Hey MTM! To me this whole proposition has always looked suspicious. If the patents looked identical to the engine because the engine had been built, tested and developed it would engender quite a bit of faith. When the sequence is reversed, it tends to scream ego, amateurism and pending failure. Very few successful designers or engineers get it right on the first try; and even fewer call themselves "inventors" because of the connotation that carries.
The premise behind the product itself bothered me, that being a modern steam engine would be superior in every way to internal combustion. It didn't seen like a slam dunk bet considering steam had been around for quite a while when the IC engine first popped up and was unable to compete in light power generation despite the huge head start. The ICE doesn't toss 947 BTU/pound in the heat of vaporization away with each stroke. It doesn't need a burner, boiler, blower and feed pump because the single cylinder does all that; simplicity is rarely a disadvantage.
One point that was stressed was the ability to use a variety of fuels, but I could never make that stand up to scrutiny. The favorite example was the use of algae oil although juices from citrus skins were mentioned; nowhere was it explained how these fuels were to be obtained nor what made them economically competitive with fossil fuel. There is a huge Catch 22 in here. The fuel producer needs an established market before he can justify the expenditure (probably of billions) to establish a manufacturing capability....assuming they lick the many technical problems still extant. At the same time, competitively priced mass production depends on a solid market to justify the investment needed to get costs of scale. Alternative fuel producers are farther ahead to spend more refining their product to match the hundreds of millions of engines out there rather than trying to support what is literally a handful of steam engines.
When you get down to it, people can (and have) run automobiles very successfully on wood and other solid biomass with producer gas generators. This may not be the most elegant solution but developing the gasogene is far less daunting that an automotive grade engine.
The whole "One Engine, One Planet" promotion not only screamed megalomania but it is impossible to imagine a better proclamation of ones comprehension of engine and powertrain development and manufacturing. The engine in a ZR1 Corvette, a Peterbilt truck, a fishing boat and a hospital backup generator may all be internal combustion but each is engineered to do very specific things. As it is, the gasoline and Diesel engines often don't compete just because their characteristics are such that in many applications there is no good range of overlap. Assuming one universal engine would obsolete everything else was not only monumental hubris, it revealed a highly simplistic and unrealistic view of the industry.
The resources devoted to developing a demonstrator were highly questionable. For instance, the bearings in a modern automobile crankshaft are usually held to a size of + / - six microns; call it about .0002 inches and probably more often under a ten thousandth. The surfaces are so smooth they read like glass and the axial and radial positions are all within maybe half a thousandth at the worst. It's obsessive, but the market is that competitive. This takes an investment in microfinishing and coordinate measuring machines as well as specialized operators and experience. The same kind of effort goes into machining the block, heads, cams and so on.
By contrast, with relatively little resources, Cyclone embarked on a program of using plastic bearings, piston rings, water lubrication, a compact once-through parallel path flow boiler operating at supercritical pressures and very high temperature, extremely short cutoff at high rpm, a totally sealed water/steam loop, a replacement for the traditional crank and rod mechanism and a very compact condenser. ANY ONE of those projects could easily absorb more resources than Cyclone possessed. One can only assume that none of the principals had any idea of the size of the challenges they were undertaking or the cost of admission -- and no idea that failure is always a possibility.
They should have been able to produce a very credible prototype inline steam engine with poppet valves operating at maybe 1500 PSI and perhaps 1000 F with a top speed of around 3,000 RPM. That would be an automotive unit; I would probably keep pressures and RPM lower for an industrial, truck or generator engine because longevity is paramount. By employing a "donor" IC engine to supply the crank, rods, exhaust valves, block and so on they could have kept initial cost down as they would limit themselves to developing only the hardware needed to run on steam. Why they felt the need to invent their own feed pumps when there are any number of superior CAT pumps on the market is beyond me.
Basically, from my point of view, this whole thing was doomed right at the starting gate. Unfortunately, Cyclone preferred to continually present the results as a fate accompli. Their website clearly shows a lawnmower that was never developed and discusses the relative advantages to other technologies already competing in the market. The one thing they have done better than any other steam developer I can recall, even Abner Doble, is to pull in investors. They limited their claims to things that were basically possible by the general laws of physics so long as you didn't examine the details closely...which they apparently hadn't either. It's too bad so many people lost money on this. They might have killed off most investment in other projects precisely because they were so good at selling Cyclone and instilling the thought that this was the ultimate in steam technology in so many minds. The thought will probably persist that if THIS project failed, the whole field is a lost endeavor.
