Fabio Taglioni

Fabio Taglioni - Ducati Magazine Cover

Fabio Taglioni designed Ducati motorcycles for 35 years. He invented the Desmodromic valve system that made Ducati motorcycles winners. The 100th anniversary of his birth was last September, hence the above magazine cover. 

Ducati Desmo Valve System
zoransucks

Most internal combustion engines use a cam to open the valves and springs to close them. The Desmodromic system, as you can see in the video above, uses a cam to open them and another cam to close them. The principle advantage is you can run the engine at higher RPM's (Revolutions Per Minute) without having to worry about valve float. The principle disadvantage, I suspect, is that it is a very precise mechanism and probably requires considerable fiddling to keep it perfectly in tune.

Why It's Almost Impossible For An Engine To Rev Over 20,000 RPM
Donut Media

This video does a good job of explaining the issues involved.

Previous posts about Ducati.

Ducati has a whole series of videos about Fabio, but they are all in Italian.

P.S. Lately I have been coming across numerous stories that use acronyms that I am not familiar. The articles don't define them and Google seems to think I am asking about microbes from lower Slobovia which is not what the story was about. So now I am trying to remember to define acronyms even though most of the ones I use should be familiar to everyone. Well, familiar to gearheads anyway, which isn't everybody, is it?