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Video of Engine Test Using traditional chemical rockets, a trip to Mars – at quickest — lasts 6 months. But a new rocket tested successfully last week could potentially cut down travel time to the Red Planet to just 39 days. The Ad Astra Rocket Company tested a plasma rocket called the VASIMR VX-200 engine, which ran at 201 kilowatts in a vacuum chamber, passing the 200-kilowatt mark for the first time. "It's the most powerful plasma rocket in the world right now," says Franklin Chang-Diaz, former NASA astronaut and CEO of Ad Astra. The company has also signed...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 26, 2009 – The F-22 Raptor and F-18 Hornet fighter jets are fast, screaming through the air at twice the speed of sound, but the SR-71 Blackbird was faster, flying Mach 3 until mechanical problems and exorbitant operating costs forced it out of service in the late 1990s. Now, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is striving to build an engine that will propel a hypersonic jet at Mach 4 and faster, while also bringing new efficiencies to ships and ground vehicles. DARPA's Vulcan program kicked off this spring and aims to create the supersonic capability needed to...

<p>DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - Cummins Filtration has announced plans to move 400 jobs at its Lake Mills plant to a factory in Mexico.</p> <p>The division of diesel engine manufacturer Cummins Inc. announced Tuesday its oil and fuel filter assembly operations in Lake Mills will be moved to San Luis Potosi, Mexico, beginning in November.</p>

ARLINGTON, Va. —The Truck Writers of North America (TWNA) announced Detroit Diesel Corporation’s DD15 engine turbo compounding as the winner of its Technical Achievement Award for 2008 during TMC’s 2009 Annual Meeting in Orlando, Fla., Feb. 9-12.

The world frets about the rise in fuel prices and the environmental damage caused by motor pollution. An inventor in Kiryat Gat says he has the solution. Hugo Tour, a retired Israel Air Force officer, claims the engine he's been working on for three years is the biggest breakthrough in motor technology since the invention of the internal combustion engine by Nikolaus Otto in 1876. At his home laboratory in Kiryat Gat, Tour has built a working bench-prototype of a split cycle engine, which he predicts will improve engine efficiency by up to 100 percent and reduce carbon emissions by...

President Obama may have singled out a General Electric-Rolls Royce engine for the next-generation fighter jet as wasteful, but House defense authorizers will have none of that. The House Armed Services Air and Land Forces Subcommittee on Friday agreed to authorize $603 million for the production of an alternative engine for the Joint Strike Fighter F-35. The GE-Rolls Royce venture is going head to head with engine maker Pratt & Whitney, which is building the primary engine and has been eying to be the sole contractor for the new fighter jet. When Obama announced his budget request for 2010 in...

A radical twin-fuel engine from Ford, code-named “Bobcat,” that variably blends gasoline and ethanol on demand to realize diesel-like performance continues to make steady progress in its development, according to presentations made by the automaker to the Department of Energy and Society of Automotive Engineers in April. The presentations also provide a first look at the engine’s architecture and make some remarkable claims about “E85-optimized” engine efficiency versus size.

Anyone interested in a car that gets 110 mpg, 400 hp, and 500 tq? Of course you are, but where can you get such an automobile? What if I told you that you just need to get the engine, and put it in your car? Awesome huh? A man has invented an E85 engine that gets all those stats. E85 is known for being very inefficient, but it delivers more horsepower to engines that can run on it while reducing mpg. All we needed was someone to make E85 efficient. Well, now we have.

Here a good news energy story from one of the few countries in the Middle-east not trying to screw us via petroleum costs Agam Energy Systems, an Israeli company has developed a piston-less turbine engine, featuring a new kind of compressor that has the potential to revolutionize the automotive industry. The engine will consume 1/5 of the gas and emit 1/10 of the pollution. The engine is compatible to engines presently being used and could be retrofit into today's models: American automakers are already taking notice, the company reports. Agam's chief technology officer and visionary is Dr. Gad Assaf, a...

Volvo Cars is introducing an entirely new 2.4-liter 5-cylinder diesel engine in the Volvo S80. Sharing only the D5 badge and the 5-cylinder configuration with the previous generation, the new D5 is Euro-5 compliant and is more efficient than its predecessor. Featuring sequential twin turbochargers, ceramic glow-plugs and piezoelectric fuel injectors, the new engine applied in the S80 delivers 205 hp (153 kW) of power and 420 Nm (310 lb-ft) of torque, with fuel consumption of 6.2 liters/100 km (38 mpg US) and CO2 emissions of 164 g/km. The previous engine generation has undergone constant development in a series of...

