Cyclone Power Technologies, Inc. (fka CYPW)

[BuddyWhazhizname]

Hey Tom, it's actually part of a pattern.

Harry's only real success was his "Delta Conic Hull" design that did make for faster boats. The Schoell Marine website shows how this was done. http://www.schoellmarine.com/index/model.htm


"Harry towing models with Allen Brown"

Notice all the models of different hull shapes and Harry pulling them through water on a pole. He persevered with enough trial and error that he found something that worked. Given all the models of things that didn't work, it's obvious that he doesn't have any particular genius or intuition for hull design. He just got lucky. Like the saying, you throw enough spaghetti at a wall and some of it is gonna stick.

With Harry, though, one success just reinforced magical thinking. Science and engineering is for chumps. Harry Schoell knows better.

His 2.6 speed factor is another example. It didn't come from the physics of wind and water resistance, but from graphing top speed data points from a variety of boats and engines. Draw a line of best fit through the data and the slope comes out at 2.6. Therefore, Harry reasoned, speed and horsepower are linearly related through the factor 2.6.

He missed out on a couple things, though. He wasn't plotting power used by a given boat at various speeds from zero to maximum, but the maximum speeds of different boats. A lot of factors besides wind and water resistance come into that number. The second problem is that he was looking at planing hulls in water and extending that observation to aerodynamic drag. Planing hulls have a resistance curve with one or more dips as speed increases. The big one is going from displacement mode to planing mode where the resistance drops quite a bit.

But to Harry, none of that scientific mumbo-jumbo is relevant. His graph showed a linear function with a factor of 2.6, so that's what aerodynamic drag does.

Fast forward from his toy boat days to advanced steam engine design and what do we see? Harry Schoell, ingenious inventor, with no understanding of thermodynamics, material science, machine dynamics, data acquisition, product development or a host of other relevant fields, promising world-beating engines will be in production in six months.

Of course he (or Frankie) did arrange to have a Board of Technical Advisors, but that was just a clever marketing trick to sucker investors into buying stock. Jim Crank, the lead technical advisor, says they never sought or accepted advice and he now calls them "Delusions-R-Us".

11 years and at least $23 million in investors' money squandered and what's Harry been doing? Trial and error with an ungodly number of engine prototypes, not a clue as to why they don't survive running for mere minutes, even less of a clue as to how to fix them, and no plans for anything other than more trial and error.

If you are up for a challenge, try to figure out just what Harry was up to in his Mark 5 efficiency calculation: https://www.cyclonepower.com/PDF/Mark%20V%20Efficency%20Calculations.pdf

Let's assume he wasn't just pulling numbers straight out of the air to get the answer he wanted.

Indicated horsepower is 131. This is the power applied to the piston tops by the expanding steam.

Thermal losses are 15.5% of indicated power, coming from a heat exchanger and insulation. Why steam already in the cylinders would lose energy to a heat exchanger and insulation outside the cylinders is a mystery, but this 20.3 hp is subtracted from the indicated power.

The only loss between the piston top and crankshaft output is friction and parasitic loads. There are not thermal losses in this flow of energy, yet Harry subtracts 20.3 hp in thermal losses.

Conveniently, though, this brings estimated engine power down to 98.45 which is a lot closer to the 100 hp he had been advertising.

Below that, CO x PA looks like cylinder volume at cutoff (0.314 cu. in.) times 6 cylinders times 3600 rpm gives 6800 cu. in. of steam per minute (not hour as stated). The next line does multiply by 60 to get steam per hour, but the cubic inches have turned into square inches. Who knew there were 1728 square inches in a cubic foot?

So now we've got 235 cubic feet of steam per hour, which has turned into just 235 cu. ft. It gets divided by .3433 hp to give 686.33 lbs. The .3433 number appeared several lines up as "V + Compression(VRC)0.3433 @ 27/1". Who knows what it is.

Our fraction has cu.ft./hr divided by hp. Hp can be expressed as ft-lb/hr. The fraction's units are then [cu.ft./hr]/[ft-lb/hr] which is sq.ft. per lb, and not lbs as given. (The next line, though, calculates water rate in lbs/hp-hr, so the previous line should be in lbs/hr, not lbs in any event.)

Next line: water rate in lb/hp-hr times enthalpy in BTU/lb should give BTU/hp-hr, but instead is BTU/hp. We get 10,947 BTU/hp-hr heat energy supplied by the boiler. But in the next line this turns into 10,737. Units are wrong in that line, too.

Now here's the cool part. Somehow temperatures of air and water turn into 4.05% "airside efficiency gain" and 4.32% "water side efficiency gain". Together that boosts the engine efficiency from 23.2% up to 31.57% And here, ladies and gentlemen, is where Harry Schoell and Cyclone determined the efficiency of engines that have never been built and tested. Numbers pulled straight from the air with calculations that have no physical meaning and the units of quantities in the calculations transmuting as needed.

Sure it's all nonsensical, but no more so than believing aerodynamic drag power increases linearly with speed.

PS: did you see the one where Harry states bearings are little generators?