More thermally efficient than an internal combustion engine?
Buddy sez: "Meanwhile the Cyclone responses to comments are more outright fraud. Frankie will send individuals "proof" by email the Cyclone engine is more thermally efficient than gasoline engines."
From my vantage point, they've been making this claim for years. It is based on Rankine Cycle calculations as applied to the patented Cyclone designs. Of course, every single element of the argument assumes world-class efficiency (or better) and I have seen no indisputable proof that real world testing backs up their claims. For that matter, I have problems believing they even performed calculations beyond the most theoretical in nature. Let's look at a few items.
Our first loss is the boiler, steam generator or "heat exchanger" as Cyclone likes to call it. For simplicity sake, let's refer to it as a boiler. For peak efficiency such devices burn fuel at one end and admit water at the other such that the water progressively heats as it approaches the fire and the combustion gasses progressively cool by giving up heat to the water as they advance to the exhaust where the water comes in. A high pressure and temperature Rankine Cycle engine is not going to get the same boiler efficiency as you read about in some home furnaces and hot water heaters. Efficiency is going to be a function of how much heat is transferred; the cooler the boiler exhaust gasses, the more efficient it is. If you feed in room temperature water, you can cool off the combustion gasses much more than you can if the water is very hot. Remember, however, that the water is coming out of the condenser rather than from a large tank. This means that the water is comprised of steam that was exhausted from the engine and cooled until it condensed back into a liquid. If you cool this liquid much below condensation temperature you are throwing heat away to the atmosphere --- this is wasteful because you must add the heat back in at the boiler. Therefore, the water entering the boiler is rather hot and the boiler efficiency falls significantly below what is theoretically possible. In essence, we get two choices; throw the heat away to the atmosphere or reduce boiler efficiency. Cooling something off is usually more difficult than heating it u,p so we typically opt to only cool as much as necessary. With this in mind, achieving a boiler efficiency much over 80% would seem awfully good. Losing 20% in a process the competing technology skips right over doesn't seem like you are off to a great start.
One of my favorites is the assumption that they will gain enormous efficiency by using supercritical steam in the engine. To accomplish this, the steam has to be expanded to a very great degree which means that the every bit of the supercritical fluid must be admitted to the cylinder before the piston has moved very far. Obviously, the valve must be open only a very brief time. Any fluid or gas passing through a restriction will experience a drop in pressure and, with such a brief steam inlet time, it's inevitable that most of incoming steam is going to experience a significant pressure drop because of the high percentage of time that the valve is only partly open or closed. Given the pressures I have seen Cyclone state, I believe it's almost a dead certainty that the fluid entering the cylinder will no longer be supercritical. If supercritical fluid is critical to the engine efficiency, we can figure that just trying to get the fluid into the cylinder will wipe out much of the theoretical gain supercritical steam is supposed to supply.
Remember that the Cyclone engine needs a blower to supply air to the burner and cool off the condenser, not to mention a feed water pump to pressurize the water to well over 3,000 psi. We can argue that the blower losses are comparable to the cooling fan and pumping losses in an IC engine but there is nothing in a car engine comparable to the feed water pump. While that isn't a massive energy loss, it still puts a steam engine at a disadvantage.
Then let's look at the spider bearing. That "toggle action" superimposes an additional shaking force on the engine. You don't shake things without dispersing energy in the process. This is over and above the non-stop impacts as the connecting rods impact the spider bearing when it produces the toggle. Many have argued that crankshafts are inefficient because they constantly accelerate and decelerate the piston but that is false because the piston slows by transferring its energy back to the crankshaft. Is that the case, however, when you have an impact of the rod against the spider bearing? I don't think so, that impact produces a vibration (which requires energy to sustain) and we can readily acknowledge that the impact dissipates kinetic energy in the form of heat. IC engines don't even produce these types of waste.
Another "Cyclone Special" is the water lubricated bearing. This is based on the supposition that certain materials get 'really slippery' when they get wet. Slippery they might be, but there is still a mechanical rubbing. By contrast, oil lubricated engines avoid rubbing contact altogether by interposing an unbroken oil film between the moving parts. Admittedly, this introduces a fluid friction but which friction do we think is smaller?
Anyhow, I look forward to seeing the results of a disinterested third party performing dyno runs on a certified machine. After all, that is how the efficiency figures are derived for the IC engines that Cyclone uses as a comparison. Anything else leaves open room for doubt.
