Camless

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Most four-stroke piston engines today employ one or more camshafts to operate poppet valves. The lobes on the camshafts operate cam followers which in turn open the poppet valves. A camless (or, free valve engine) uses electromagnetic, hydraulic, or pneumatic actuators to open the poppet valves instead. Actuators can be used to both open and close the valves, or an actuator opens the valve while a spring closes it. As a camshaft normally has only one lobe per valve, the valve duration and lift is fixed. The camshaft runs at half the engine speed. Although many modern engines use camshaft phasing, adjusting the lift and valve duration in a working engine is more difficult. Some manufacturers use systems with more than one cam lobe, but this is still a compromise as only a few profiles can be in operation at once. This is not the case with the camless engine, where lift and valve timing can be adjusted freely from valve to valve and from cycle to cycle. It also allows multiple lift events per cycle and, indeed, no events per cycleswitching off the cylinder entirely. Camless engines are not without their problems though. Common problems include high power consumption, accuracy at high speed, temperature sensitivity, weight and packaging issues, high noise, high cost, and unsafe operation in case of electrical problems. Camless valve trains have long been investigated by several companies, including Renault, BMW, Fiat, Valeo, General Motors, Ricardo,Lotus Engineering, Ford and Cargine.[1][2][3][4] Some systems are commercially available, although not in production car engines. Notably, Formula One cars do not use camless valve trains, but pneumatic valve springs together with conventional camshafts and followers instead, this is however primarily due to the regulations teams must follow for engine development. A helical camshaft is a type of mechanical variable valve actuation (VVA) system. More specifically it is a camshaft that allows the valve opening duration to be varied over a wide, continuous, step-less, range, with all of the added duration being at full valve lift. In this article a "variable duration camshaft" refers to a camshaft with a design that is intended to replace a conventional camshaft in a cylinder head and operate the valves through conventional followers. Further qualifications are:

the duration range is step-less and continuous all the added range is at full valve lift the range is wide enough to allow full torque/power at even extremely high RPM the range is wide enough to allow engine load control by late inlet valve closing (LIVC)

the rates of valve opening/closing, acceleration, jerk etc. are within acceptable limits at all duration settings

These qualifications must be made as there have been many claims over the years of purely mechanical variable duration camshafts but none have been able to meet all these requirements.[citation needed] Despite enormous effort and expense being expended by both large organisations and private individuals, camshaft arrangements like patent 1527456 have never been significantly improved upon and have remained unused by the mainstream automotive community. The opinion of many engineers (and others) on the possibility of a workable variable duration camshaft being developed after so much effort and so many years of unsuccessful attempts was that it was highly unlikely that it ever could be done and would remain an unobtainable "holy grail."

Camless
ELECTROMECHANICAL CAMLESS VALVE ACTUATOR In recent years camless engine has caught much attention in the automotive industry. Camless valve train offers programmable valve motion control capability. An EMV system consists of two opposing electromagnets, an armature, two springs and an engine valve. The armature moves between the two magnets. When neither magnet is energized, the armature is held at the mid-point of the two magnets by the two springs located on either side of the armature. This system is used to control the motion of the engine valve. The engine valve is then in turn used to control the flow of air into and out of a combustion engine cylinder. The camless engine, where lift and valve timing can be adjusted freely from valve to valve and from cycle to cycle. It also allows multiple lift events per cycle and, indeed, no events per cycle-switching off the cylinder entirely. Computer controlled- opening and closing of valves make it possible to optimize the various phases of engine running. During idling phases, specific intake valve opening strategies make it possible to admit just the necessary quantity of air without having recourse to throttling the intake with a butterfly valve, something that generates consumption of fuel not used by the engine. Timing of valve opening or the latitude to only open a single intake valve make it possible to stabilize the engine on idling points which consume little fuel while ensuring a good level of drive ability or the driver. During urban driving and on the open road, both adequate opening and timing of the valves make it possible to admit a quantity of air limited to the requirement so the engine mixed with a massofburned gases purposely retained in the engine. This strategy ensures reduction of fuel consumption, polluting exhaust emissions, in particular, nitrogen oxides, produced by the engine. In terms of performance, the modularity of the system makes it possible to maximize the massof fresh air trapped in the cylinder at all engine speeds, ensuring both good torque and high power. Apart from these advantages, deactivation of the cylinder also delivers additional savings in terms offuel consumption and exhaust emissions when the engine is only using a small amount of its power as, or example, in urban use. In this mode, only halfof the cylinders are used to provide energy to the wheels, significantly limiting losses due to poor engine efficiency. The camless system is there or system which, on an air aspirated supercharged engine provides the customer with a significant improvement in engine features. In addition, it is a system that has a strong potential or evolution and its functions will be consumption required in order to implement combustion through autoignition, such as the HCCI system, which is under consideration as the next stage in the battle to

