The concept's business model never worked for me.
Originally their goal was to design a product and license it to manufacturers. This is not uncommon; Bell Labs, Bose and even big auto makers like GM and Toyota do this all the time. The key is that these companies have very expensive engineering facilities and staffs capable of doing development work that smaller companies can't afford. It works out for everyone, the licensees get technology they couldn't otherwise develop and the developers offset some of their costs.
At no point did Cyclone have an industry leading engineering staff; in fact, all their product development was based on the concepts of someone without an engineering degree. None of their staff, or ever their technical advisors, had solid backgrounds in small powertrain research, development and production. It's one thing to have an interest and to tinker around with something, it's an entirely different thing to do it on a profitable commercial footing at large scale. The only chance of licensing their products profitably was to undeniably demonstrate a superior product to that of the competition.
What makes this really challenging is that Cyclone did not develop a new and unique technology, there was no chance of filing patents on basic concepts. It's a steam engine, the Rankine Cycle has been public domain before Rankine himself was born. It uses the best known working fluid, water, lots of luck tying that up. Supercritical pressure systems date back to the early part of the last century. Piston steam expanders, back to the 18th. Uniflow engine design, the 19th century. The basic operating physics of condensers is all old hat. Even the integrated system concept is pretty old hat. The only things Cyclone can patent is the precise mechanisms used to do all these old functions; anybody else is free to make products doing precisely the same things so long as they don't copy the Cyclone blueprints fairly closely.
When all is said and done, Cyclone was selling the idea that their mechanical engineering was so good that no one could develop anything comparable at lower costs. Since the company had no mechanical engineers experienced in this kind of work while other engine manufacturers have staffs of highly experienced engineers, the premise was faulty.
There was a second problem with the model, that being it was assumed that there was a huge untapped market for steam engines. Sure, people fill untapped markets all the time by coming up with something new that meets a need -- such as the pocket calculator; most people didn't know they needed one until they saw one and realized what it could do. Steam engines are hardly an unknown quantity and there are any number of good ways to generate power compactly.
Cyclone advertised superior thermodynamic efficiency, which is always a selling point, but this was all theoretical and to date no public demonstration has revealed the performance in the 30% range they publicized. And even efficiency is only a lure so long as the price premium is recoverable in a reasonable period, else most will buy the less efficient product and use the saving to purchase fuel.
The big lure was alternative fuel use, no longer being dependent on chancy and expensive oil supplies. There is a precedent for this, back in the late 1800s John Rockerfeller was annoyed that Standard Oil refineries produced tons of a waste byproduct that had to be thrown away, polluting the local environment. When the IC engine came out, he was an enthusiastic backer as he now had a market that would eagerly pay something for an item that was previously a burden. Let's ask ourselves, "if gasoline had been rare and expensive, would the internal combustion engine become popular"?
Cyclone tried to tap into this scenario but they were on the wrong side of the curve; the cheapest and most convenient fuels are the petroleum based fuels used in common practice. All the talk of algae oil and orange peels didn't disguise the fact that you can't go to the filling station and get 20 gallons of this stuff at a competitive price. They appear to have assumed that there would be a groundswell of interest in the engine and, once a huge number were in service, suppliers would deliver competitively priced fuel. This avoids the question as to why anyone would buy such an engine if the only practically available fuels were the ones that every other engine already consumed. Producing and refining fuels in competitive quantities and prices is a multi-billion dollar exercise, lacking a ready market would anyone lay out that kind of money on a gamble?
It's a chicken and egg conundrum, someone has to lay out big bucks, either to sell the engines to jumpstart the fuel production or vice versa. This ignores the reality that any really cheap alternative fuel can probably be used as a feed stock in current refineries, therefore lowering the cost of gasoline and diesel while cashing in on a sure-fire market.
Honestly, the whole business seems to have started with the idea that building a steam engine would be a neat idea and then working backwards rather than starting with the proposition that there was an unfulfilled demand in power generating systems and working forward to a product that filled the need.
