BusinessWeek reports on a fascinating new Diesel Design by EcoMotors:
One of Khosla’s latest bets is EcoMotors, a Detroit company whose crown jewel is a two-cylinder diesel engine that’s lighter, more powerful, and easier to scale up than today’s engines, says Ford Tamer, operating partner at Khosla Ventures. The design could wind up boosting a diesel engine’s efficiency — which is already 20% to 40% better than those of gas engines — by half. The two-cylinder units can be clicked together like Legos: by linking them in a series, designers can build the sorts of larger engines with four, six, or eight cylinders that are typically used in cars and trucks.Details on the patented design are still hush-hush, but the design uses horizontally opposed pistons, like those in Subaru‘s gas-powered “boxer” engine. Because the pistons are always moving in opposite directions to one another, they cancel out most of the stress they’d otherwise transfer into the engine block. This allows the design to be lighter than conventional engines, where the pistons are inline or in a V configuration. EcoMotor’s approach cranks out about 1 hp per pound of engine weight, says Tamer, 20% better than the highly tuned engine on a Porsche 911, and 300% better than many mass-market engine designs.
It also sounds legit:
The design comes with an impressive pedigree. It’s the brainchild of EcoMotors’ CEO Peter Hofbrauer and COO John Coletti, two gurus of engine design with more than 50 years of experience and dozens of industry firsts between them. Before Khosla got involved, EcoMotors’ design went through three development phases under a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program to develop ultra-efficient motors for battlefield use. “This isn’t a model running in a lab,” says Tamer. “It’s real. Our goal is to license a commercial version to any automakers.”