Some time within next two years, the roads of Sussex should see what they haven’t seen, outside the London to Brighton Rally, for 80 years or more – a steam-powered motorcar.
Not that any casual onlooker will be able to tell, since unless you lift up the bonnet this steam roadster will look like any other Mazda RX8 sports car.
What will be propelling it, however, will be a 21st century answer to oil shortages and excess CO2 emissions – a hybrid power unit using steam generated by the otherwise waste heat from the RX8’s petrol engine, to boost energy efficiency by half as much again, from around 25 or 28 per cent to 40 per cent or more.
The combined petrol-steam system is being developed by the team at Clean Power Technologies (CPT), based in Newhaven, Sussex, under Professor Fred Bayley, an expert in hybrid-power vehicles, and Mike Burns, a highly experienced engine designer. If the system works as they expect, then CPT’s technology could, in the words of the company’s president and CEO, Abdul Mitha, “replace each and every vehicle that is on the road.”
CPT, which calls its technology “CESAR” – Clean Energy Storage and Recovery – is generating considerable interest around the world. It has already attracted onto its board of directors David Thursfield, the former head of international operations for Ford, and then with Cerberus Capital, the new owner of Chrysler, and “the ultimate industry insider”, according to Mr Mitha, and, Jim Mason, a highly experienced automotive engineer whose previous positions include director for engineering at the truck company Leyland.
CPT is being backed by one of the world’s most experienced makers of steam pressure vessels, Doosan Babcock, which normally supplies 40-feet-high steam vessels for power stations, but which has made an experimental two-feet-high steam accumulator for CPT’s engineers to work with.
According to Mr Mitha, “our first steam engine for the refrigerated vehicles, also called reefers and auxiliary engines for trucks will be in commercial use within the next 18 months”. This is just the start. This technology offers many other spin-offs opportunities and the potential is tremendous.”
Energy efficiency
Mike Burns explains that in a normal petrol or diesel set-up 27 percent of the energy derived from the fuel goes to drive the vehicle, 38 percent goes down the exhaust pipe, 33 percent goes into the cooling and the rest is lost in friction. “So for every £1 you spend on fuel, you only get 27 pence worth of value driving the vehicle. It’s extortionate, really – it’s so inefficient, in a modern technological environment.”
What CPT does is capture some of that energy by generating steam from the heat that normally goes straight out of the exhaust. That steam is then injected into spare cylinders in the petrol engine to give it extra power, or is used to run a separate steam engine. With the accumulator, even when the petrol or diesel engine is turned off, there is still sufficient pressure already generated for the steam engine to carry on running, for free.
Professor Bayley, who is project consultant at CPT, said: “Steam accumulators are a proven technology; they’ve been around for a long time. We predicted we could increase the thermal efficiency of the engine by up to 50 percent, where with a current combustion engine you might get 25 percent efficiency, we ought to get near 40 percent – and so knock a third off the fuel consumption, and of course, for free, in the sense that we’re using waste.”
In fact, even with the comparatively modest set-up, CPT is currently testing the feasibility of its technology with, using a Caterpillar diesel engine and an old second-hand steam engine; the first tests have already been running at 30 percent better efficiency than the diesel engine on its own. Professor Bayley and the rest of the CPT team are confident that with fine tuning and a more modern steam engine they can exceed their target of a 50 percent improvement.
Mike Burns, a former chief engineer at Daewoo Motor Company in Worthing, says: “Our aim was to prove we can get the energy out – we’ve shown we can do that, so that doubt has gone. So now the job is at the feasibility stage, of engineering a unit that goes typically into a truck or a much smaller unit that goes into a car.”
Ultimately, Mr Burns says, future vehicles powered with CPT’s technology will have to have their “architecture” completely re-engineered to fit in all the necessary kit. The most crucial part of the system, Mr Burns says, is the control system, which allows the engine to work as a hybrid, and takes care of such technical problems as cutting out the petrol side of the engine when the vehicle has halted at, for example, traffic lights, so the engine can run solely on non-polluting, accumulated steam pressure, and the fact that the torque, or ‘pulling power’, of steam is much higher than a normal petrol engine.
