New Look to an Old Engine
THE GIST OF THE STORY Combustion engines are incredibly inefficient. Some engineers are looking into ways to recover wasted energy. ================================================================ To hear some people tell it, the internal combustion engine is dead. Some engineers aren’t so sure. We’ll check it out. Today, on Engineering Works! Listen to the podast. Just about everybody knows a little about internal combustion engines. They’re what powers almost all of our cars, trucks and motorcycles. They’ve been around for more than a hundred years, and they’re boring. They’re also really inefficient. Only about a quarter of the energy in fuel actually turns the wheels and takes us down the highway. The rest, mostly heat, is just wasted. Engineers are looking into some nifty ways to get that wasted energy back. One group of British engineers are working on a tiny turbine that would fit in the tailpipe. Exhaust from the engine would spin the turbine. It would drive