Increasing Internal Combustion Engine Efficiency

Green Car Congress reports on a concept engine designed by the aptly named Frank Tinker. He claims this engine could produce an efficiency gain of 30%. (Current designs are about 20% efficient.) He has developed a prototype he claims requires 71% less energy to operate than existing internal combustion engine (ICE) designs.

Tinker's website, dvrhome.com, has some interesting stuff on it, too, including the white paper "On the Efficiency of Heat Engines" (PDF). They further claim -- in an unrelated area, but having taken signal processing in college, I know just how cool this is -- to have discovered an even faster Fourier tranform (faster than the fast Fourier Transform) that can perform one operation in two cycles -- "500 times faster than any existing fourier transform processor". Wow.