work, we did lengthy dyno testing on a mule

http://somender-singh.com/content/view/21/37/

Interesting but mechanically complicated.

There are extant several patents covering variable displacement engines.

heres a better link

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=7588000&OS=7588000&RS=7588000

It does sound interesting but I too worry about long term reliability given the environment in which it will have to perform consistently.

Reminds me a little of another long coveted techno advance that also has to deal with the difficulty of the heat and high pressure of the combustion chamber - variably timed valves, operated some other way than with a camshaft locked into the crankshaft.

In both cases maintaining lubrication and reliable function could be tricky.

If this works as it should I can tell you when we will see this in production.

That will be when the Patent expires.

In 1967 a rep for a large engine producer was telling me about how improved their new engines were. I asked about an introduction date and he said when their competiation came out with a similar product.

As he put it, "Why change the hook when you are still catching fish?"

If this really will do what it claims we will likely see it in racing engines first.

There have always been overlapping fashions in engine technology whether they were adopted large-scale or not. In the early years of the 20th,cent. conventional valve gear was troublesome due to metallurgy and lubricants and some weird, wonderful and fairly practical alternatives were produced.
We had the Rotary valve, the Piston valve, the "Valveless"{2 cycle} and the Sleeve valve,{2 of which cars I have}.

Then came high-compression engines in the '20's, while there were many practical ways to avoid "pinging" and valve seat recession, notably in cylinder head design, Tetra-ethyl Lead was introduced due to General Motors sponsoring it's developement and "marketing" by their wholly owned subsidiary Dayton Engineering Laboratories....DELCO, Think of the licensing fees and royalties.

In the late '70's Stratified charge engines were the dernier cri of engine developement. Some, like Jaguar made a fairly efficient one, although beset with teething troubles, most other manufacturers maintained the status quo due to economic reasons.

Just take a gander at engine efficiency designs some time and you'll see what I mean. Everyone is still seeking the philosopher's stone, although the reciprocating engine has reached the pinnacle of commercial developement.

I've fantasize before about what sort of valve operation would be workable with some sort of auxilliary force and activation. Existing valves need a certain amount of torque to move against those springs. I imagine any sort of cam-less timing would use electricity to time and activate the valve (duhhh) and perhaps to do the actual work of moving it - electromagnetic solenoid (redundant) perhaps. Or maybe electrical signals could time the opening of a gate to hydaulic pressure.

You mentioned rotary valves and that's a thought I had. But it's a scary propositon. How you going to keep the seal good enough while opening and closing those things flawlessly enough? At 4000 rpm, each valve opens and shuts 33 1/3 times a second.

Fiat has MultiAir which is a mechanical valve train with variable hydraulic bleed-off on the intake valves. They claim some decent performance gains (all Fiat jokes aside).

Good video here.

BMW was playing with this idea, I don't know if it ever panned out.

Ducati came up with a pretty good solution.
http://woody-racing.com/Ducativalve.jpg

Damn, that is a good video. And the graphics - wow. Very impressive and I wish them the best, I mean since I won't be getting into any time machines so as to stay in school in mech. eng. and compete head to head with them.

I can't help but wonder though when we're going to read about something going wrong in that setup with valves being sent crashing into pistons. Maybe it has a sort of fail safe to prevent that.

In some ways the cam and valve train as we know it is a big fail safe in that direction.

Not sure if I follow all of that. Is that a regular cam shaft, driven by the crankshaft? I can see the advantage to this though, I think. I'm guessing that setup closes the valves faster than the springs would, which I gather can be a problem at really high RPMs. Maybe drains less hp to move the valves as well.

However, I can't tell what keeps the valve closed.

MB in the early 50s while racing perfected the Ducati system called desmo tronic - the cam opens and closes the valve in and while its rotating , the compression of the engine closses the valve - it also doubles as a compression release letting of just enough bypass while cranking - it is very good at making torque and the system reduces the speed at which it makes torque reason ducati has won 10 world championships - it does not use valve spring at all -- jz