The Congress is a mix of press events, technical talks, and vendors large and small hocking their wares, latest innovations and inventions, It's also a great place to see some pretty nice hardware chopped up in cross section with booth professionals who know the difference between a PV diagram and a pirouette. We've listed our top five favorite engine displays at this year's 2009 SAE World Congress. Some are large, some are small, some are conventional and our favorites are really unconventional. Click through each image for a complete gallery, and if it's something novel, an explaination on the inner workings.

5) Lexus IS 350 2GR-FSE V6

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4) Dodge Ram 5.7 L HEMI V8

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3) Honda Insight 1.3 L i-VTEC and 10 kW Motor

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2) Scuderi Split-Stroke Engine

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1) Vengeance Power Engine

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Our favorite engine at the 2009 SAE World Congress was this awesome piece of engineering from Vengeance Power. It borrows concepts from several different kinds of engines and improves on them in certain aspects. Think of it like a sliding vane superchager improved in every possible way and made to burn fuel. The engine was designed to alleviate one of the worst flaws of the Wankel rotary design, the rapid expansion of combustion chamber volume after ignition, reducing the amount of physical work that can be done with each stroke.

The Vengeance engine uses an almost oval-shaped engine block liner designed to let the gasses expand more slowly, so they can do more work than a Wankel. The combustion chambers are formed by eight sliding vanes, riding on two sets of offset roller bearings and guided by a tracking cam to follow the oval block shape. The vanes are also sealed on three sides by some specially designed contact seals. In all there are only nine moving parts but the model shown is capable of 550 HP and 2500 lb-ft of torque at 1200 RPM.

The engine is targeted primarily as power sources for generators and according to Vengeance they'll be quite well suited to the task. Roller bearings and no reciprocal motion means low vibrations and the compact size means it'll fit into a lot of places. They're also claiming a 50% stoichiometric efficiency on natural gas, 53% with gasoline and 67% on diesel, which is outstanding. Furthermore it's claimed the cost to build is 80% of an equivalent piston engine. Sign us up.

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It might be a tiny little thing, but the 2010 Honda Insight's 1.3 liter four cylinder with an integrated 10 kW motor/generator is a big part of why the Insight is both efficient and relatively cheap. It does have some fancy tech though, with i-DSI or intelligent Dual & Sequential Ignition, as evidenced by each compression chamber's twin spark plugs. 98 HP and 123 lb-ft ain't much but 43.8 MPG is the key figure here.

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You didn't think we'd leave the Mopar-maniacs out of the fun did you? Say what you will about the Dodge Ram or other Chrysler products the HEMI V8 goes into, but the 5.7 liter unit in the Ram is quite a nice piece. It's got a 10:1 compression ratio, variable valve timing, coil-on-plug ignition, aluminum cylinder heads an active intake manifold which changes the intake runner length, to vary torque delivery through the rev range. 380 HP and 404 lb-ft of torque doesn't hurt either.

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The Lexus IS350 2GR-FSE V6 is an update to the previous 3.0 V6 found in the previous IS and with 306hp at 6400 rpm and 277 ft-lbs of torque at 4800 rpm, it's no slouch in the power production realm. This particular cutaway is rather nice for checking out those mile-long long intake runners.

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One of the things we didn't expect to see here at the 2009 SAE World Congress amidst the seas of pocket protectors, and twenty-year-old eyeglasses was a full-sized, seemingly functional balloon car. Yes, that is a real balloon, yes that is a real tube, and yes the cart actually rolls. Unfortunately we're pretty sure the tube is plugged so there's no way to let this baby rip.

It's actually a clever prop to let everyone know there's something called the "Jet Toy Olympics" happening this Wednesday which features 500 elementary students racing their balloon cars for fortune and glory. Mostly glory.

This piece of military could-be is part of a larger push from the US Army to reduce their fuel consumption and use smarter technologies to make future land vehicles better in the field and more useful tools for soldiers. The RST-V is a technology demonstrator built entirely by General Dynamics to show what's possible on a smaller-sized vehicle built around a series hybrid drive system.

It uses a small diesel-engine powering a generator to charge on-board batteries or power the in-wheel electric motors. Instead of mounting the wheels to studs on the motor as is normally done on hub-motor concepts, this concept works a bit differently. First the wheel is assembled on a bearing riding on an stub axle, then on goes the 90 kW peak, 50 kW continuous pancake motor mount installed on the splined hub shaft, then on top of that a pancake gear reduction unit which interfaces with an eccentrically mounted geared track one the rim of the wheel. Very, very clever. Each wheel gets an independent motor controller so even if three motors get shot out, forward motion is still possible.

Aside from being able to operate in all-silent mode, it can also export over 20 kW of power to the grid. Since it doesn't have the traditional powertrain layout, it allows packaging designers to mix things up. Outside you get a pretty extreme break-over angle for great obstacle clearance but inside you excellent passenger room, and some pretty sweet all-digital gauges and electroluminescent controls.

With a combined instantaneous power output of 482 HP at the wheels and staggering ground clearance, we'd love to see what this thing could do out in the muddy and rough stuff.

The Split-Cycle engine is a new type of compression cycle, so named for it's use of a pre-charge piston feeding an ignition piston which fires well after top dead center is reached. We spoke with company President Sal Scuderi about his engine.

According to Mr. Scuderi, the design is now complete on their first prototype engine, which is designed to run on virtually any liquid fuel with much higher efficiency than a traditional internal combustion engine. It does this with very high combustion pressures, generated from the built in compressor, driven by the same crankshaft as the combustion piston. The system relies on several vigorously designed elements like the pre-intake-valve mixing chamber, the lifting rocker arm which pulls the intake valve out of the compression chamber rather than pushing it in, the 2900 PSI fuel pump, and the compressed air transfer passages.

The novel post-top-dead-center ignition is made possible by incredibly high pressures and air cooled by the transfer passage with something similar to an in-block intercooler system, to adopt common lingo. The fuel is injected in to a carefully designed chamber ahead of the intake valve and the swirl effect creates a stratified charge injection, leaving a very controlled flame front and avoiding knock from high pressures.

What we see here is the bench display of the first finished prototype, and the engine currently resides at the company testing facilities in Texas, where it's about to undergo it's initial firing and tuning (the current configuration is even turbocharged to force even more air into the compression cylinder). Should the simulations and calculations prove accurate, engineers are expecting 140 HP per liter out this thing with significantly reduced weight and greatly improved efficiency compared to a traditional engine.

As we expected, the Raser Electric Hummer H3 is a plug-in, extended-range electric vehicle (EREV) utilizing a 200 kW motor to drive the wheels and a turbocharged Ecotec four-cylinder to power a 100 kW generator to charge the batteries and run the e-motor.

If you're good at math you immediately see the problem here. For the first sixty miles the Raser Hummer runs in all EV mode and from there it will run on a constantly operating generator, resulting in an asymptotic decline in average fuel economy. It does get the dramatic 100 MPG fuel economy the company claims — as long as you don't go further than 60 miles in a day. The actual, long-range economy is a less headline-grabbing 33 MPG. Much better than a standard H3 for sure, but Raser has not quite yet managed to defy the laws of physics.

We'd have more details for you, but Arnie strode into the middle of the press conference with his phalanx of security guards and turned it into a media feeding frenzy.