Motoring with Compression

Here’s a video of the CCI engine motoring with compression.

Progress!

The intake head has been modified to fit our new injector, our combustion cylinder pressure transducer system is almost complete and the desmodromic hydraulic valves have new BAL seals.  The engine is being reassembled onto the dyno so we can start motoring with compression, which will be the first test where we will get a good measure of the performance of the engine.  The big moment – the first firing – is scheduled for October 1st!

Innovation in Engine Design

Many times people ask me if it is possible to make an engine like our CCI that is so efficient and compact, why have the big companies that have been working in engines for decades not done it yet?  The answer is they cannot.

Most of the big automotive and equipment makers who manufacture millions of their own engines per year do not have the capability to develop innovative new designs.  The lack in capability is both technical and philosophical.  Designing engines is a complex undertaking with many different factors that interplay with each other.  No change is simple.  People have spent entire careers learning all the intricacies of the slider-crank mechanism in the SI and diesel engines of today.  When you put an idea in front of them that challenges what they “know”, they have a very hard time accepting it.  I’ve often found that the more someone knows about engines, the harder it is to explain the CCI to them.  This is not because they are finding deficiencies in the design, but because it gets harder for them to break out of their box that has been reinforced for years.  Additionally, engineers at these companies have forgotten the basic science behind the things they know about engines.  Engineers responsible for designing engines at the major OEMS no longer know how to start with second law thermodynamic analysis and derive a new design.  Instead, they start with an existing engine (or a “new” engine near enough to existing ones), modify it and use software to tell them if the thermodynamics are improved.

Additionally, there are philosophical challenges in the corporate culture.  These companies have become very risk averse, and they have become very dependent on the slider-crank mechanism.  They have spent so much time and money to optimize this mechanism that it seems crazy to them to move beyond it.  If they know their competitors are similarly averse to upsetting the status quo then they have very little motivation to step out of the box.

This means that any innovation from the major OEM’s is in incremental, non-fundamental changes.  Things like variable valve timing, direct injection in SI engines, multi-stage turbo-charging – these are advances to be sure, but they hardly take much imagination and the benefits they provide are tiny compared to what is possible when you throw the otto cycle or diesel cycle out of the window and start out with something fundamentally better.

That is where a startup comes in.  We do not have the historical entrenchment in the slider-crank.  We do not have an existing business that we can nurse along and enjoy the profits.  We are required to figure out a way to make something that is so much better for the customer that it simply cannot be ignored, even though most of the engine world has their heads in the sand.  The only way for us to do this is to go back to the basics and figure out how to make the slider-crank obsolete.

Motoring Begins!

The engine is assembled and on the dynomometer!  We have begun motoring tests with the heads and injector removed so there will be no compression going on.  We are just measuring torque from friction at this point.  Torque, vibration and wear patterns are all looking good so far.  Here are some photos.

We will continue motoring testing adding in the oil lubrication and cooling system, heads, valves and adding pressure transducers to get pressures in all three cylinders.  Then we will add in the injector and actually fire!

Distributed Power Generation and Natural Gas

We are very excited to attend the ARPA-E workshop on small-scale distributed generation:

http://tinyurl.com/3bh6cc9

Compared to low-efficiency coal plants, with high pollution, transmission losses, inflexibility and security issues, a distributed generation network featuring CCI engines burning natural gas can provide tremendous benefits to the US’s power grid, energy security, and environment.  The CCI’s high compression ratio (our demonstrator is over 35 to 1 and this is NOT an upper limit), high average temperature and low rate of volumetric change around top dead center give us the ability to ignite direct injected natural gas in a compression ignition engine without having to use any kind of ignition catalyst.  In fact, a CCI at 6000 rpm can complete ignition of NG in 2 degrees of crank angle, compared to 180 degrees for a conventional diesel at 2400 rpm! (6000 rpm equates to about 6m/s mean piston speed in a CCI, similar to 2400 rpm in a conventional diesel)

Microturbines are expensive and inefficient when you cannot utilize the waste heat, as would be the case in most residential applications.  Sterling engines require very expensive materials for heat transfer to perform well.  Fuel cells are also dependent on rare and expensive materials.

Needless to say, we’re pretty excited about this application of the CCI!

Rare Earth Metals – Will they limit the attractiveness of electric and hybrid cars?

I’ve been predicting for a while now that greater adoption of cars that utilize lithium batteries will cause a huge rise in demand of the metal causing increasing costs of batteries, rather than decreasing costs as is required for mass adoption of electric and hybrid cars.  It seems this is already happening and being accelerated by tariffs and trade limitations in China where most of these metals are mined.  In addition to lithium, the price of neodymium – a rare earth metal that is key to the efficient permanent magnet motors in electric and hybrid cars – has quadrupled in the last year.  The Wall Street Journal has an article on this story today.

I have not seen much speculation as to the motives behind China’s protectionist moves.  Given the rising prominence of their automotive manufacturing industry, perhaps they see this as a way to become the only country with the ability to make affordable electric cars.  Or maybe they are just being opportunistic and exploiting their position as the only source of a material used in a growing market to make more money.

Toyota claims to be close to having an induction motor that will be able to replace permanent magnet motors in these applications.  If true, this would be a huge technology breakthrough.  This has been a research goal of many a scientist over the years, so it is surprising that Toyota could have come up with a solution in such short order, but they are also a company that does not tend to exaggerate their technology accomplishments so I’m looking forward to seeing what they have done.

Needless to say, rising costs is the last thing hybrid and electric cars need to start taking a more meaningful share of the global auto market.  But you never know, maybe this will spur more innovative thinking leading to a completely different battery technology that is an order of magnitude better than lithium.

Tax Policy to Increase Fleet Efficiency

Increasing CAFE standards are the primary tool the government uses to force automakers to increase the fuel efficiency of their vehicles in the United States, and in general I think the population believes that getting more mileage out of their car is a good thing, as long as the car is affordable, and performs comparably to what they are used to. We are not ready to accept the range limitations of all-electric vehicles priced within reach of the middle class nor cars with tiny engines that accelerate from 0-60 in 12 seconds. If we simply replaced the gasoline engines we use today with diesel engines and make no other changes, we would see an instant increase in mileage. For instance the gasoline BMW 335i gets 28mpg highway and the diesel gets 36mpg. That is not likely to happen overnight in today’s environment.

Diesel engines are starting to build a fan-base in North America with enthusiasts who have realized that they have much better fuel economy than their gasoline powered counterparts and can be a lot of fun to drive given their superior torque. But automotive diesel engines have significant hurdles to leap before they reach mass acceptance because the cost of the engine is higher, and in America, the cost of the fuel is higher, thus negating the fuel efficiency benefit.

In Europe, diesel is cheaper than gas, causing diesel cars to be much more popular than gas and this contributes greatly to the high mileage enjoyed by the European fleet. So why is there such a price disparity of diesel vs. gas in the US and Europe? It’s simple, in Europe, the taxes on diesel are lower than the taxes on gasoline.

Germany’s chart is very representative of most of Europe and it clearly show’s how tax policy incentivizes diesel engines, helping to increase the efficiency that the market demands in their country. On the other hand, look at the US chart:

It can be difficult to see here because US fuel taxes are relatively low causing the lines to overlap a lot, but US gas and diesel prices retain their relative positions before and after taxes.

So would it not be much easier to increase the efficiency of the American fleet simply by creating a fuel tax policy encouraging the purchase of significantly more efficient diesel engines? Part of the difficulty of this is that federal taxes are only a portion of the taxes on gasoline and doing this effectively would require cooperation between Washington and the states.