With 700 cc it emulates the performance of a 2.8 liter block
What you see here is an internal combustion engine with no less than 8 pistons inside. And you know what’s best? That its design and development is Spanish, more specifically from the INNengine company, based in Granada.
The beauty of this revolutionary compact design is that it promises to achieve a weight/size/power ratio never before seen in a conventional internal combustion engine. The original idea is from James Atkinson himself back in 1882, but now the Spanish company has achieved high efficiency with the fewest moving parts.
In fact, the two prototypes that have been developed so far, the so-called E-REX and REX-B have 70% fewer parts than a traditional four-stroke engine. And that is less weight and also less internal friction.
The key in its original design was to eliminate the traditional concept of pistons connected to a crankshaft. The connecting rods in this case rest on a permanent contact surface where the movement of the pistons is finally transformed into a circular movement on a single output shaft.
Three reasons why the INNengine can succeed
The good thing is that with a displacement of 700 cc in the case of the REX-B prototype, it is capable of offering the performance of a conventional engine of up to 2.8 liters. This prototype, in particular, is not expected to go into production until 2024. But the simplest, the so-called E-REX, which has been designed for displacements between 125 and 350 cc, will go into small-scale production in the last quarter.
What we do not know at the moment are the official consumption, power or torque data. But the good thing is that it has one last great advantage, and that is that it can work with any fuel, be it gasoline, diesel, CNG, LPG and even hydrogen.
Currently, there is an INNengine in a Mazda MX-5 as the main powerplant, and in fact, more and more tests will continue to be carried out with it in order to fine-tune the performance. But from INNengine they are very clear that this application is not going to be the future.
They are not blind and they know that the automobile industry is fully focusing on the electric motor. One only needs to see how the large automobile groups have frozen their investments in heat engines to dedicate all their efforts to batteries, power electronics and electric motors.
INNengine is no stranger to this and that is why they are looking for the application of their range extender motors for electric vehicles or motors for drones. And the truth is, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to us due to its small size and weight, very low noise and high efficiency.
We will be very attentive to the evolution of these engines, because they seem to us that they can turn the automotive industry upside down.
