One of my favorite automobile engine ideas is the use of camless, electronic valves. It’s an idea whose advantages have been known for 100 years or more, and it’s finally going to be used on a mainstream, commercial car — on this year’s Fiat 500s. Fiat is not going entirely camless, but the plan is to replace the cams on the air intake valves with solenoids. A normal car engine uses cams and lifters to operate the poppet valves used to control the air intake and exhaust. Replacing these cams and lifters saves some weight, and allows the Fiat-500 to operate more efficiently at low power by allowing the engine to use less combustion energy to suck vacuum. The Fiat 500 semi-camless technology is called Multiair: it’s licensed from Valeo (France), and appeared as an option on the 2010 Alfa Romeo.

How this saves mpg is as follows: at low power (idling etc.), the air intake of a normal car engine is restricted creating a fairly high vacuum. The vacuum restriction requires energy to draw and reduces the efficiency of the engine by decreasing the effective compression ratio. It’s needed to insure that the car does not produce too much NOx when idling. In a previous post, I showed that the rate of energy wasted by drawing this vacuum was the vacuum pressure times the engine volume and the rpm rate; I also mentioned some classic ways to reduce this loss (exhaust recycle and adding water).

Valeo’s/Fiat’s semi-camless design does nothing to increase the effective compression ratio at low power, but it reduces the amount of power lost to vacuum by allowing the intake air pressure to be higher, even at low power demand. A computer reduces the amount of air entering the engine by reducing the amount of time that the intake valve is open. The higher air pressure means there is less vacuum penalty, both when the valve is open even when the valve is closed. On the Alfa Romeo, the 1.4 liter Multiair engine option got 8% better gas mileage (39 mpg vs 36 mpg) and 10% more power (168 hp vs 153 hp) than the 1.4 liter cam-driven engine.

David Bowes shows off his latest camless engines at NAMES, April 2013.

Fiat used a similar technology in the 1970s with variable valve timing (VVT), but that involved heavy cams and levers, and proved to be unreliable. In the US, some fine engineers had been working on solenoids, e.g. David Bowes, pictured above with one of his solenoidal engines (he’s a sometime manufacturer for REB Research). Dave has built engines with many cycles that would be impractical without solenoids, and has done particularly nice work reducing the electric use of the solenoid.

Durability may be a problem here too, as there is no other obvious reason that Fiat has not gone completely camless, and has not put a solenoid-controlled valve on the exhaust too. One likely reason Fiat didn’t do this is that solenoidal valves tend to be unreliable at the higher temperatures found in exhaust. If so, perhaps they are unreliable on the intake too. A car operated at 1000-4000 rpm will see on the order of 100,000,000 cycles in 25,000 miles. No solenoid we’ve used has lasted that many cycles, even at low temperatures, but most customers expect their cars to go more than 25,000 miles without needing major engine service.

We use solenoidal pumps in our hydrogen generators too, but increase the operating live by operating the solenoid at only 50 cycles/minute — maximum, rather than 1000- 4000. This should allow our products to work for 10 years at least without needing major service. Performance car customers may be willing to stand for more-frequent service, but the company can’t expect ordinary customers to go back to the days where Fiat stood for “Fix It Again Tony.”