I've no doubt that it runs and does everything they claim it does, on a
test bench and in a controlled environment.

I've also no doubt that it will have a prohibitively short life, be
incredibly expensive to manufacture and be hideously unreliable.

Why?

Firstly it is a "barrel engine". The main problems barrel engines have
are:-
The weight of rotating engine mass relative to total engine mass.
The difficulty of getting intake charge into the cylinders and exhaust
out in an efficient fashion.
Cooling.

Secondly, the crank arrangement, using inclined ramps to provide
compression and absorb combustion pressure is going to be very
difficult (and expensive) to engineer to provide sufficient machined
bearing surface to cope with the loadings and just about impossible to
lubricate anyway. Splash lubrication with current consumer oils won't
do it and because of the lack of sealing a pump of enormous flow
capability would be needed to provide a pressure fed film of lubricant
to keep metal away from metal.

Probably make a great compressor though, the resemblance to a swash
plate air-conditioning compressor is striking, just exchange the
inclined ramps for articulated rods and it's there.

There is nothing new about barrel engines, in fact, aside from the
crank arrangements, this one looks a lot like my photo of the "Wooler"
barrel engine that the RAF sank thousands of pounds into in the 1920's
only to discover that you can't make them efficient because of gas flow
and if you make them big enough capacity wise to produce the power you
need, you can't cool them anyway.

The various versions of the Wooler used either a "Z" crank or
articulated rods attached to a swash plate which at least could be
built strong enough to absorb the power and be lubricated. It was still
an unmitigated failure however.

These sort of things seem to pop up every few years and then quietly
disappear once the investor capital is expended.

In the past 5 years I recall the "split cycle" engine from the Gold
Coast, they hit upon the novel idea of sinking their available capital
into sponsoring Jason Bright in a one-off appearance in a Champ car
(conventionally powered though) at Gold Coast Indy. This raised a lot
more investment funding, but nothing further has been heard. I just had
a quick look and other than cached pages, everything is "404"on the web.

The other "new, great, going to revolutionise" engine to come out of
Australia was the "scotch yoke" crank engine from Adelaide.

That one got fitted to a car and was driven around, got good mileage,
had good power etc, just the small problem that the "scotch yoke" crank
sh.t itself pretty regularly for the same reasons as above, impossible
to thin film pressure lubricate and bloody difficult to machine to the
required tolerances in the first place. Scotch yokes were a great
invention on slow turning steam engines where the yoke bearings could
be massive. They also were used with great success on the (now rare)
metal shaper machine where likewise the size of the yoke relative to
the amount of power being transmitted and the absence of combustion
shock loading meant that wear was minimal. I should mention that the
whole point of the Scotch yoke crank is that it allows a different
piston speed at various stages of the cycle whilst maintaining a
constant crankshaft speed, shaper manufacturers used to bang on
endlessly about "fast return stroke", steam powered scotch yoke pump
manufacturers used to say pretty much the same thing as well. The rest
of the world discovered that from an engineering point of view, if you
wanted "X" number of cycles per minute, it was easier to use a
"conventional" crank and rod and just turn it a bit faster. Funny that.

Tony Smith