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Looking Beyond Detroit For Engine Innovation
waderoush writes "Opposed-piston engines (with two pistons in the same cylinder) have been around since the 1920s, but have been used mainly in submarines and airplanes. Now, several startups are working to make these high-efficiency engines practical for cars, trucks, and light vehicles — but they're under no illusions that Detroit will adopt the idea. Silicon Valley startup Pinnacle Engines, which is backed by the world's largest venture fund, is looking to a scooter manufacturer in India as its first partner. 'This ought to be music to Detroit's ears, but to them I'm just some whacko in California,' says Monty Cleeves, Pinnacle's founder and CTO. 'This is Silicon Valley, and what does Silicon Valley know about making engines? Folks in Asia have almost zero "not-invented-here" issues, whereas it's pretty prevalent all over the U.S.'"
Detroit will be interested in it, if it works better.
Hint: Detroit has worked on this idea before, and didn't get it to work.
I'm not saying it can't work, only that it's been tried. Maybe this guy can actually scale up to a practice car with this that's reasonably more efficient.
At that point, Detroit will be interested.
However, the auto industry is full of things that worked on small scale, but turned out to be impracticable, or not marketable.
In the US, a culture is built around items, and that culture build upon itself.
In Asia, they are happy to take anyones ideas, and sell them illegally.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If you think Detroit is going to commit a production run to an engine that has maybe 10 prototype copies, you've got to be kidding. Think of the cost of recalls. Get a few thousand built, demonstrate the efficiency, get some patents to protect the IP and Detroit as well as Japan, Korea, Germany, etc. will have a look.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Now, several startups are working to make these high-efficiency engines practical for cars, trucks, and light vehicles — but they're under no illusions that Detroit will adopt the idea...'This is Silicon Valley, and what does Silicon Valley know about making engines? Folks in Asia have almost zero "not-invented-here" issues, whereas it's pretty prevalent all over the U.S.'
'Detroit' as he refers to are now multi-nationals with divisons on every continent on the planet. NIH doesn't really apply since common models are sold across the globe with only minor variations (due to local laws). The reason 'Detroit' haven't done anything with the startups is because they have their own R&D factories. Why partner when they can do it themselves better and cheaper?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
No, boxer engines are opposed pistons, but they use separate cylinders. Boxer engines are a form of a 'Flat' engine.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
Opposed-piston_engine for ignorant feckers like myself who have never seen or heard of this engine design before?
“There are 50 opposed piston engine companies out there, and they all haven’t gotten to the point where they’ve figured out what their Achilles’ heel is,” says Byron Shaw, general manager at GM’s Advanced Technology division in Palo Alto. “It’s unlikely that [the engine startups] have discovered something that isn’t known,” he continues. “Let’s say they really improve the ability to run air flow ratios super lean, but then they haven’t solved the NOx problem [nitrogen oxides, a by-product of combustion and the source of smog and acid rain]. There is always a ‘but,’ and most of these companies haven’t gotten to the ‘but’ yet. In India and China they don’t have any idea what the ‘but’ is. They are a pure growth trajectory. But as those markets mature, so will their expectations.”
and the best part:
As if to illustrate Cleeves’ point, Shaw tells a story from his days as a young, just-out-of-college engineer at GM in 1988. “I came up with this change to an internal part of the air conditioning compressor,” he says. It was part of a project to switch over to a new, environmentally safer coolant. “It passed every test. I was rocking and rolling. I was going to change the world. My boss said, ‘Okay, why don’t you get on the plane and go down to the plant and tell them all about it.’ So I go down there and I start to give my spiel. And the plant manager says, ‘Let me give you a tour of the factory.’ “He shows me where the blank aluminum comes in and where it’s machined and processed. And then he takes me down this line of machines. There are 320 steps and each machine does one step and it’s really fast and precise. And at the end of the line this part rolls off. And he says ‘The part you want to change is machined on step number two. And on every machine after step number two, that’s where they grab the part and hold it to do all the subsequent machine steps. So we’d have to retool 320 machines. Is your change that good? How much more are people willing to pay for their cars based on the improved performance from your little part change, versus what it’s going to cost the company?’ That was a really interesting lesson for me.”
