Yahoo Autos Porsche Has Dreamed Up a 6-Stroke Engine, Patent Documents Reveal
It's been a long time since the automotive world has bothered with the mixing of oil and gas of the two-stroke combustion cycle — but soon, it may come time to rid ourselves of four-stroke engines, if a set of patent filings from Porsche for a six-stroke engine are a hint of what's to come.
As patent filings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently highlighted by Motor1 reveal, Porsche has come up with a detailed plan for a newly developed six-stroke design. Instead of relying on a traditional combination of intake, compression, power, and exhaust, Porsche wants to try adding on an extra compression and power stroke, according to the documents.
To break it down into basic terms: a two-stroke engine completes a combustion cycle after just one revolution of the crankshaft, while a four-stroke engine requires two complete revolutions to finish this process. By design, the six-stroke engine of Porsche's dreams would use a novel operation; the automaker says the process is "six individual strokes that can be divided into two three-stroke sequences."
Sifting through Porsche's 81-page patent filing, the details of how this system works are thoroughly complex, but the basic crankshaft revolution premise is as follows: intake-compression-power, then compression-power-exhaust. The secret to making this novel ignition is a crankshaft that rotates around two concentric circles (also known as an annulus), allowing for an alternating point of rotation — and, in turn, decreasing the distance the piston has to travel to bottom dead center in its stroke. This alternating-distance revolution design also changes the compression ratio of the engine, and means the engine would have two top and bottom dead centers.
Patent filings are full of jargon and yawn-worthy writing meant to check a bunch of boxes for the government, but the reasoning behind Porsche's inventive engine design is simple: power. Instead of one of every four strokes producing power, this design would allow for power to be produced in every third stroke, in addition to a more complete usage of the air-fuel mixture.
And, in the most German way possible, Porsche says another reason behind the design is simply to keep the internal combustion engine moving forward. "There is a constant effort to optimize the operation of combustion machines in view of continuously increasing requirements to improve energy efficiency and other operational aspects of combustion machines modern combustion machines," text from the patent filing reads.
Take these claims with a grain of salt, as patent filings can be as much about keeping another company from using a design as actually protecting proprietary inventions for later use. That said, we'd certainly be excited to see a six-stroke engine up and running, especially if it keeps the internal-combustion engine alive farther into the future.
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