Pilots usually think of airplane flight performance in terms of gallons an hour—not miles per gallon. AOPA member and aeronautical innovator Klaus Savier, owner of Light Speed Engineering based at Santa Paula Airport (SZP) in Southern California, has been setting speed and efficiency records for two decades in his experimental, Rutan-designed Vari-EZ—a plane that serves as a technology demonstrator for products that hint at possibilities for improving the efficiency of the GA fleet. “Efficiency and speed go hand in hand,” said Savier, a German-born engineer, glider pilot, and composite materials expert. “They’re so closely related that it’s really a matter...

harles Babbage (1791-1871), computer pioneer, designed the first automatic computing engines. He invented computers but failed to build them. The first complete Babbage Engine was completed in London in 2002, 153 years after it was designed. Difference Engine No. 2, built faithfully to the original drawings, consists of 8,000 parts, weighs five tons, and measures 11 feet long.

Basic design of a two-piston RoundEngine. The external combustion chamber. Canada’s VGT Technologies, the developer of the RoundEngine, has started development of a “plug-in” compressed air hybrid vehicle using the RoundEngine technology. In this application, “plug-in” refers to connecting to an external air compressor to top off the storage tanks. The RoundEngine is a novel variable geometry toroidal (VGT) engine. The gasoline/air hybrid vehicle is similar to a gasoline/electric hybrid vehicle but uses compressed air instead of electricity for an auxiliary drive. In the first phase of development VGT will focus on the air drive using the RoundEngine technology...

[snip]. Well, we do have such a power plant and at the moment it is sitting doing not a lot really, in a Gold Coast workshop at Southport. It is a four-cylinder, 2.4 litre engine which has been independently certified as being the world's most efficient petrol engine. In other words, for a given amount of petrol burned this engine will do more work than any other anywhere in the world. During testing, the engine achieved a repeatable Brake Specific Fuel Consumption figure of 212g/kWh or 38.6 per cent efficiency, best figure achieved being 207g/kWh or 39.5 per cent efficiency....

Johnathan Goodwin can get 100 mpg out of a Lincoln Continental, cut emissions by 80%, and double the horsepower. Does the car business have the guts to follow him? “Check it out. It's actually a jet engine," says Johnathan Goodwin, with a low whistle. "This thing is gonna be even cooler than I thought." We're hunched on the floor of Goodwin's gleaming workshop in Wichita, Kansas, surrounded by the shards of a wooden packing crate. Inside the wreckage sits his latest toy--a 1985-issue turbine engine originally designed for the military. It can spin at a blistering 60,000 rpm and...

MUSIC engine on the test bed. Side view of the MUSIC cylinder head MUSIC system schematic Cylinder head design layout and prototype for the four-cylinder engine. Recent testing of a 2.0-liter, four-cylinder implementation of the Merritt Unthrottled Spark Ignition Combustion (MUSIC) engine, initially developed at Coventry University, (earlier post) showed a 19.8% improvement in fuel economy compared to a baseline Ford 2.0L Duratec. MUSIC is an un-throttled, high thermal efficiency, lean-burn, spark ignition system that uses an indirect combustion chamber to produce charge stratification by means of controlled air management. During the compression stroke, the piston forces air to...

The California Air Resources Board has revised a draft regulation that will require retrofits and engine replacements for the estimated privately owned 300,000 diesel trucks and buses on California roadways beginning in 2012. The proposed regulation now calls for truckers to retrofit pre-2007 model year trucks with soot filters and then requires a gradual modernization of trucks beginning in 2012, so that ultimately all trucks are the cleanest, 2010 or newer models. Staff re-worked an earlier version of the draft regulation, presented in January, to eliminate the need for truckers to replace two trucks in a nine-year span, instead relying...

BMW’s 2.0-liter four-cylinder diesel (earlier post) was named Best New Engine of the Year 2008 at the tenth annual International Engine of the Year Awards at Engine Expo in Stuttgart, Germany (6-8 May). The top six contenders in this category included two twin-turbos (one gasoline, one diesel), a V10 with 580bhp, the world’s first diesel boxer engine (from Subaru), and a fresh version of Volkswagen’s TSI. BMW’s 3-liter Twin Turbo gasoline engine was named International Engine of the Year 2008, as it was last year. (Earlier post.) The judges of the awards noted that the back-to-back win also confirms turbocharging...

Researchers in the UK have developed a new kind of engine. It could be called a hybrid, but what it combines is not two power sources but rather two mode of operation: 2-stroke and 4-stroke. The goal is to be able to significantly downsize the engine and get the fuel economy benefits of smaller displacement, but to be able to switch seamlessly to 2-stroke mode when more power is required at high loads and low speeds. The prototype (seen above) is a modified 2.1-liter V6. After tests at the University of Brighton, it has been found to produced performances...

Results of the study indicate that a steam hybrid using exhaust waste heat could reduce fuel consumption by up to 31.7%, depending upon drive cycle and vehicle. A study by researchers at Loughborough University and the University of Sussex, both in the UK, has concluded that using waste heat from light-duty vehicle engines in a steam power cycle could deliver fuel economy advantages of between 6.3% and 31.7%, depending upon drive cycle, and that high efficiencies can be achieved at practical operating pressures. The basic concept of the “steam hybrid” system is that energy is recovered from the exhaust...