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The biggest problem with all this, and there are a huge number of problems, is that they haven't taken their dire circumstances as a sign that they should 'fess up to the fact that the original design was always problematic and that something drastic is necessary to get things on track. (Spider bearings, lack of control system, far too little condenser surface area, water lubrication, and so on, and so on, and so on...)
Cyclone is still standing pat with the old "You've seen it run in videos" line -- which is exactly the problem. The only thing that we have seen is a shaft turning, and often not that impressively. The car is still stationary. The boat is still dormant. We have yet to see a pump throwing a huge stream of water, a generator powering up a set of spotlights or any other evidence that the machine can perform large amounts of useful work. Heck, they moved from Florida to Texas, so having the thing run an A/C unit would be good -- although maybe a bit hard to verify on video.
If insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, then Cyclone is looking for insane investors.
Besides, does anyone think that you can trust a company that can't even put the right address on its website? It goes without saying that the devil is in the details -- if a mere website change is out of grasp, is it realistic to expect that they can engineer a power plant, assemble, test and place it into production?
Paul,
I’ve worked with gas bearings. They are excellent for applications with small radial loads and high rpm, which this valve system doesn’t appear to resemble. High pressure admission steam pressing down on your conical valve will collapse any reasonable gas film. Moreover, for operational reasons, we definitely do not want any gas film involved. High pressure steam engines suffer from severe blowby – steam leaking past the piston. You state that your expansion ratio is to be 200 to 1 (we’ll go into that later) which means your acceptable leakage is essentially zero. So, while blowby is a problem in any high pressure steam engine, it’s fatal in yours.
Lots and lots of people have tried rotary valves and, so far, none of have been commercially successful; and none of them were striking for the sort of performance that you claim. Maybe you could make it work if you aren’t running high pressures and temperatures but there’s not a lot of reason to build a commercial steam engine working at low steam conditions since internal combustion already possesses an inherent efficiency advantage over the more efficient high pressure and temperature and pressure engines. Anyhow, Dutcher industries built the most efficient piston steam engine ever encountered and they had significant blowby in the high-pressure cylinder. After doubling the piston rings, they found that they had improved things … a little bit. (And after spending a lot of money on their project, they never did match a typical gasoline engine, let alone a diesel). Their engine still had unacceptable amounts of blowby. And that’s with rings rubbing the cylinder wall, imagine how much steam will leak by if you are intentionally leaving even a small gap.
I’ll accept the 4-link motion but wonder why one wouldn’t use a typical master rod, which is much simpler and has fewer wear points, and is cheaper due to lower parts cost. All those tens of thousands of Pratt & Whitney, Wright, BMW, Nakajima, Bristol, Armstrong-Siddeley, Lycoming, Continental and other engines argue that the current method is highly effective. I’ve been involved with a number of engineering development programs over the years and have found that it pays to minimize the number of new features. That’s what killed Cyclone, they put a lot of ‘bright ideas’ into one basket and never could get the whole thing working.
I’m sorry, 12 cylinders are more costly to manufacture. With an inline engine, we can deck all the cylinders in one pass whereas you require 12 passes by indexing the part each time. The same applies for other operations which can normally be performed in gangs, such as boring, honing and drilling. As you increase the number of operations, the cycle time rises, as does the cost. Manufacturers strive to minimize these times. In any case, you need to manufacture extra pistons, linkages, bearings, screws, pins, and so on. And if you think tolerances aren’t all that important, then you haven’t seen all the CMM machines in an engine plant or its suppliers. Efficiency and durability are far more important today and you need to be holding tolerances measured in a handful of microns.
A Z06 Corvette can generate 670 horsepower on 8 cylinders, and some production 4-cylinder engines can make 300, or better. So, we can assume that 75 hp/cylinder is roughly an upper end for current engines, with roughly 35 on the lower end. These are all 4 stroke engines, whereas a single-acting steam engine is effectively a 2 stroke. Therefore, a 12-cylinder steamer should make as much power as a comparable 24-cylinder ICE having the same mean effective pressure. Twenty-four cylinders is an extremely rare configuration only used when large amounts of power are needed. I noticed that the industry trend is to reduce cylinder count for the number of horsepower, for good reasons. In any case, above about 500 HP, steam turbines become competitive with, and then surpass, piston steam engines. Everything else being even, turbines are simply a better deal for a number of reasons if you are trying to compete with engines producing the same power as a 24-cylinder motor.
