What if everything you know about engines is wrong?After 200 years of brilliant scientists and engineers evolving traditional internal combustion engines, significant breakthroughs have become few and far between. After all these years of effort, engines still loose over 60% of their energy to heat and still have many other excessive losses.We set out to fix this. We knew to come up with something of interest to the engine industry, we needed to achieve a dramatic breakthrough. Otherwise, the industry simply wouldn’t care.Our design approach was significantly different than other engine designers. At Oak Leaf Engines, our approach to our new engine design first focused on thermodynamics and the difference between the mechanics and the chemistry of combustion without regard for the limitations of traditional engine geometry. Only after the thermodynamics, the chemistry, and the mechanics of combustion were optimized, did we approach the mechanical design necessary to contain the resulting advanced thermodynamics. Oak Leaf has successfully developed an engine design that is widely scalable from low power applications to many thousands of horsepower. Significant Design Issues –1) An efficient thermodynamic engine requires very high compression and pre-ignition pressure. Traditional engine geometry cannot withstand the structural loads resulting from compression at the optimum level required. 2) With traditional engine geometries, parasitic losses go up exponentially as cylinder pressure increases. We needed to mitigate this. 3) Waste heat represents about a 60% loss in traditional engine efficiency. We knew our largest reward awaited us here.4) Significant cylinder expansion is required to reduce waste thermal energy. The Atkinson Cycle used in many hybrid car applications addresses this, but suffers from serious power density issues which limits its use to hybrid electric platforms. --- eMail for more information - DonMurray@FTISD.com
Listed skills include Solar Energy, Sustainable Energy, Photovoltaics, Manufacturing, and 46 others.
