Single Cylinder IVA (SCI) is a generic design of IVA specially developed to enable the flexibility of IVA to be used in combustion development.

A bespoke adapter plate is designed to provide the mechanical interface between the Client’s single cylinder engine and the SCI mechanism.

Our SCI Systems use 4 independent iVT actuators (one per valve). Each iVT rotary actuator is under full-time, fast feedback control permitting the generation of any valve timing, period or lift required at the touch of a button. Both conventional and unconventional event profiles can be achieved. The conventional camshafts are completely eliminated and valve position can be monitored throughout the event using a specialised sensor.

The system has built in fail-safes and automatic protection against selection of events at risk of producing valve clash.

A single cylinder engine using this equipment can either reduce the time taken to gather a set of combustion data covering a given set of valve event options by orders of magnitude or permit hugely more complete data sets to be gathered in the same development time. In practice, much larger data sets will be gathered, allowing much more detailed response surfaces to be determined in a fraction of the time a conventional SCE programme would take.

The system is compact, quiet and, apart from the actuators fitted to the cylinder head assembly, and a dedicated absolute crank position sensor requires only a power supply in the cell plus a laptop with a custom interface to control the system. The entire system including valve position instrumentation and power supply can be provided ready to interface with your data acquisition equipment.

iVT offers virtually independent and infinitely variable control of both valve lift up to the maximum and period and can mimic any conventional valvetrain.

Additionally, IVA permits “Event Shaping” – the maximum opening point can be skewed within the event, the event feature a dwell period at full lift, other, more elaborate shapes are also possible. Multiple events within one engine cycle can be achieved – allowing extra exhaust events for HCCI or CAI combustion studies for instance, or running in 2-stroke mode (or 6 stroke or 8 or 12).