How Koenigsegg's Tiny Engine Makes 600 Horsepower - Only 3 Cylinders!

hello everyone and welcome in this video we are talking about the Koenigsegg Gamera and it's incredible engine this is the world's most powerful three cylinder engine that has also rode emissions compliant now the Gomera is a pretty complex vehicle so I want to start with a high-level overview of the powertrain hold on a second did you just say gum era like a gum or on look you're gonna have something to talk about in the comments at the back of the vehicle are two beefy electric motors they're each rated for 500 horsepower and 1000 Newton meters of torque and they each have a single speed gearbox before sending power to the rear wheels independently sandwiched between the motors is the tiny Friendly Giant or TFG our lovely three cylinder engine which is placed longitudinally this potent engine is good for 600 horsepower in 600 Newton meters of torque and mounted to the end of its crankshaft is another electric motor good for an additional 400 horsepower and 500 meters of torque if you've been adding all of that up you're at 2,000 horsepower though the actual output is about 1,700 horsepower as the battery has limits to how much power it can supply and motors and engines make peak power at different times here's a plot of what those horsepower and torque curves look like if you were to add up the three motors horsepower you'd get 1400 horsepower but due to the battery limitations peak combined will be 1,100 horsepower from the motors and then 600 from the engine the engine and third motor actually send power to the front wheels exclusively so this is Koenigsegg first all-wheel drive model power is sent through a carbon fiber torque tube then passes through a torque converter and then through a simple ring and pinion to split power between the front wheels on each side of the ring and pinion our wet multi-plate clutches so either front axle can be completely locked up or detached allowing for torque vectoring with independent rear motors the rear also has torque vectoring and each motor has a wet clutch to detach completely meaning for highway cruising it can operate as front-wheel drive only for optimal efficiency powering all of the electric motors is a 16 point six kilowatt hour eight hundred volt battery pack the pack is good for 50 kilometers or 31 miles of electric-only range and can be charged using the engine through regenerative braking or by plugging the car in total combined range is 1,000 kilometers or about 620 miles now that's not nearly all of it so we're gonna get more into the overall layout later on in the video but for now let's focus on this incredibly impressive three cylinder engine now let's talk specs this is a two liter inline three cylinder engine so the engine isn't very big and there aren't many cylinders however with a bore of 95 millimeters and a stroke of 93 point five millimeters the cylinders themselves are actually quite large in fact if you're to compare it to coating sex 5 liter v8 these cylinders are actually larger and so how does this thing make so much power 6 on our horsepower 6 on our Newton meters well some engines will make a lot of power through revving very high some engines will make a lot of power through a lot of boost this is doing both so it has 2 bar 29 psi of boost pressure and it revs to 8,500 rpm so you can kind of think of it like a Honda s2000 engine which was naturally aspirated and tripling the amount of air that goes inside of that engine so you can make 600 horsepower 600 Newton meters of torque 300 horsepower per liter which Koenigsegg says is 2.5 times more than the next highest rated 3 cylinder engine this is the most powerful road-going 2 liter engine and it only weighs 70 kilograms now one of the other things I thought was pretty interesting when looking at these specifications is this has a stroke of 93 point five millimeters paired with a very high 8,500 rpm redline and combined this is a bit unusual because that means the Pistons are moving extremely quickly now we can calculate the average piston speed by taking 2 multiplying it by our stroke length and multiplying that by our rpm divided by 60 and so if you do that for this tiny friendly giant engine what you get is 26 point 5 meters per second now that may not mean much to you but if we compare it to the Hun Sen which revved all the way to 9,000 rpm with a stroke of 84 millimeters it has an average piston speed of 25 point - so this is faster moving Pistons than the Honda s2000 engine that f20 see and versus an f1 engine if you look at today's f1 engines they're 1.6 liter v6 s they Rev up to 15,000 rpm with a stroke of 53 millimeters multiply this out and we get an average piston speed of twenty six point five meters per second so this thing has Pistons that move as fast as f1 engines it's got cylinders that are larger than Koenigsegg v8 cylinders and it has 29 psi boost now another cool thing about this engine is that it uses Koenigsegg free valve technology now I already have a video explaining how free valve works if you'd like to check that out so in this video we're gonna focus on what are the advantages of incorporating free valve onto this engine now a traditional engine will use a camshaft to open and close the valves and so as you can see there's only going to be one point in time where this cam lobe right here is at its peak lift meaning you have peak valve lift Koenigsegg is free valve doesn't have any camshafts instead each individual valve has an actuator so you can open it completely all the way let it sit there and then return it and it does that using pneumatic actuators so if you look at a plot of time versus valve lift looking at a traditional engine you'll see the valve lift follows that profile of the camshaft however with conics ex-free valve you pop straight up to maximum lift and then you come right back down so that means you can have more airflow actually coming into the engine and make more power you've got less restriction for that air to come in and also you can choose between all these different methods of how you want a very timing lift and duration so with a traditional engine you can of course vary that valve timing so you're changing the exhaust valve and intake valve overlap same thing here with Koenigsegg free valve you can vary your valve lift so there are plenty of engines some only choose between two profiles some have infinitely variable engines like BMW or Nissan but with BMW or Nissan when they change the valve lift they are not independently changing it so they're also changing valve duration whereas with the Koenigsegg you can keep that duration the same and just alter how much lift you have and then finally with variable valve duration of course Hyundai's engine is capable of independently varying valve duration