I'm with Little Mickey. Most of the posted "facts" about Cyclone engines come straight from their own PR; ignoring the fact that the forecasts made in the same PR has either failed to materialize or that later PR essentially refutes earlier. We call this a "credibility gap". Quoting Cyclone to prove ones position only proves circular reasoning if external verification is not forthcoming.
There are so many troubling things here. Having worked in product development most of my life, I can't recall ever seeing a development shop where the Admin budget far outstripped the Engineering. Apparently generating paperwork has a higher priority, or perhaps it just makes people feel powerful to have an office staff even though there is no real business attached.
The whole "enclosed cycle" thing sounds good...but is it real? I know of a couple of mechanical engineers who question that the cooling surface area is sufficient to process the waste heat and return all the feed water back to the storage tank, the online videos sure don't show a sealed unit.
The superior thermal efficiency advertised is based on running high temperature supercritical steam (NOT organic fluids), and even then presumes high mechanical efficiency, high boiler efficiency and significant thermal regeneration. The spider bearing makes me question the mechanical efficiency, added moving parts rarely reduce friction. Supercritical steam generation is not trivial, there are significant technical challenges and no evidence that the system is running at those parameters reliably. Thermal regeneration is nice, but again, I know of engineers who question that the heat exchange area is adequate. Certainly, you can only save so much energy by ducting condenser cooling air to the combustion chamber, the burner uses far less air than does cooling.
Planning such a project requires identifying an unmet market need, devising a superior solution at a competitive price, in a timely fashion. To date I have seen no evidence that the products have been narrowly aimed at specific customers, it seems to be an assumption that everyone will want one....that hardly ever works. There has been little emphasis on designing for production, everything seems to be machined and assembled with little in the way of castings, injection molding and so on. Cost will be a bad issue.
The product hinges on water lubrication, and by their own statements it is obvious that insufficient dyno time has been accumulated to prove the concept reliability for the projected applications.
The clear lack of corporate focus can be clearly seen in the "Product of the Week" postings a few years back. Auto engines, weed whacker, generating sets, ship propulsion, lawn mowers, semi trucks. Can anyone tell me just what the company was set up to produce?
I dunno, looks like a real mess. Unfortunately, a lot of good people will get stung. As a light steam enthusiast, I am also afraid it will undermine the credibility of the field for another generation....just as the hyper over the steam Clean Air cars of the 70s did.
Tom