If you are looking at a small engine putting out something like 100 horses, then the 12 cylinder is problematic due to the square-cube law. For a given displacement, the surface area goes up rapidly as you increase the number of cylinders and make the cylinders smaller. A 12-cylinder engine has 44 percent more cylinder wall surface than a 4-cylinder engine having the same displacement and the same ratio of bore to stroke. That 44 percent represents added friction and heat loss through the cylinder wall. Heat loss is a bad thing in a steam engine. Something similar happens to the connecting rod bearings. Oh yeah, I forgot, rotary cylinders have more external surface area than inline cylinders, which means you have more surface through which heat can leave the engine (a bad thing).
As for the 200 to 1 expansion ratio, that’s utterly impossible. You are using rotary valves having ports into the cylinder head, which is functionally similar to a slide or piston valve. These ports have height, width, and depth – especially depth; in other words, they contribute to clearance volume. Your rotary valve and cylinder head surfaces must be perfectly conical otherwise they will either leak or bind up. In order to resist bending due to the high pressure and temperature steam sitting inside the cylinder, these ports are going to be fairly deep, so that you have sufficient strength to prevent distortion. For a 200 to 1 expansion, your total volume at steam cutoff has to be ½ of 1 percent of the volume at bottom dead center. The volume in your ports will need to be larger. Just obtaining a 0.5 percent clearance is problematic enough if we ignore the ports, assuming thermal differential expansion as the engine operates and flexing in the lower end components at high output.
There’s another reason that a 200 to 1 expansion volume won’t work; you totally forgot about FMEP (Friction Mean Effective Pressure); this is the mean effective pressure in the cylinder needed to overcome all engine friction and auxiliary loads. At 200 to 1, your mean effective pressure will be much less than 1/200th of the admission pressure. This is because the steam pressure will drop by much more than a factor of 200 during expansion. The average steam pressure during the stroke won’t be enough to overcome the friction of your cylinders (half of which are pushing steam out the cylinder head, which is another force you need to overcome) not to mention the friction on all those bearings. The, of course, you need to drive the feed water pump, burner blower, condensate pump, oil pump, alternator, valve friction, and so on. You are far from the first person to realize that extreme expansion offers high efficiency – but this is theoretical efficiency and not what you will see in the real world.
Even if we ignore all the above, the 200 to 1 STILL won’t work due to ‘port blocking phenomenon’. Steam doesn’t accelerate instantly, nothing accelerates instantaneously. Since it takes a small amount of time to get up to speed, the steam experiences an extreme pressure drop. This is no big deal in an engine with longer cutoff since the following steam makes up most of the deficit. Unfortunately, you are making sure that there is no following steam. There are two consequences to this, the first being that your mean effective pressure is much lower than boiler pressure would indicate, and your power is going to drop dramatically (and you were already having problems with FMEP).
Furthermore, if we yet once again ignore all the above, there’s the matter of temperature drop during expansion. You can only expand steam just so far before it begins to condense. Such condensing is one reason the steam pressure drops in the cylinder more rapidly than the expansion ratio, water is far denser than steam and every volume of steam turning into just a drop of water produces just that much less pressure against the cylinder wall. This is the sort of thing that gets out of hand because steam is a relatively poor thermal conductor while water is pretty good; as water hits the cylinder wall it draws off heat which is then pushed out the exhaust. The incoming steam has to give up energy to reheat the cylinder, which is heat that no longer drives the engine. Turbines having very extreme expansion use reheaters between stages to prevent condensation; Abner Doble also found this necessary and his engine had nothing vaguely close to the expansion you state.
Regards,
Tom
Paul, I looked at patent 8,997,627. Some comments follow, unfortunately not as positive as I would hope.
The use of 12 cylinders seems pretty counterproductive. This makes the engine highly complicated, expensive, and difficult to build. Scaling piston bore and stroke by a factor of 1.73 would give you the same displacement using only 4 cylinders. As a benefit, the crankcase would comprise a much smaller portion of the engine's size.