However, he says, in certain areas the technologies fit together very well: “A big truck diesel engine is only doing about 1,800 rpm, really slow, but that’s right on the sweet spot for what a steam engine wants to run at. So I would think our engine of the future, for a car or a truck, would be something like a straight-six with four pots running on gasoline and two pots running on steam. In the 1920s you had steam cars that would be up to steam in 30 or 40 seconds, hit a top speed of 95 mph, and they would easily cruise at 70mph. The steam cars were more efficient, in those days, than the internal combustion engine.”
Going commercial
For now, however, the easiest route to market for CPT is by making auxiliary power unit for refrigerated trucks. The current system for generating power to run the refrigeration units for “reefers” uses an auxiliary diesel engine on every truck. CPT plans to manufacture kits combining a steam generator working off the waste heat from each truck’s main engine, an accumulator to store the steam under pressure and a steam engine to run the compressor to drive the truck’s refrigerator. The whole thing will weigh less than the auxiliary engine it replace, it won’t need the 50 gallons of fuel that has to be hauled around to run the auxiliary diesel engines, and it will cost, effectively, nothing to run, since it will be using energy that is otherwise wasted.
There are an estimated million refrigerated trucks in the United States: CPT plans on giving the US Environmental Protection Agency a truck fitted with its technology at the end of 2008 for testing, after which it hopes the EPA will accept the environmental logic of switching from polluting diesel to free, clean steam power to power truck refrigerators and agree a 35 to 50 percent tax break to truck owners who retrofit CPT’s technology. Once the refrigerated truck market is opened up, Mr Mitha says, “We should be in revenue-generating mode within the next 18 months.”
Although the practical ‘production-engineered’ steam/gasoline hybrid road vehicle is still some way off, Mr Mitha says CPT hopes to have a prototype running on the road by the end of 2009, and to unveil the technology within the next three years. The hybrid engine should be ideal for anywhere where the current engine generates a lot of waste heat – “rail locomotives are very attractive”, Professor Bayley says, and so, too, are big pleasure boats.
CPT was founded after Mr Mitha, a Canadian-based business consultant, began looking at alternative fuel technology projects. He says: “I came across an article in New Scientist magazine from Professor Bayley and he was talking about steam, and instantly that made sense to me, because you are not reinventing the wheel. You are using two known sources of power in a more effective way. Steam has been a known source of energy for hundreds of years. Petrol is a known source of power. So if you can marry those two and use them in a more effective way, I thought that was the way to go. So I set up with Professor Bayley and Mike Burns, we explored these ideas further.”
Generating interest
The company has a budget of £5 million for the initial development of its technologies, and is now planning an IPO on the Alternative Investment Market (Aim) that will raise up to £10m. “The Company is seeking investors There has been a lot of interest in the City of London, and we’re talking to prospectiveinvestors, but until the cheque is in the bank, it is still all talk” Mr Mitha says. Currently CPT, which has its headquarters in Canada, is publicly listed on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board on NASDAQ in the United States.
Its plans have brought “considerable interest from some auto manufacturers and auto engine manufacturers as you can well imagine,” Mr Mitha says. “The Government of Bahrain has shown interest in what we’re doing – they’re coming to visit us shortly for discussion. The Chinese have also shown interest in our technology.”
CPT is confident enough to believe it can revolutionise the whole transport system. “In order to make the engines we use now more efficient, something has to change, drastically, and that’s what we’ve done,” Mr Burns says. “Our technology will produce an engine that is a true hybrid, that uses the hydrocarbon fuel, produces energy that is used immediately but it also recovers the waste energy and puts it back. That’s the revolution.” Mr Mitha added, “the elegance of this technology lies in its simplicity and the steam technology is finally making a comeback.”
For further information visit www.cleanpowertech.co.uk