Cyclone Power Technologies, Inc. (fka CYPW)

[BuddyWhazhizname]

Cyclone's motto should be, to paraphrase Bugs Bunny, "We know this violates the Laws of Thermodynamics, but fortunately for us we never studied law."

Remember that truck chassis with the mock-up Mark 6 engine? Harry would explain how with all the patented "heat regeneration" built into the engine it converts every possible bit of heat energy into work. Then he would point to the WHE engine mounted on the exhaust and say it would extract even more energy from the exhaust. His contradiction seemed to escape him.

There are places where waste heat is at a high enough temperature that the WHE concept might be viable, such as the glass furnace exhaust at Bent Glass Designs, the first and only installation of a WHE engine. Q2Power's plan was to burn waste methane from sewage plants to make steam, so their application wasn't waste heat.

The bigger problem than the potential economics and payback, though, is the fact that Cyclone engines just don't work for more than minutes without failure.

When you figure it's now 12 years since Cyclone started and their operating losses are over $25 million, Q2Power's losses are over $6 million over two years, Ohio State University redesigned the WHE engine to make it reliable, not to mention all the other partners (Revgine, Great Wall, Raytheon, Topline, etc.) who did development work on the engines, and they have still not demonstrated an engine capable of running for 200 hours under part load, their former chief technical advisor's name for them, "Delusions-R-Us" comes to mind.

In fact, there has never been a public demonstration of an engine running for one hour under no load, let alone one powering something.

Chris Nelson watched failure after failure for years at Cyclone while continuously predicting production would soon start. He's the one quoted in the stories about Cyclone's factory in Ohio. And he still misleads investors. All their marketing, including yesterday's PR says this technology is ready to deploy, e.g.:

Q2Power's current pilot staged combined heat and power (CHP) technology can be deployed with minimal time and expense at thousands of small-scale facilities that must dispose of waste such as methane, biogas and other used fuels at increasingly greater costs and regulatory burdens.

They installed the 'pilot' system more than a year ago and there has been zero information given on its performance. In fact, they have never stated if it was even started. They sold one system in January, but there is no indication they have started to build it yet. They fired all the employees in May, so this system will never be built. There is nothing that "can be deployed".

Same scam as Harry and Frankie sucking in investors with their stories of "market-ready" products.

A marketable electrical generator would need a life of tens of thousands of hours before anyone would even consider buying it. As far as we know, a Cyclone engine has never survived one hour at full load.

Chris Nelson might plausibly claim stupidity regarding the seriousness of the fundamental problems while he was at Cyclone, and could point to Harry's misrepresentations of fact, but the work done at Ohio State University removes that excuse. The Ohio State people did a presentation in March, 2014 on their work with the WHE engine. Page 19 mentions the bearings as a critical path issue. Pages 30 and 31 reinforce this and say a bearing test machine was being built to develop bearings that could make the engine life viable.

Cyclone had tested every bearing material on the market and found nothing that worked. Ohio State was able to increase life by a factor of 4 with pressurized water lubrication, but life was still far too low. The separation agreement between Cyclone and Q2Power said Q2Power would assume the cost of building the bearing test machine, but that was the last mention of it.

Chris Nelson was fully aware the technology did not exist to make the engine work reliably and that new bearing materials would need to be invented before that could happen but he still told investors the system was ready to deploy. He even sold a system to an unsuspecting customer.

On the other hand, the financial reports for Q2Power primarily describe all the ways most of that $6 million from investors was funneled to insiders, so he has personally made out OK.