- Porsche’s just floated a wild new idea for an innovative gasoline engine design
- The key change? An extra compression-combustion cycle instead of the usual four strokes
- Don’t look for it in your Cayenne just yer: the tech remains a patent suggestion for now
Time to add another entry to the file labelled Needlessly Complex German Engineering. According to a number of outlets and this patent filing unearthed just last week, Porsche AG may be working on an entirely new type of internal-combustion engine — one which has six strokes instead of the common four-stroke design.
In case you fell asleep in shop class, recall the combustion cycle in most modern gasoline-fuelled engines involves a four-stroke cycle: intake, compression, ignition, and exhaust. Crude gearheads may also identify these as “suck, squeeze, bang, blow”; we’ll leave you to write yer own hilarity.
It’s been a basic principle of gas-motor operation for over a hundred years. But Porsche thinks it can do one (or two, in this case) better. In some form, the company thinks it can deploy not one but a pair of top-dead centre and bottom-dead centre measures in the same cylinder, permitting two instances of compression and combustion between the intake and exhaust strokes of the piston.
Simply put, the entire cycle in such an engine would be comprised of suck, squeeze, bang, squeeze, bang, blow, thereby doubling up on the amount of squeezing and banging. One presumes the extra compression-ignition cycle is intended to burn every last scintilla of air-fuel mixture in the cylinder, thereby eliminating waste and improving efficiency. Knowledgeable gearhead-types at The Autopian do a good job of breaking down this proposed engine type in simple(-ish) terms; my attempts at doing so simply caused by brain to spin out of control even more than it usually does on a Monday.
Of course, automakers frequently file patents for ideas which never see the light of day. And even if they do, they’re not always long-lived — especially when it comes to a new take on the basics of internal combustion. Recall how the Miller-cycle engine, named after its inventor and hailed as a Big Thing in some circles, would leave the intake valve open for slightly longer than it would in a traditional engine.
Mazda gave the Miller cycle a go in the ‘90s with its Millenia sedan, promising a raft of benefits. Versions of it are attempted today by other major automakers across the pond in a bid to chase efficiencies. The same can be said for the variable-compression concept at Nissan — to mention nothing of the spectre of developing a new way to burn gasoline in an era of increasingly tough EV mandates.
Whether a mass-market engine produced in any meaningful quantities springs forth from this patent remains to be seen. It does seem overly complex — but what else would you expect from the company that gave us the word Doppelkupplungsgetriebe?
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