It occurred to me that internal combustion engines must burn a lot of energy pushing valve lifters against the pressure of the valve springs. Seems like a lot of effort. I’d think there would be some kind of solenoid/actuator that controlled the valves directly, and you could avoid the whole cam and timing belt thing.
It would seem to make the engine a whole lot simpler, far less moving parts, and since computers control everything in the engine anyway they could more precisely control the positioning of the valves.
I was wondering why this wasn’t a thing, and then I found this and realized I had invented the camless piston engine…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camless_piston_engine