however conics eggs also can independently vary valve duration while simultaneously independently varying valve lift so Hyundai's engine could not vary valve lift so this is going to be the first engine in which you have fully variable valve timing fully variable valve lift and fully variable without and so you can choose any of these points at any given rpm any given load what you're going for whether it's efficiency or whether it's power or whether it's emissions you can optimize all three of these among other parameters and choose the best spot for whatever you're targeting so you have an immense amount of flexibility with this engine some other advantages you can choose between just using one or two valves to open up so you can just have one intake valve open and create some swirl or some tumble within that cylinder you could choose to have both for better air flow you can implement cylinder deactivation really easily because all you do is you just don't open the valves you don't need a throttle with this engine you can use valve lift in order to throttle the engine for low loads or high loads and so that improves efficiency and again just having all of this control means that you can optimize for whatever you're looking for now there are of course some drawbacks to this system the obvious ones being cost and complexity this is an extremely expensive course so don't look at this and be like wow none of the other manufacturers know what they're doing because Koenigsegg can get 600 horsepower out of a 2-liter engine so could they they would just charge a lot more for their cars this you know is a million-plus dollar car so it cost comes with these added cool features and then from an energy standpoint it actually does seem like a fairly energy intense system because it's electronic it's hydraulic and it's pneumatic so you have an air compressor onboard as well in order to power opening and closing these valves a traditional spring will return the valve but air pressure will set it down to it's lift now partially possible because of free valve this is actually a twin turbocharged engine you might be wondering wait a minute it has three cylinders and two turbochargers how do you but those cylinders between the two turbochargers so let's look at the layout and so here you can see the three cylinders and you have your individually split exhaust for each cylinder so it has two exhaust valves and each exhaust valve routes to a different turbocharger so for example your air would come in through this compressor side of the turbocharger travel through the air to water intercooler enter the engine at low rpm we're only going to be going through this red exhaust right here the free valve is going to keep this second exhaust valve closed so all of your exhaust is just going out one exhaust valve and that's all being rounded to just one turbocharger then as you start to increase rpm you open up both exhaust valves and you spool up both turbochargers and you make peak power so at low rpm when it's just using the single turbocharger by closing off that exhaust valve it's able to spool up peak spool at 1,700 rpm and then as you increase in rpm and you have enough plenty of exhaust gasses to spool up both it switches over and you're able to produce 600 Newton meters of torque from 2,000 rpm all the way up to 7000 rpm very cool strategy that they have here with the turbochargers and using free valve to split the exhaust gases now let's go back to our layout and what's interesting about this is just like the Koenigsegg Agera there are not multiple gears here so all of our power sources are passing through just a single gear ratio so our tiny Friendly Giant engine at the back coupled with that motor in front of it is sending torque to the front which has a gear ratio of two point six nine to one with that ring and pinion and then in the rear we have two electric motors each has its own individual gearbox with a three point three to five to one gear reduction and so if we add up our wheel torque in the front we have 600 Newton meters plus 500 Newton meters multiply that by 2.69 we get 2900 60 Newton meters in the rear we have two electric motors each with a thousand Newton meters of torque multiply that by three point three to five and we get six thousand six hundred fifty so we combine have nine thousand six hundred 10 Newton meters now Koenigsegg says the actual wheel torque peaks at 11 thousand Newton meters so where does that come from well through this hydraulic coupling so Koenigsegg says with this hydraulic coupling you can have up to two times torque multiplication up to 3000 rpm and then it'll lock up and be more efficient once you reach higher speeds so that's how they're able to increase their peak wheel torque up to 11,000 Newton meters now one of the things you may have noticed is that these gear ratios are fairly low so why would they choose a fairly low gear ratio well if you're too compared to a traditional vehicle these may be about a third or a fourth however this is allowing for still crazy high wheel torque and yet a very high top speed so this vehicle has a top speed of 400 kilometers per hour or 250 miles per hour I was curious so I did the math on multiplying out based on the wheel size and the gear ratios what the front and rear would actually achieve and it's something like 260 miles per hour if you assume that no tire deformation and of course with a little bit of tire deflection that's gonna come down to its top speed of about 250 miles per hour so it is geared so that it has an insane acceleration 260 miles per hour or 100 kilometers per hour Koenig says says it's good for 1.9 seconds 0 to 100 kilometers per hour at which if you actually believe means it's average acceleration is 1.4 9gs something we have not yet seen in a production car so it'll be interesting to see what it actually achieves and this is good for all the way up to 250 miles per hour where it's basically in gear limited to that speed so it's got insane acceleration on that entire way and has that crazy high top speed so quite a cool vehicle quite a cool engine that has gone into it of course all in a very expensive price but a very neat thing nonetheless so thank you all so much for watching and if you have any questions or comments of course feel free to leave them below

Channel: Engineering Explained

Views: 2,651,205

Rating: 4.9359121 out of 5

Keywords: koenigsegg, engine, tiny engine, 3-cylinder, 3-cylinder engine, koenigsegg gemera, gemera engine, 600 horsepower, tiny friendly giant, koenigsegg tfg, tfg, tfg engine, 600 horsepower engine, car engine, how it works, engineering explained

Id: WwlNqaz9q_0

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/kindaLikeCars]

It all started with this video.. since then i can't stop reading and study their tech. Just Wow!