The engine will not work as shown. Basically, you have copied Harry Schoell's "spider bearing" but without the bumpers. I see twelve articulating connecting rods and no master rod; this means the piston motions are all unconstrained and that the engine can thrash about violently -- and unpredictably -- rather than in a smooth motion. For an example of a correct master rod assembly you can refer to Master Rod
The next problem lies with the rotary valves, this is an old idea and well known in the art of steam engines. Rotary valves tend to suffer from a few problems. The first of these is that thermal expansion leads to temperature differentials inside an engine and this causes the various components to experience thermal expansion at different rates. Since the mating parts are expanded at different rates, they have a tendency to either bind up or become loose -- either causing the engine to stop running or leak steam.
Another problem with many rotary valves is that they are not balanced. By that, I mean that the pressure is not the same on each side and the steam either forces the valve open so that it leaks or presses it down so strongly that it rubs so hard that the parts wear down.
Related to the sentence above, rubbing parts need to be lubricated. This allows oil to flow into the cylinder and out the exhaust to the boiler. At high temperatures, the oil will decompose in the boiler and clog the tubes. Failure to lubricate will cause the valves to wear rapidly. Valve lubrication is not a good idea in highly superheated engines. Poppet valves tend to avoid these issues.
Another problem is that rubbing surfaces tend to leak unless you have a good seal at the port. I am not sure I see a provision for such.
The successful rotary valve steam engines, of which I am aware, operated at modest pressure, temperature, and rpm. This was fine back in the day when efficiency wasn't that important. As it is, I think a piston valve design would be superior to rotary valves and even these tend to leak and wear. It's hard to beat poppet valves, which is why we see them in almost all car engines.
Lubricating valves in engines having using highly superheated steam tends to cause the oil to decompose in the engine, leading to a loss of lubrication and valve failure. Heck, steam cleaners remove oil from concrete, and highly superheated steam is far more aggressive than a steam cleaner, merely keeping an oil film in place is difficult.
Your engine is also a counterflow. This tends to reduce efficiency a bit because the expanded steam (which is cooler than the admission steam) passing through the cylinder head tends to cool the head. The cooler head, in turn, cools off hot incoming steam. The cooler incoming steam produces less work in the cylinder and we experience a bit of an efficiency loss.
I'm sorry that I can't be more positive. I can provide you with references to patent literature to describe more promising designs.
Tom
Hi Paul,
Honestly, the use of a radial engine is one of the things about Cyclone that turned me off. Radial engines came to prominence with their use in aircraft. The valuable feature was that all the cylinders stuck out and could be easily air-cooled because there were no other cylinders in front of them to block the airflow. Another reason that radial engines were easily air-cooled is that all those individual cylinders caused the engine to have a very high surface-to-volume ratio.
The problem with all this is that we DO NOT want to cool off steam engine cylinders. Quite the opposite, in fact, it is preferable if they are insulated. The temperatures inside a steam engine cylinder are far lower than in an internal combustion engine, every degree of temperature lost results in lower efficiency.
Of course, Cyclone mounted their engine so that the shaft is vertical....heaven only knows why. Outside of lawn mowers and outboard motors, we hardly ever see vertically mounted engines. Mounting a radial horizontallyis problematic, however. Crankcase lubrication drops down into the lower cylinders when the engine is idle and causes a number of problems.
There's also a balance issue with radial engines. Cyclone attempted to address this with their so-called spider bearing. Of course, this resulted in making the manufacture of connecting rods more difficult. Worse yet, it involved thousands of destructive impacts per minute. Since the motion was now unconstrained, the piston movements became unpredictable. And, ironically, they interrupted the sinusoidal motion of the pistons with a sharp discontinuity that generated many times greater unbalance forces than they were trying to fix. The correct solution is that adopted by US manufacturers during WW2 -- stay with the master rod and slighly differ strokes and rod lengths to for different pistons so as to minimize unbalance. This won't cancel all the unbalance but will reduce it greatly.
Then we get to manufacturing. Radial engines are more difficult and costly to make. For instance, a 7 cylinder radial block has to be indexed every 51.429 degrees to bore the recess for the cylinder and to face off the top of the block. By contrast, an inline engine needs no indexing whatsoever for the same operation -- merely move the block linearly from cylinder bore to cylinder bore. Likewise, we are going to see additional costs manufacturing a number of bolt on cylinders versus manufacturing the whole thing en bloc. Just the extra part handling and assembly will run up the bill.
