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It is known to internal combustion researcher that the correct determination of the crank position when the piston is at Top Dead Centre (TDC) is very important, since an error of 1 crank angle degree (CAD) can cause up to a 10% evaluation error on indicated mean effective pressure (IMEP) and a 25% error on the heat released by the combustion: the TDC position should be then known within a precision of 0.1 CAD. This task can be accomplished by means of a dedicated capacitive sensor, which allows a measurement within the required 0.1 degrees precision. Such a sensor has a substantial cost and its use is not really fast; a different approach can be followed using a thermodynamic method, whose input is the pressure curve sampled during the compression and expansion strokes of a “motored” (i.e. without combustion) cylinder. In this work the authors compare an original thermodynamic method with other ones available in literature, by means of both experimental and simulated pressure curves.