Merry Christmas everyone!
Hi Terry, sorry, when you were talking about all the commercial steam engine products, I though you meant reciprocating engines of the scale (e.g., ~100 hp) of the Cyclone engine.
Yes, there are many companies supplying commercial scale (e.g., a megawatt on up) systems for biomass and waste heat recovery. I know of a utility company plant in Washington state that has been burning forestry waste for many years to produce electricity.
Turbines are the way to go in larger systems, but they become increasingly inefficient at lower sizes. They also spin faster and become difficult to connect to anything. For instance, Cummins has a waste heat recovery system for truck engines 40 hp or so but spins at 130,000 rpm.
Turbines also have a "sweet spot" for speed and load. They don't work well unless they are at that operating point. Lots of experimental gas turbine cars have been built since the 1950s, but nothing practical for street use has come out of it.
My sympathies don't really lay with German engineering. I think the reason the Spilling steam engine costs about 10x a reasonable amount is because of the "meister" attitude of making everything perfect. (An example from WWII was tanks. From Wikipedia "While the Tiger I was an excellent design, it was over-engineered, using expensive materials and labour-intensive production methods. Only 1,347 were built between August 1942 and August 1944. The Tiger was prone to certain types of track failures and breakdowns, and limited in range by its high fuel consumption." The U.S. produced 49,234 Shermans. They weren't nearly as elegant in design and construction, but they were much cheaper to build and more reliable.)
Now the Pratt & Whitney system also uses organic fluids instead of water. That's great when there's a low temperature heat source you want to utilize, but if you are burning fuel, you've got high temperature heat, so why not use it to greatest efficiency?
Organic fluid systems have to be hermetically sealed, which is expensive and makes repairs very difficult. Most of the organic fluids are toxic and/or flammable as is, but if they get overheated they thermally degrade into things like phosgene gas. Organic Rankine Cycle systems will need be used in large scale systems to get the necessary economies, and to have the highly qualified personnel to work on them.
As for the Cyclone engine, I've been looking for months to find evidence that it has ever powered anything. They've built two speedboats to set a water speed record, and neither apparently has ever been launched. They sponsored Chuk Williams' land speed record car in 2009, and he got another engine in 2012 after the promised Cyclone engine never showed up. They reputedly spent half a million dollars on their own land speed record car in 2012, and Harry made a lot of statements about how powerful the engine was on the dyno and how they rented the shuttle runway at Kennedy Space Center and then were going to a drag strip for testing, but there's been not a peep about that car even having an engine installed, let alone run under its own power.
Cyclone has sold Mark 5 engines starting in 2009 to Phoenix Power, Raytheon and Combilift, but no Mark 5 has ever been delivered. (Although Cyclone has been confident commercial production will start in 6 months continuously for the last 5 years...) They also sold a license to Great Wall Power Systems to build Mark 5s for the Chinese market, but all Harry provided was the blueprints for an engine that didn't work in Florida. Great Wall couldn't make the Mark 5 work either, and eventually gave up on the license.
Although Harry's been claiming for years the engine is "runnin' sweet on the dyno", when challenged he refuses to provide any test results, or a video of the engine powering a load. He typically claims the SEC prohibits him from doing so.
I've never found a case of someone other than Harry saying they've seen the Mark 5 run.
Oh, and the Mark 5 burns liquid fuels, not biomass. The P&W system burned biomass.
AI