This the same Detroit that cried like babies over federal fuel efficiency requirements? Didn't they say that 30mpg was impossible and would put them out of business, despite foreign car makers doing it for years?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
As the cost of hybrid batteries plummets, engines will increasingly run at set power levels for long periods of time. The right engine for this role is debatable, but it's almost certainly a turbine, or less possibly a stirling. They run on any fuel, have excellent economy, and have problems primarily with throttling - which isn't a problem on a hybrid. Investing in new conventional piston technology is a waste.
An opposed piston engine has two (well, at least two) crankshafts at opposite ends of a cylinder, with a piston on each. The pistons then "meet" in the middle.
The advantage is that you don't need a cylinder head, so the engine can be lighter, and often smaller and go to higher pressures, which makes it ideal for aircraft and submarines and areas where you want to maximise power to weight.
A boxer engine is simply a V engine flattened all the way down, with two banks of cylinders facing away from each other with the crank in the middle.
One of the "classic" opposed piston engines is the Deltic, fitted to the locomotives that were named for it. A hugely complex beast with three crankshafts (one contrarotating), which was very powerful for its size, but very highly strung. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Deltic
It has nothing to do with NIH.
Most Americans, as opposed to California, has a "fix it if it's broken" mentality. It's not a closed box. Opposed piston designs, like boxer engines, are not well suited for this. Neither are EVs. They have parts that wear out and are either too cost prohibitive to replace, or too difficult (in terms of accessing them to take them out).
Meanwhile, something like a Detroit engine, as we're calling it now, can have the engine pulled and replaced with relatively little effort still, in many vehicles. Plug, wire, etc. maintenance is still easy (except in designs that crowd the engine bay). It's a design that's known to work fairly reliably, and when it doesn't, it can be fixed. Try replacing the engine in something like a Subaru sometime... or even getting at the plugs.
On the other hand, I'd love to see more inline engines. They have a lot of the same benefits.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
More prominent than Pinnacle is the first company mentioned in TFA, Ecomotors. In the past 6 months they have begun test builds on on-highway trucks for one of America's largest truck manufacturers, Navistar. (https://www.ccjdigital.com/navistar-announces-opoc-engine-technology-agreement/) Considering America's position as #1 fuel consumer, hacking into the amount of fuel used by the most fuel-intensive industry is much more significant than increasing efficiency on mopeds in India.
From TFA:
"“I don’t know what it’s going to take to get somebody in the U.S. excited” about fundamental improvements to the venerable internal combustion engine, Cleeves [CEO of Pinnacle] says"
Are you kidding me??!
Trucks here are doing everything they can to improve fuel efficiency, from installing flaps underneath their trailers to controlling and monitoring the speed of trucks. If the OPOC engine does prove to be a large increase in efficiency on these large, constantly running trucks, while at the same time eliminating components, you better believe the trucking industry will hop on board with a second.
Come on, practice a little vetting for once, or maybe try googling for more than one source on an article here!
Glad I could help.
This design allow the engine to have a power stroke for every revolution, it is called 2-cycle but its not like what people think as 2-cycle. The engine has a compression stroke as the piston come together, a power stoke and then a "vent" at the end of the power stroke. One of the pistons that is called the power piston will open up ports along the cylinder wall to let out the exhaust, a few degrees of rotation later the other piston called the slave will open ports in the cylinder wall to allow forces air to purge out the remaining exhaust. The exhaust ports will then be closed off as the power piston starts to move back up the cylinder and then the slave will close its ports a few degrees of rotation later allowing a pressurizing charge to build up. The use of a super charger or blower is required on this type of engine. No valve or valve train - minimalist type of engine.
The crank shaft for the power side is about 10 degree ahead of the slave end. Oon the power stroke, this results in the power piston to be past TDC and moving down the cylinder while the slave is going through its TDC and have little cylinder movement.
Hmm, could this explain how Asia was able to move so quickly in the past decades? Yes, it means that you steal (either figuratively or literaly) ideas more often, but it also means that you'll always try to use what it's best, without being hang-up on the current solution.
Where do you see this happening? In most industries, China has first, blatantly ripped off existing IP, then figured out how to manufacture it, then undercut other manufacturers and made some money. They've not done especially well in high tech. Their new 'Chinese" commercial aircraft is largely copied from an Airbus A320. Much of the technology in their high speed trains is German and French.
