Harmonic Dampening. Just another exploration into the mind of Cyclone!
Once again our good friends at archives d*t org, through the use of their Wayback machine have allowed us to go to the long forgotten year of 2005. Well, it seems to be long forgotten by all those people pumping Cyclone and who act as if they never made an announcement before last week.
The Cyclone website credited the engine with having these attributes:
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“No Vibration/No Exhaust Noise
Internal combustion engines have an explosion that emits sound waves out the exhaust valves to the atmosphere. It is necessary to install a muffler system ‘downstream’ of the exhaust manifold to contain some of this noise. A four-stroke engine is not inherently vibration free as the explosion between the piston and the head are balanced only on alternate strokes. A heavy flywheel and harmonic dampener is required to reduce these vibrations.
• The Cyclone Engine does not exhaust its vapor explosions into the atmosphere. It exhausts into the Cyclone condenser and is totally contained, requiring no exhaust system muffler. Moreover, the lack of exhaust pollutants requires no catalytic converter.
• Vibration is controlled because the crankshaft is counter weighted and the pulsations are balanced by equal offsetting pressures, thus requiring no harmonic dampener. No flywheel is required to be turned by a starter because the Cyclone Engine is self-starting.
• The weight of the flywheel, which creates the momentum to keep an internal combustion engine revolving at idle rpm, is unnecessary in the Cyclone Engine.”
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First off, sure the crankshaft is counterweighted. Model airplane cranks are counterweighted. That is a given for almost any modern engine, it is about like a car company wanting credit for adding tires and lights to the machine.
First I would ask you to access the 8 February 2006 cyclonepower website via the Wayback :and click on the videos link at the top of the page. Then please click each one of these links. Each of them shows one of those videos that ebarns is so thrilled with. Please describe in 30 words or less how each of these demos contrasts to the description above:
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“The Cyclone Engine does not exhaust its vapor explosions into the atmosphere. It exhausts into the Cyclone condenser and is totally contained, requiring no exhaust system muffler.”
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Yep Yup, that sure shows us how factual those demonstrations are when it comes to proving they say they are doing what they claim.
Personally, I loved the claim that:
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“A four-stroke engine is not inherently vibration free as the explosion between the piston and the head are balanced only on alternate strokes. A heavy flywheel and harmonic dampener is required to reduce these vibrations” and that by contrast “Vibration is controlled because the crankshaft is counter weighted and the pulsations are balanced by equal offsetting pressures, thus requiring no harmonic dampener.”
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Rather than take my word, go to Wikipedia. They state:
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“A harmonic balancer (also called crank pulley damper, crankshaft damper, torsional damper, or vibration damper) is a device connected to the crankshaft of an engine to reduce torsional vibration and serves as a pulley for drive belts.
Every time the cylinders fire, torque is imparted to the crankshaft. The crankshaft deflects under this torque, which sets up vibrations when the torque is released. At certain engine speeds the torques imparted by the cylinders are in sync with the vibrations in the crankshaft, which results in a phenomenon called resonance. This resonance causes stress beyond what the crankshaft can withstand, resulting in crankshaft failure.
To prevent this vibration, a harmonic balancer is attached to the front part of the crankshaft. The damper is composed of two elements: a mass and an energy dissipating element. The mass resists the acceleration of the vibration and the energy dissipating (rubber/clutch/fluid) element absorbs the vibrations.”
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Notice that the damper dissipates uneven torque distributions to discourage resonant shaking. This has NOTHING TO DO with being a 4 stroke engine. TO ME, THE REALLY AMAZING THING IS THAT THIS GUY SPENT HIS TIME WITH BOATS! Are we really supposed to believe all those 2 stroke outboards were silky smooth and you could stand a quarter on edge upon them? The fact that such a claim is made shows an appalling ignorance of mechanical engineering for a company with the logo “One Engine, One Planet”. You’d have a hard time passing this nugget of drivel off at a high school auto shop class.
Steam engines may not “fire”, but every time that magical valve cycling at a FEW TEN THOUANDTHS OF A SECOND !!!!! opens, it allegedly drops over 3200 psi on top of the piston. Talk about instant torque! Since the engine is also allegedly highly efficient, the pressure drops very rapidly to almost nothing in half a stroke, which means there is a huge variation in torque. If there is a real, honest to gosh load attached to the end of that crank, there will be torque pulses as the crank goes from cylinder to cylinder. Wait! I almost forgot! That spider bearing! That thing toggles the crank from one cylinder to another, which means that the force the piston applies to the crank is not nicely sinusoidal….instead it has a whopper of a secondary force and acceleration applied to it by the bearing. Talk about a pulsation manifested at the crank!
