CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: My name is Christian Von
Koenigsegg.
I'm 40 years old.
And for half of my life I've been on the quest to be a
leader in the hypercar industry, utilizing Swedish
design combined with visionary technical solutions.
Our latest car, the Agera R, is built in the old hangers of
a former Swedish fighter jet squadron.
Their symbol, a ghost, is now proudly painted on the back of
every Koenigsegg.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: So now I'm going to show you
something which we are working on for the future, which I
personally find very, very interesting in many aspects.
So what this is, this is what we call an actuator.
It's a Free Valve actuator.
Most of you who are familiar with combustion engines and
especially car engines know that there are camshafts
involved to move the valves inside the cylinder head.
And these valves, they have been controlled by camshafts
for the last 150 years or something like that.
But it's very restrictive, really, especially if you have
multi-cylinders and you want to have a rev range to go
through with efficiency and power because, when you have a
camshaft, you basically look at all the cylinders in the
same line to do, pretty much, the same thing.
There are coming systems now which give some flexibility.
You can tweak the angle a little bit, compared to the
crank of the engine.
And you can slide them sideways, like Audi is doing
to shut off cylinders now.
So it's getting better and better, but it's still very,
very restrictive.
You can think of the camshaft like a broom, pretty much.
You hold it in your hands and you push all the valves
simultaneously with this broomstick.
What the Free Valve system does is that each valve
becomes individual.
So if you think of the valves like keys on the piano,
suddenly, instead of pushing all the keys at the same time
with a broomstick, you can actually play the keys with
your fingers, which is the Free Valve idea.
And then, of course, the engine can perform in a
completely different way than being forced into a preset
pattern of combustion.
So what we're going to show you here is this is like a
small cut out of a cylinder head.
Here we have one valve.
Normally, there are two intake valves and two exhaust valves.
And here is just a small rig to run one of
these Free Valve actuators.
So basically, here you have the valve.
Here you have the actuator.
It goes into it like this.
This is lubricated by engine oil and pressurized by
pressurized air, which acts like an air hammer
to move this out.
Then the engine oil makes sure it stays stable and can lock
it in different positions.
And then air spring or a metal spring pushes it back.
So we have individual control over each valve, which brings
great benefit to the combustion
cycles in the engine.
So it's actually a snowballing effect.
The engine becomes lighter, smaller, cheaper, cleaner.
It can change the look of the car in the end.
So it's a very, very interesting technology that
I'm sure, one way or the other, will conquer the
cylinder heads of the world.
So here we'll go into a little bit of details how it works.
Urban, who is partly responsible for this
development, will show you a little bit what it looks like.
URBAN CARLSON: It's a very simple control system.
We have one signal for each valve.
And when we tell it to open, it opens with a few
milliseconds delay.
And when we tell it to close, it closes with, again, a few
milliseconds delay.
This it can do at very high speeds, up to
20,000 RPM, if necessary.
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: The same size of actuator is
actually good for a small motorcycle engine revving
15,000 RPM and a truck engine revving 2,500 RPM.
Because the motorcycle valve is very light, so it takes the
same energy to drive it backwards and forwards at
15,000 RPM as it takes to drive a huge, heavy truck
valve backwards and forwards at 2,500 RPM.
So it's very neat that the same actuator basically covers
the need for all different engine sizes.
So now we're running at what kind of RPM here?
URBAN CARLSON: Well, here's a little bit over idle.
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: This is actually the
movement of the valve.
So you can see it goes quickly up.
And then it stays flat.
It's like having a square camshaft profile to make the
engine breathe really well.
If you would have a square camshaft profile, it would
break immediately, because it would jump off the edges and
would start hitting the valve stem.
And it wouldn't work.
But with the Free Valve system, you can actually open
any way you like and open really fast, stay open flat,
and then drop down.
Here it's possible to see the valve sequence as well.
That is a smooth curve, so it doesn't hit the valve so you
create noise and wear.
URBAN CARLSON: This is 3,000 RPM.
And you can see still a square form of the valve curve.
This is 9,000 RPM.
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: So this might just look like an
old Saab to you all.
And in fact, it is, apart from one aspect.
That aspect is what you see that's red here.
And that's the cylinder head, which has been modified to
accommodate our Cargine Free Valve system.
So basically what we've done here is we've taken the
cylinder head apart, machined out all the mountings and so
on for the camshafts, and installed 16 Cargine Free
Valve actuators.
And then we have designed a special valve cover.
Or it's not really a valve cover.
It's more a lid containing pressurized air channels and
pressurized oil channels coming from
the engine oil side.
You can see the height of this black cover here.
That's the same height as the standard cylinder
head used to be.
So even when we retrofit it, when it's not optimized for
space, it's anyway lower than the standard cylinder head.
So the engine actually shrinks and becomes lighter.
If we would have made a cylinder head from scratch,
instead of retrofitting into an existing cylinder head, it
would also become much narrower and even lower.
And this whole section here, which is a cover for where the
chain drive and for the camshaft used to sit, would
disappear completely.
So the engine would also become a lot shorter.
Basically, when you go from a camshaft to Cargine Free
Valves, the size of a four-cylinder engine becomes
just a little bit bigger than the size of a
three-cylinder engine.
And then, of course, if you cut away one cylinder to
maintain the power and torque level you used to have in your
four-cylinder engine, then it becomes really much smaller.
So this car here has been running with Cargine Free
Valve system, winter and summer, for the
last 2 and 1/2 years.
We've accumulated almost 60,000 kilometers, without any
failure whatsoever to the Free Valve system.
It's just been upgraded with our latest generation,
actuator generation 5, on both the intake an exhaust side of
the engine.
And it's been tested at the testing institute, called AVL,
with up to 20% improvement in fuel efficiency so far.
And that's just the starting point, I would say.
This is more a test field to run for durability and for
cold starts, even in the winter, down to minus 20
degrees Celsius.
But it's really exciting.
And it's, I think, one of the few cars in the world that is
running with no camshaft whatsoever.
When it's fully optimized, we're expecting to have 30%
less fuel consumption, 30% more torque, and 30% more
power, and, in an average driving
cycle, 50% less emissions.
And that's without connecting it to the possibility, which
is very interesting, which is an air tank.
Given this valve technology, we can actually recoup energy
while engine braking, by using the engine as an air pump,
pumping up a tank with air, getting air pressure there,
and then driving off only on that air, using the engine as
a compressor or, let's say, an air engine.
That compressed air can also be used for boosting the
engine while using fuel to have a really big, quick
spooling turbo which consumes no energy.
So instead of storing energy in the battery and like a
battery, we're using an empty tank of air.
So that's the next step of this technology.
But already, without that, it's a huge benefit, compared
to normal camshafts.
This technology is not yet in Koenigsegg.
And it's something, of course, we might plan
to do for the future.
It will be another three, four years out, before it's in any
production car.
And hopefully, the Koenigsegg could be one of the first.
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