Truthfully, the only advantage that I can see in building a radial is that you can get away with a crankshaft possessing just one crankpin. This certainly reduces cost and effort in that department. However, a V-4 engine only has two pins. It will take two indexings to work on the cylinders, so that's a bit of a hassle, but still much better than a radial.
Their "Ethics" statement prohibited message board posting, as I recall. That was a non-starter from the word "go". Of course, ethics have never been a huge component of their business model given all the claimed achievements that were subsequently shown to have been false.
When the brags themselves are pathetic, you realize just how bad the situation is.
The problem with all this talk of funding and putting engines into production is that either the Cyclone people don't understand what it takes to actually do this, or they do and are ignoring it in order to pull in bucks.
These people are talking nickels and dimes in comparison to what is needed. You don't build and test A engine. You build a whole bunch of exactly identical engines and then test them in dynamometers under all different sorts of operating conditions. One dynamometer isn't going to cut it if you want to put in the requisite number of hours in a reasonable amount of time -- it's going to take a number of machines. From what I recall, the total number of hours Cyclone has spent dyno testing all their engines isn't a lot different than what a legit manufacturer might spend testing some individual engines in their program. And this testing would occur in a period measured in weeks, not in a decade.
This outfit never had an engine designed to rational engineering principles (spider bearing, indeed!). They never had any sort of logical test program and nothing like a reasonable business model.
So, now that the company is ostensibly broke, they announce that they are going to pull a product out of their hat along with a factory to manufacture it. Funny that they can now do everything with nothing but before couldn't manage the money in a professional manner...
Note disappearance of Timing Pennies and buddies. Pumped and dumped this turkey!
Awaiting announcements that this is a good thing....it wouldn't even be the most ridiculous thing posted on this site.
BEHIND THE SCENES -- NOT FILING LEGALLY REQUIRED REPORTS?
CYPW LEAN, MEAN, INVESTOR SCREWING MACHINE!!!
CYCLONE MADE NO PROFIT$ WHEN THEY WEREN'T BROKE
Why would any rational person assume they will make a profit now that they are bust?
CYPW -- INVESTOR GREEN (MONEY) EATING MACHINE It's pretty much wiped out all the capital put into the company, along with all the goodwill initially generated.
Broken Promises! Voodoo Engineering, Testing! Lousy Business Model
There is always talk of "good charts", which never has gone anywhere -- as evidenced by the utter lack of sales or profits. Of course, you can't have sales when there is no product on the market -- try to buy a Cyclone engine, I dare you. Much of the engineering is mumbo jumbo and that fact can't be erased by quoting Cyclone talking points -- which are just a string of claims that have been debunked for years -- often by the company itself.
Great! A parroted reply instead of an intelligent discussion.
PEOPLE VERY UNCLEAR REGARDING THERMODYNAMICS -- "EXTERNAL COMBUSTION RULES"
For our purposes, we can assume that there are two types of heat, sensible and latent. Sensible heat does not change the state of the material and causes a continuous temperature rise as heat is added. For example, if we take a glass of water at room temperature and heat it to 200 degrees, the temperature will go up a relatively constant amount for every BTU of heat added. On the other hand, if we start with water heated to 212 degrees, we will need to add 947 BTU of heat in order to convert a pound of water into a pound of steam -- the temperature still being 212. The energy needed to convert a fluid at boiling temperature into vapor of the same temperature is called latent heat. Only after we add that 947 BTU worth of latent heat can we start to superheat the steam.
Now, the problem is that adding this 947 BTU is a non-reversible process, meaning that we can't extract energy from the steam by condensing it back to water. So, for every pound of water we boil, 947 BTU worth of latent heat is lost. An internal combustion engine, by contrast, is not working with fluids and therefore avoids this loss of latent heat.
Now, this is very simple physics, which most of us should have learned in junior high (or middle school). On this basis alone, it is extremely difficult for the educated person to assume that external combustion -- particularly Rankine cycle (steam engines) -- actually "rule".
How many shares are even out there?
At the rate someone is buying this stock up, how close are they to holding a majority position? If they wanted to repurpose the corporate shell, maybe Cyclone ignoring the SEC is the best thing that could happen. The new holder(s) could argue that the company should forfeit control and turn it over to shareholders who could set things straight. I dunno, not a lawyer, just know that the Uniform Commercial Code is generally rigged to promote business as a social good. Maybe something similar applies here...
