STEAM, yet again?

There was a puff piece in Southern Boating about the Cyclone steam engine,

A Googe got..... http://www.cyclonepower.com/

The Cyclone Engine
USES ANY FUEL with NO ENGINE MODIFICATIONS
The Cyclone Engine is a Rankine Cycle heat regenerative external combustion, otherwise known as a “Schoell Cycle” engine. In short, the Cyclone is a 21st century, high efficiency, compact and powerful steam engine.

The Cyclone Engine is capable of running on virtually any fuel (or combination of fuels) including today’s promising new bio fuels, while emitting far fewer pollutants than traditional gas or diesel powered internal combustion engines. To date, Cyclone has over 1,000 hours of running and testing our engines, has achieved verified thermal efficiencies above 30%, and is very close to putting the first of these engine models into small-scale commercial production.

From garden equipment and generators to cars, trucks, trains and ships, we see a day when our planet will be powered in a sustainable manner by just One Engine – the Cyclone Engine.



Interesting stuff as most marinas have waste oil tanks , and PAY to have the oil removed.

Free cruising ,, for a while?
Trans ocean on salvaged floating plastic?

Talk about leaving a clean wake!!!

For liveaboards the universal boiler would be a great winter find to be able to heat the boat with whatever .

FF

 

The claims of cleaner burning are exagerated at best. They claim the fuel gets atomized and any fuel can be burned efficiently with the same setup. Injection systems can be optimized for a narrow range of fuels. They can be made to run on other non-optimal fuels, but not efficiently. It is a sales pitch with little to back it up in hard data.

 

nice looking engine fred, i sent them a message asking when they will be available and how much they will cost. i hope it becomes available and doesn't go the way of other alternative engines that get killed off by oil companys .

 

"i hope it becomes available and doesn't go the way of other alternative engines that get killed off by oil companys ."

Great JOKE, there has and will never be an "engine killed by the oil folks"

The reason is the Chinese Communists do nor honor patents , and are as desperate for cheap energy , to raise their standard of living, as the rest of the world.

Since the Chi Coms Gov have daily adventures hacking the Pentagon and our advanced Nuke labs , reading a patent that is on line , open source would be no big deal.

FF

 

there have been good engines in the past that have been killed off by oil company's , thats what the inventors say , i will try and find some info on the subject, i don't find it hard to believe the oil industry would protect themselves. we are addicted to hydrocarbons and thats how they want it. efficent closed loop steam engines have been around for a long time yet they have never got anywhere with them. an old popular mechanics magazine i read had a story about a fleet of steam powered buses that were trialed in texas for a year and exceeded expectations according to the story but they disappeared at the end of the trial. that engine was based on a stanley steamer but it used refrigerant gas in a closed loop and was heated with a small gas burner.

 

There's certainly a lot of evidence to show that oil companies, and motor manufacturers, have tried to hold back developments on alternative propulsion systems, at least in the past. The infamous restraint on the production of high capacity NiMH batteries is one example (a tale told reasonably truthfully in "Who Killed The Electric Car?").

However, the World is a big place, and attempts by a small (in global terms) clique of North American companies to prevent progress backfired when other nations just sidestepped the artificial barriers that were being erected. Although hybrids aren't anything more than a stepping stone in the development of alternatives, it's fair to say that Toyota and Honda have stolen a march on those companies that tried to prevent new developments from getting to market. There's no real evidence that world-beating engine technology has ever been blocked, though.

Back on topic. External combustion systems can burn fuels cleanly, as many of the new generation of power stations demonstrate fairly well. External combustion allows a much leaner burn than spark ignition internal combustion engines, so combustion products can be better oxidised. 30% thermal efficiency is up around where the best internal combustion engines are, too, so that bodes well.

As has already been pointed out, external combustion isn't really a one-size-fits-all solution in terms of burning any fuel, as each different fuel will require a fair degree of adaptation of the burner to get good efficiency and low emissions. It may be that this can be done automatically, with a closed loop combustion control system though, similar to the way most petrol car engine management systems use exhaust gas monitoring to control injection systems for a clean burn.

It's not clear how this engine overcomes some of the other drawbacks of external combustion engines, though, like poor "throttle" response and relatively slow start up times. They are a good solution for requirements where instant throttle response isn't needed, though. There are already pretty efficient domestic Micro Combined Heat and Power units available that use free piston Stirling Cycle generators hooked up to run on the waste heat from domestic air and water heating systems to produce electrical power. My guess is that this particular variation on that engine theme may well be a fair be more efficient, though, if their marketing hype is to be believed.

Jeremy

 

The only "artificial barrier" to steam is usually the local burorats that demand things like licenses to operate high pressure steam devices.

FF

 

we still have to burn oil to make the steam ya?

 

I guess the advantage that some external combustion heat engines have is that they don't need to burn oil, they can run on coal, wood, some fancy engineered biofuel or whatever. You can even run heat engines on solar power, at least ashore, using solar concentrators to heat the working fluid.

Jeremy

 

how about the list of fuels that would be epa legal on the road after being burnt

 

why not lpg or biodiesel.

 

High pressure steam is very dangerous. It can cause death and a great property damage. It is not simply a bureaucratic whim to require certification.

 

It depends. In a cylindrical boiler/high capacity pressure vessel I'd agree with you. In a very low capacity flash boiler then it's no worse than the cylinders in an ordinary internal combustion engine, in fact arguably it's less hazardous, as a split pipe in a flash boiler would be a wholly contained event, posing no appreciable risk of damage outside the engine.

This engine uses a very low capacity flash boiler, that looks to be made in the classical way, from coils of HP tubing. If it used a conventional boiler then I'd share the concern about the damage likely to result from a failure, but having seen a home-made flash-type boiler tube failure I'd have to say it's a bit of a non-event in comparison to a pressure vessel failure.

Part of the reason has to do with the much lower stored energy in a flash boiler - it only converts enough water to super-heated steam as the engine needs at that moment. Conventional boilers are effectively big energy stores, containing several minutes worth (or more) of pressure to run the engine.

Jeremy

 

I wonder how this would work with a syngas generator burning CO instead of atomized fuel. Then you really could feed it almost anything organic.

 

"High pressure steam is very dangerous. It can cause death and a great property damage. It is not simply a bureaucratic whim to require certification."

I cant wait to be a 6 month apprentice , and then sit for an exam to run my Lawn Mower!

FF