Rather than being entirely new, it is a development of the standard petrol engine.
The engine is intended to provide "diesel levels of efficiency through a lean-burn strategy similar to that of direct injection".
Merritt proposes that fuel/air mixing is not done in the cylinder, but takes place beforehand in a special chamber designed to promote swirl.
[2] Brian Knibb, an engineer in Derby, UK, says it is relatively straightforward to modify existing engines to run in this way.
“To produce MUSIC engines, a factory would simply need to change the cylinder head fitted to engines, leaving the cylinders and the rest unchanged.”[3]