Every con man ever said "TRUST ME!"
Have any Cyclone Shill's predictions ever come true?
Cyclone shills do employ constant tactics, this is how you can tell that they are shills. The first giveaway is that they show up out of nowhere and have fixed opinions, then disappear as quickly as they came. Just like hired hitmen.
You can also tell that they are paid for the job because their posts obviously take no time to write -- they make their money on volume.
Their tactics include repeating unproven Cyclone claims and ignore all evidence these claims have been made for years and never come true.
When presented with facts and analysis, they insult anyone who disagrees.
This will be followed by arbitrary assertations with no supporting evidence other than a loud declaration that they know what they are talking about and you better listen to them.
Invariably, there will be wild statements about future growth, providing no data and ignoring previous contradictory trends.
Read his post, show me the facts!
You think that maybe they are just trying to acquire the corporate shell?
20,000,000 shares? Gotta idly wonder what manipulation is going on. It's pretty certain no one thinks this turkey is actually going to make money building and selling energy systems. Admittedly, this is only $2,000 but that still $1,999.98 more than it's worth.
Without their state-of-the-art labs, how will they go on????
It's trash once it can't lure more suckers into this morass.
Market value of $6,000???
If they have 6 billion outstanding shares, and the stock is going for.000001 .....
Remember when this was a multibillion-dollar, disruptive, game-changing outfit? (In their dreams --- or press releases, anyhow)
The next time they claim to be ready to launch production, (always just six months down the road), you have to ask what assets are going to fund the initiative. They could always issue another 6 billion more shares and sink the whole, massive 6 grand into financing their super-factory.
Hmmm.... I thought trading was suspended on this stock.
Wow, what manufacturing facility is it this time?
All sorts of questions bubble up, such as:
"Where's the money for the tooling coming from?"
"Where's the money for the materials coming from?"
"Where's the money to pay the labor coming from?"
"Which engine is this, the "Diesel Efficiency" supercritical steam model or the rotary valve radial engine?"
"Is this the same manufacturer, in Ohio, that was building a special facility just to produce Cyclone engines, oh so many years ago?"
"Taking inflation into account, fuel is at an all-time low price --- why would anyone buy an expensive steam engine when a cheaper gasoline or diesel engine is available?"
"How many customers have put down cash for these engines?"
"Why would anyone believe you after all these years of promising that production was to begin 'in six months', hmmmmmm?"
"So, you can pull off manufacturing (of which neither Frankie or Harry has a clue) but you can't file financial statements?"
"How come you can't get new material, rather than printing the same old sad story, time after time?"
They didn't note the trough wasn't Cyclone's! Honestly Buddy, by just looking at the article, you'd draw the honest conclusion that the attached photo actually illustrated real Cyclone hardware. It's a variation on the old Cyclone razzle-dazzle: make elaborate, over the top claims while showing hardware --- NEVER mention that the claims and the hardware don't overlap.
Wow! Simply Wow!!! A twenty-cent transaction! I can't imagine anyone doing this as an investment strategy, but it sure is a cheap way to jack up the stock price.
Absolutely! You can go up from zero...
Deserting a sinking ship. When someone sells 4,170,864 shares at 0.000001, you know it wasn't to cash out and run with the money. Heck, probably cost more to peddle it than the sale earned. Have to assume someone just wants to cut their losses and move on, unencumbered.
Bobby, it's the noisiest engine per kilowatt-hour, ever! Those three little bulbs don't look as bright as a lot of modern flashlights, and it's taking a refrigerator-sized unit making more noise than a diesel truck to power them. You would honestly think anyone would be embarrassed to publicize this! The video says a lot about what they think of their customer's gullibility.
Yet again, pathetic conspiracy theories and sad excuses.
I got a few good laughs out of this drivel:
First of all, someone is supposedly paying big bucks to get someone to trash Cyclone. This is a compound laugh getter … the first laugh coming from the idea that you would need to hire someone to trash Cyclone when their behavior and business practices have invited many people to do it for free as a public service.