reduce fuel consumption. Electromechanical Valve Train is considered the next evolution of VVT. With the potential to dial in any conceivable valve timing point of the combustion cycle for each individual cylinder, valves can be opened with more lift and/or duration, as the computer deems necessary. Just imagine that you have your latest 2-litre 16-valve EMVT powered engine on the dyno after installing an exhaust. Simply changing a couple of numbers on the computer will have a set of completely revised valve timing maps to suit your exhaust - or cold air intake for that mater. There will be no need for expensive cam changes that may not even give the results you are after. Electronically altering valve events will have a far more major impact on engine performance than any current electronically-controlled item. CONTROL DESIGN When the valve-closing event starts, the lower solenoid coil is deactivated, and the valve moves up towards its seating position by the mechanical spring force. An electro mechanical valve actuator works according to the spring-mass pendulum principle, which means that the system follows its own natural oscillation frequency, and external electromagnetic force is only needed for overcoming the friction loss. The electromagnetic actuator is only effective in a relatively short range closing to the seating position, and so it is not efficient in the sense of energy consumption to apply closed-loop control when the valve is still far away from the seating position. The system goes unstable as the engine valve moves to the region within one-third of the total lift. This type of system uses an armature attached to the valve stem. The outside casing contains a magnetic coil of some sort that can be used to either attract or repel the armature, hence opening or closing the valve. Most early systems employed solenoid and magnetic attraction/repulsion actuating principals using an iron or ferromagnetic armature. These types of armatures limited the performance of the actuator because they resulted in a variable air gap. As the air gap becomes larger (ie when the distance between the moving and stationary magnets or electromagnets increases), there is a reduction in the force. To maintain high forces on the armature as the size of the air gap increases, a higher current is employed in the coils of such devices. This increased current leads to higher energy losses in the system, not to mention non-linear behaviour that makes it difficult to obtain adequate performance. The result of this is that most such designs have high seating velocities (ie the valves slam open and shut hard!) and the system cannot vary the amount of valve lift. The electromechanical valve actuators of the latest poppet valve design eliminate the iron or ferromagnetic armature. Instead it is replaced with a current-carrying armature coil. A magnetic field is generated by a magnetic field generator and is directed across the fixed air gap. An armature having a current-carrying armature coil is exposed to the magnetic field in the air gap. When a current is passed through the armature coil and that current is perpendicular to the magnetic field, a force is exerted on the armature.When a current runs through the armature coil in either direction and perpendicular to the magnetic field, an electromagnetic vector force, known as a Lorentz force, is exerted on the armature coil. The force generated on the armature coil drives the armature coil linearly in the air gap in a direction parallel with the valve stem. Depending on the direction of the current supplied to the armature coil, the valve will be driven toward an open or closed position. These latest electromechanical valve actuators develop higher and better-controlled forces than those designs mentioned previously. These forces are constant along the distance of travel of the armature because the size of the air gap does not change. The key component of the Siemens-developed infinitely variable electromechanical valve train is an

armature-position sensor. This sensor ensures the exact position of the armature is known to the ECU at all times and allows the magnetic coil current to be adjusted to obtain the desired valve motion. The ability of the electromechanical valve actuator to generate force in either direction and to vary the amount of force applied to the armature in either direction is an important advantage of this design. For instance, varying the value of the current through the armature coil and/or changing the intensity of the magnetic field can control the speed of opening and closing of the valve. This method can also be used to slow the valve closure member to reduce the seating velocity, thereby lessening wear as well as reducing the resulting noise. A special software algorithm is used to control the actuator coil currents such that the valves are decelerated to a speed near zero as they land - in conjunction with a switching time of barely three milliseconds. For the valves this means minimal wear and minimum noise generation. The 16-valve four cylinder engine that is currently undergoing tests in Germany, by Siemens, is equipped with 16 valve actuators and the corresponding armature-position sensors. A ECU is used and two cable rails connect the actuators to it. A 42-volt starter-generator provides the power.

WORKING Camless engines generally employ one of two types of camless actuators: electro-hydraulic or electromechanical valve actuators. The actuators receive input from the ECU via a dedicated CAN bus to open and close the poppet valves at a prescribed crankshaft angle timing, transition time and lift, matching the valve timing request sent by the ECU. Feedback is then sent by the actuators through the CAN bus to verify the actual occurrence of the operation. Electromechanical actuators are generally made with two solenoids and two springs. As can be seen in Figure 1 the ECM receives input from the crankshaft position sensor to close the valve, which activates Solenoid 1 by taking current from the battery. The current is passed through a pulse width modulator which tunes the amplitude of the current to control the speed of valve seating. The magnetic field created by Solenoid 1 attracts the armature in the upper position. Spring 1 is compressed and thus closes the valve. Solenoid 2 pulls the armature down to open the valve as shown in Figure 2.