This blew me away, and im going to look more into it. Just thought id share this:
Rotary Sphere valve heads (http://www.coatesengine.com/)
http://www.coatesengine.com/eGallery/images/pic03.jpg
http://www.coatesengine.com/eGallery/images/pic06.jpg

Interesting. Very interesting. THat thing can rev to 14,850 RPM! I couldn't find how it actually opened and closed the "valves", or whatever is used to allow the fuel into the cylinders. It also said that you could run pump gas with 15:1 CR. I don't see how, but you never know. I wonder how they perform in real world testing. Thanks for sharing.
Chris

It appears the rotary valves are gear driven, with the round spherical valves rotating instead of a regular valve train hammering up and down on top of the head. It ought to work if they can get the timing down right. You can see the openings in the spherical valves where the intake charge would enter then rotate and deposit into the cylinder.

had them send me lterature 'bout 2 yrs ago..
quite pricey
shane

Wouldn't those require some forced induction to overcome the airflow turbulance. Seems like the higher the rpm the more restrictive it would be.

I contacted them direct a while back and they said they were going to concentrate on the Big Rig, "over the road", diesel motors so that kinda told me, (AND I hope I am wrong), that they haven't completely got the rotary sealing bugs worked out of it yet...

pdq67

Great design, but the guy that developed it is known as such a SOB in the business world that it will take someone else to get it into production. Several groups of investors have tried to back it but he's so hard to get along with and unreasonable that they all back out. He won't sell - all of the big 3 have made him unbelievably lucrative offers and he thumbs his nose at them. Too bad, this has been available for a few years now and could have probably been in production by now if circumstances were different. There's a lot of info available on the web about the guy and his company. I researched it a couple of years ago and was very disappointed when I learned about this guy.

Same basic principle as a rotary valve. Had an old Kawasaki 2 stroke bike that used a flat rotary valve. You could cut it wider to play with timing. The limit on RPM's is still going to be the stroke and piston speed. What the spherical valve does is allow instantaneous seating and unseating.

kkkkeeeewwwwwllllll!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, butthead that he might be, he is now half way to his first billion dollars.

Which diesel engine company is located in Oklahoma? I'm not at all suprised that it was a diesel engine manufacturer that is latching onto the Coates Rotary valve - the big diesel engines are so expensive already, that they are one of the few applications that can pay Coates his money and still make business sense out of it. Besides that, there are serious emissions issues that big diesel engine manufacturers are grappling with. An EGR or ACERT technology will only do so much for emissions reductions on the big diesels, and I am convinced that EGR's on big diesels will shorten long term reliability (indirectly, an EGR contaminates engine oil).

Thomas

Dont know if the application is that practical for 'us' but what a great design from an engineering point.

Now what would be really cool is taking that technology and getting rid of the crank driven gear drive setup and instead turning the valves with a computer controlled motor.

You could crack the valves open and closed more like a carb throttle blade and control flow dependent on RPM. It would be more like an infinitely variable duration cam -- you could reduce the emmissions at idle / cruise and still get the valve timing you want for max power at WOT.

I guess the hard part would be coming up with a computer controlled motor or pnuematics or whatever that would respond quick enough to open and close the valves with enough speed and precision.

I was thinking maybe a lever and stop on the end of each cam/valve assembly with a spring set up to hold that puppy closed and an opposing solenoid or pnuematic cylinder to open the valve as the software requires.

Imho, the Big Three/Four or whatever will just wait until he kick's the bucket just like they did with respect to Mr. Fueling that hold's/held the patents on the multi-valve heads.

He had/has(??) lawsuits against several of them but died. AND M/B/C acted like they never acknowledged his patents so I won't be buying a Benz or new MOPAR.... You know, our legal Patent system just doesn't hold water if they have to abide by it sorta deal!!!! F-, er, eh, you get my drift, THEM!!

They did the same thing when the EPA caught seven motor companies cheating on the Big-Rig, Diesel over the road engine I/M test proceedures as did Volvo if not mistaken!! It's all on record if anybody is interested..

Five took the fall hard and the other two just kinda said, we didn't do anything wrong sorta crap!!!

pdq67

Hot Rod did a story on those heads about 6 or 8 years ago. I had forgotten about those until I saw the photos. They mentioned Diesel usage back then.