And this leads to the question: "Just who benefits from destroying their company to the point that they would shell out money to get the job done?" Are we supposed to believe it is the top secret cabal of International Internal Engine Manufacturers? Let's see if we have this straight --- there's probably a few hundred engine manufacturers out there but they are so afraid of an outfit that has never subjected an engine to an impartial series of tests that they will engage in a smear campaign. Once again, you can only laugh at this sort of trash conspiracy campaign, it's roughly equivalent to the "100 miles per gallon carburetor" stories. Unfortunately, there's all kinds of paranoid and technologically illiterate people who buy into that kind of nonsense; this tells us who Cyclone believes are their supporters, and in what contempt they hold them.
Now, as for all their efforts being directed towards "Commercialization", this is another laugh getter as well as being a perfect example as to why people trash Cyclone for free. Just how many years ago did they announce a "family of market ready engines"? Now, tell me where I'm wrong; aren't the terms "market" and "commercial" more or less synonymous? If you have a product that's "market ready", doesn't that state that it is a commercially viable product? Trying to pretend they aren't the same is cause for more hilarity. The whole proposition simply begs another question "Was the statement that the engines were "market ready" a lie?" If it was a lie, and if you haven't taken responsibility for spreading the lie, what proof do you offer that the current "commercialization" effort isn't also a lie? Again, you are forced to laugh at the shallowness of the argument in the face of the company's history.
And this brings me to the issue of expensive press releases, which also comes into play in this latest missive. News outlets don't require payment in order to print the news, they spend money on reporters and other assets to find the news. Spending money to get the word out is called "advertising". If no one is willing to cover your story, then it's a fair bet that the consensus is that there is nothing significantly newsworthy involved. Let's view this from the press's point of view; they would have to find it laughable to report on Cyclone's unsubstantiated statements given that none of their previous coverage was later supported by facts.
Anyhow, this whole thing is part and parcel of the ongoing Cyclone saga. They announced the development of a "market ready" engine that was potentially a market "disruptive" technology, but never demonstrated it living up to the hype. They sign up a highly reputable board of technical advisers, which they instantly ignore in favor of the underdeveloped ideas of someone with no educational or practical credentials in the field. When all their promises fail to materialize they take a multiple path approach of:
Making new promises and predictions without explaining their previous failures.
Blaming mysterious outside sources.
And, most importantly, they never, ever, not in a dozen years, take responsibility for all the misinformation and deception. They expect every "press release" should cause people to instantly forget all the previous promises and accept the new ones uncritically. They never admit that ego, incompetence and self-gain got in the way of protecting investor interests.
Hard times for Cyclone when the pumpers disappear!
You can't help wondering about his credibility, Buddy.
If you're a management professional, one would assume you would do research before getting involved with a client, let alone making public pronouncements. How long would it take to go through Cyclone's web presence to discover how many times they have promised product that never materialized? How hard would it be to find this discussion group on Investor's Hub and do a little reconnoitering to see what others are saying? You would assume a business professional would hire another professional, like a mechanical engineer, to verify the potential clients representations before telling the public how wonderful the alleged product is.
Basically, you can only come up with two conclusions. Either the turn-around expert is gullible or willing to boost a client's image so long as the check clears. The degree of culpability between these states is quite a bit different but neither says much for credibility.
Even the trailer was a lie, Chuck.
That list of sponsors contains a lot of bogus names. Let me clarify; the people exist --- but they didn't contribute to the Cyclone team. Many of those folks contributed to Chuk's land speed record attempt, in some cases long before Cyclone became involved. Note that Cyclone also joined Chuk's team, they even said so in their press releases.
It's unclear whether the folks at Cyclone are that dishonest or egomaniacally deluded … at some point they decided that it was their LSR project and that Chuk was their driver. By various reports, Harry even told people that Chuk was "his driver". Anyhow, Cyclone later explained this all away by stating that they were doing these contributors a favor by putting their names on the Cyclone sponsors list. Of course, some contributors were upset that their good names were being used to advertise a product and company in which they had no faith.
As a matter of fact, some of those people demanded Cyclone remove them from the list of contributors and the names are still right on the side of that trailer … tattered as the sign is.
The heat regeneration figures really are mysterious, Buddy.
Don't get me wrong, heat regeneration is a legitimate engineering practice used by all kinds of power stations. It is even found in such things as steam cars and locomotives in the form of heat exchangers which extract heat from the exhaust steam and transfer it to the water entering the boiler. The thing is, there are limitations.
