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.