The Scuderi split-cycle engine technology is not new to our pages. Last year around this time, we had an opportunity to interview Nick Scuderi about the company and came away thinking that the idea, though unproven, has some merit. According to an article on Automotive News, Scuderi is confident that they will line up some licensing agreements to use their technology shortly. Apparently, some amount of validation has been completed recently which offered promising results.

Diesel Scuderi engines could post 30 to 50 percent lower nitrous oxide emissions according to the company and gasoline/compressed-air hybrids are also in development. Still, real test-engines are not yet up and running, so there is a long way to go before anybody will know for sure if this engine design is able to meet its expectations. Watch a video after the break of a simulated rendering of the Scuderi engine in action.

At the recent SAE World Congress AutoblogGreen spent a few minutes talking to Nick Scuderi of the Scuderi Group about their air hybrid engine technology. Calling this engine an air hybrid may be a bit of a misnomer, especially when compared to a gas-electric hybrid vehicle. Semantics aside, the concept is an interesting one and shows that the potential of the internal combustion engine hasn't yet been fully exhausted. We'll keep an eye on this one to see if it actually works as promised when running prototypes are available.

AutoblogGreen: I'm talking to Nick Scuderi who's the VP of the Scuderi Group about their air hybrid engine technology.

Nick Scuderi: It's a split-cycle engine and basically the way it works is we split the cycle so we still do the four strokes of the Otto cycle but what happens is one piston is doing intake and compression and the other one is doing power and exhaust. But by splitting the cycle it gives the engine independence to do things that you can't do with a regular Otto or diesel-cycle engine. What those are are basically we have high-pressure air which comes from the compression side over to the power side and we're able to maintain this high-pressure air in a storage tank and that's how we get our air hybrid system. We can take regenerative braking of the vehicle, we take the kinetic energy of the wheels through engine braking. We're gonna pump up that tank filled with high-pressure air. Now we don't use high-pressure air to run the car although we can. We use the high-pressure air in our combustion process to operate the vehicle, it's a lot like an electric car. If you just think of that air tank as your battery pack, the difference is, it's much less expensive to manufacture and it's as efficient as electric hybrid systems.

Continue reading about how the air hybrid engine concept works, and see a video of it in action, after the jump.

We brought you news of the Scuderi engine quite some time ago, but not much has been heard since. It seems as if that may change starting this week, as the engine and its designer, Nick Scuderi, will be at the Hybrid Symposium in San Diego this week on the 7th and 8th. While you are enjoying our coverage of the Chicago Auto Show this week, if you happen to live in San Diego, you can get some first-hand impressions of the new engine technology at the Holiday Inn on the Bay, 1355 N. Harbor Drive in San Diego.

The engine, in addition to the standard functions of any internal-combustion engine, also recaptures and stores energy in the form of compressed air. Read more about it here and here.

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[Source: The Auto Channel]