Heat transfer is going to be affected largely by two factors:
1. The temperature difference between the two fluids and/or liquids.
2. The surface area of the heat exchanger.
We'll assume the thermal conductivity of the exchanger itself isn't an issue nor do we have problems with things like laminar flow in the fluids.
The effect of temperature differential can't be overstated. If the difference is 300 degrees, heat readily flows from one substance to another. At 5 degrees, the flow is pretty modest. What this means is that we have a roughly asymptotic curve, it can be pretty aggressive in one region and then flattens drastically. We can offset this to some degree by making the heat exchanger larger (the second factor, above) but this also involves tradeoffs of size, weight, cost, friction and so on.
The most common form of heat regeneration in traditional steam systems has ben the feed water heater. This simple device is a tube through which water heading into the boiler passes. The tube is situated so as to be heated by exhaust steam leaving the engine, thereby returning some of the exhaust heat back to the boiler. This works exceedingly well in such things like locomotives where the water is derived from a tank and is therefore relatively cool. It's also not too bad in water cooled condensing systems operating at high vacuum, since the water leaving these condensers is cool. Unfortunately, Cyclone supposedly uses air cooled condensers. Air is not a great cooling medium and it therefore follows that the condenser is operating far above vacuum pressure … meaning that the water in the condenser is already quite hot, thereby minimizing the temperature differential between it and the exhaust steam. So, not a lot of heat regeneration will be possible. You can cool the condensed water further but that's just throwing heat away and you don't get points for putting heat back that you wasted needlessly.
We can also recycle heat from the combustion gasses leaving the boiler into the air entering the burner. This has a similar limitation --- if the boiler is exceptionally efficient, the exhaust gasses aren't extremely hot and the portion of heat that can be recovered is limited. Cyclone claims an exceptionally efficient boiler and the heat regenerative properties would then be reduced accordingly.
The last route we can take is to transfer heat from the condenser cooling air to the air entering the burner. The big limitation there is that you need a lot more air to operate the condenser than is used in the burner … meaning that only a fraction can even be applied to the heat exchanger in the first place.
Any way you cut it, the heat exchangers for all this regeneration would appear to be quite voluminous but I haven't seen such large structures anywhere.
Anyhow, the heat regeneration issue is the same as many other Cyclone "performance specifications". Am I wrong that they generally give results as single values? Heat regeneration won't be a fixed percentage of output but will vary depending on ambient conditions and throttle setting. This is also true for the engine thermal efficiency. I can't recall Cyclone posting such values in a range (you know, like the EPA does with car fuel economy? At least they give city and highway estimates).
You're absolutely right Buddy, and it's worse'n that.
Nitrous oxides are not something magically formed by the Diesel cycle. NOx emissions come from high combustion temperatures. What do high combustion temperatures in a heat engine imply? High thermal efficiency. Diesel engines make a lot of nitrous oxide because they burn hotter and therefore use the energy more efficiently … burning more efficiently means that they produce far fewer amounts of other pollutants, such as greenhouse gasses. Go figure, an engine that's using 25 percent fuel is probably producing 25 percent less carbon dioxide.
High temperature equating high efficiency isn't something you can abracadabra away --- even Harry Schoell kept bragging about the high temperatures his engines would operate at in order to have revolutionary efficiency. Of course, he had no engineering skills, so he couldn't make it work --- but you don't have to be an engineering genius to quote something that almost everyone knows.
So, does this mean we let diesels get away with producing large amounts of NOx because they are so efficient and actually produce fewer amounts of other pollutants? Of course not! That's where DEF, Diesel Exhaust Fluid comes in. DEF contains urea which mixes with NOx before entering the catalytic converter. A few chemical reactions occur in sequence but the output is largely nitrogen (the largest natural component in the atmosphere), water vapor (which is also always naturally present in the atmosphere) and a relatively smaller amount of carbon dioxide.
So, my question is this:
"If Cyclone is bragging about low NOx production, are they admitting that Harry has been lying about the efficiency for many years?"
Wonder what the corporate shell would sell for? That may be their most marketable commodity. Now I'm starting to wonder, do they still have the car and two boats? It's hard to tell if they have anything else left of value outside the scrap value of the engines. Well, assuming P.T. Barnum was right, maybe a patent or two could be unloaded for a few bucks.