They have bright engineers and have figured out complex mechanical engineering and supply chains and whatnot, but they are hardly a paragon of new technology blazing to unheard of heights. Hell, their space program is based on the 1960's Soyuz design. Nothing wrong with that, but it's hardly ground breaking.
They are pretty much using the 'current solution' everywhere.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The two crankshafts have to be connected together - the pistons need to stay in phase, so you only need one output since what one crank does, the other must match it.
Like the Deltic engine I linked above, you can get awesome power to weight ratio and power to size ratio out of them (although the Deltic was an opposed 2 stroke diesel), but they are somewhat temperamental - something that would likely be less of an issue in the modern era with finer machining tolerances etc.
Sometimes a radical idea takes a lot of time to percolate in the minds of those who hear it, or even hear of it, before it starts to make sense to them. It's fine to go seeking more open minds to get the concept ironed out and start making money, but maybe he should also drop the scorned prophet act while he does it. Come back with his billion dollars and his 3 million Indian customers as the best damn proof of concept he could possibly have and negotiate with Detroit from a position of strength rather than badmouth the very people he wishes would do business with him.
Also, take a look at Mr. Cleeves Linkedin profile. His industry appears to be Semiconductors and his summary says "Leadership roles in technology development".
Nothing about engineering or materials or chemistry or any other field I'd imagine central to massively repurposing a large engine. But hey, a semiconductors guy with specialty in "Process management" should have doors flying open for him in Detroit.
I can't imagine a guy with that skill set could have an easy time convincing a heavy industry to listen to him, no matter what his idea. It doesn't mean the industry is a closed-minded bunch of trolls, as he seems to think; it just means that he's got no reputation and no credentials, just like the other thousand outsiders who try to send them ideas or schedule pitch meetings every year.
Didn't they say that 30mpg was impossible and would put them out of business, despite foreign car makers doing it for years?
No they didn't say that. Nor have the foreign car makers been "doing it for years". If you make a big heavy vehicle it is going to get crappy fuel efficiency. US consumers, for better or worse, love big heavy cars. All automakers know how to make more fuel efficient cars but those are not the ones most people buy. Designing more fuel efficient cars without regressing on other features customers demonstrably want is seriously difficult and possibly without much prospect of payback for the engineering cost. Relatively few people buy a car with fuel efficiency as their primary concern. That might change if gasoline were suddenly $7/gallon but that simply is not going to happen.
The reason the automakers fought against increasing CAFE standards was simply cost. The government is imposing an engineering cost on their business without any certainty of additional revenue from their customers to offset the cost. Furthermore when your most profitable vehicles are the least fuel efficient (true for every auto manufacturer) and best selling, that is a major problem.
Toyota and other foreign car manufacturers were just as against raising CAFE standards as the US auto makers. The Toyota Tundra simply cannot achieve 30mpg without some combination of horsepower reduction, weight reduction, better aerodynamics and possibly hybridization. That's physics and has nothing to do with being a foreign or domestic car maker. The engineering challenges are just as difficult for Toyota as they are for GM. I've worked with both companies directly and I promise you Toyota does not have better engineers.
The Junkers Jumo engines in WWII had opposed pistons, they were the only diesel aircraft engines that I know of, at least in large production scale. Ironically, the British Napier Deltic engines were licensed technology from Junkers, perhaps one of the last technology transfer agreements between both countries before the war.
Opposed pistons are very interesting in that they can have a large compression ratio without increasing weight too much, because they do not need cylinder heads. That's how they could get a diesel engine lightweight enough to power an aircraft.
However, differently from the engine mentioned in TFA, Junkers and Napier made two-stroke engines. Opposed pistons allow one to build a low-pollution two-stroke engine, because the pistons don't run exactly opposite each other. The piston on the side that has the exhaust port reaches the bottom end before the admission port side piston.
I think that, from an engineering POV, the Junkers Jumo/Napier Deltic is one of the most interesting concepts that have been invented and abandoned. I know the Deltic engine had reliability problems due to its triangular configuration, it was difficult to get proper cooling in the core of the triangle, but the linear Jumo design has no intrinsic faults that I can think of and had lots of advantages. It had two crankshafts, true, but that's nothing compared to the complexity of modern motors.
Yes, CNC machines now do a lot of work that used to be done by dedicated machining equipment. But for large portions of the manufacture of a complex assembly, like an A/C compressor, you have a whole series of machines bending, twisting, pushing, pulling, smashing, slicing, fastening, etc. And all of those machines require holding the assembly in a secure fashion. (So, for that matter, do the CNC machines.) Things that grip to tight tolerances usually can't be adjusted just by running a new program.
Yes, you can design those machines to be adaptable, but that also makes those same machines more complicated, expensive, and error-prone. (And those adaptions are usually done by adjusting movable chucks/grippers/etc. or swapping in new jigs, which is a lengthy, tedious, process.
Read their website. It's a 4 stroke design, not 2.
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As others have pointed out, having a second crankshaft is at least as big a disadvantage as having a cylinder head.
A second problem is the use of slide valves in an internal combustion engine. I'm not a mechanical engineer, but I know that IC engine valves take a lot of abuse and my guess is that slide valves aren't up to the job.
In addition, the claim that this engine is going to use 25% to 50% less fuel than a conventional IC engine is just plain bogus.
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No, definitely lighter, not heavier.
This is not new technology - these engines were in use in the 60s in ships and locomotives for *exactly* this reason - they are very light and small for their size - an equivalent power V-engine on a Class 23 diesel loco [when a move to more 'normal' engines was considered] would have added an extra 8 tons to the mass. Their power to weight ratio is very good, despite having "a whole other crankshaft" (two extra crankshafts in the case of a Deltic engine, for a total of three).
The designs for these engines came out of the prototype ideas for aircraft engines, where reduced weight was a primary concern, along with increased power.
I suggest you actually do some research before trying to make it sound like you know what you're talking about. It usually helps, otherwise you just look silly.
They are still used as backup generator engines at nuclear power plants and the submarine I was on had one. I ran it. It has to be reliable - that's why it's used in those applications. The one I ran was a 6 cylinder version of the 38 ND 8 1/8 (8 1/8" bore). http://www.fairbanksmorse.com/engines/engine_opposed_piston_model_38.php?return=stationary_power.php
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Well, Daimler has at least bought a 10% share in Tesla. I am working pretty closely with some of the Daimler developers, and believe me, they are watching closely what is going on at Tesla.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
It works both ways, though. When the Big 3 buy a system from a Tier 1, it's essentially a black box to them. Whenever they want anything changed with it, they're beholden to just one company: the Tier 1. And their vehicle gets engineered and certified around it, so they can't just swap it out for a different system (well, for some parts easier than others, but for many, it's a *very* non-trivial task).
Plus, when you look at the sort of stuff some of the Tier 1s pull (*cough* SEC *cough* ripping off some of my employees' previous employers), well, it's hard to pity them. I'm thinking of one in particular, and I imagine you can guess who.
It's not that simple any more, mind you, with auto industry venture arms, arms-length subsidiaries, etc. But it's still an incredible longshot to go straight for the Big 3. The auto industry is all about confidence. You can have the best product in the world, but you need them to see that someone that they already trust has seen your product and will vouch for it.
Next to my desk we have an Ire Extinguisher. Our boss is really assertive, so we like the idea of having it.
You win a cookie. ;)
Next to my desk we have an Ire Extinguisher. Our boss is really assertive, so we like the idea of having it.
There's a disconnect here. If people are buying big heavy cars which aren't fuel efficient, why did the US auto makers need a bailout?
There is no disconnect here. In 2006 almost 17 million cars were sold in the US. In 2009 10.4 million cars were sold. They needed a bailout because they have huge fixed costs which were draining their cash reserves and nearly half their revenue was wiped out. The only way for any large manufacturer to deal with that sort of business environment is to have large cash reserves, cut costs as much as you can and then wait for a recovery. Everyone lost money, foreign AND domestic alike. The only difference is that the recession happened before the US manufacturers could get their high labor costs back to competitive levels. Their balance sheet wasn't in good enough shape going into the recession and it was more than they were able to absorb. Frankly the bankruptcy is probably the best thing that could have happened to GM and Chrysler because it sped up their recovery and made them competitive more quickly than they might have otherwise been.
Because consumers were still buying cars, they just weren't buying the cars the big three were making.
The actual data shows that consumers weren't buying cars from ANYONE. Even Toyota had their first full year loss in decades to the tune of several billion dollars. Toyota, Nissan and Honda sales in 2008 fell more than Ford or GM that year. It was a bloodbath across the board, foreign and domestic alike.
You're a girl scout too??? ;)