Air cycle technology was formed to take existing knowledge of the thermodynamics of air cycle
cooling and some of the hardware that's been used say for example in the aerospace industry
and bring it to a compact affordable application on internal combustion engines. Steve and I are
old colleagues, we came together to form a company to take this thing to market and the process has
been to heavily use modeling to demonstrate the capability of the system, to deliver the cold air,
and to even with the modeling we have available, Simcenter Amesim, to predict the improvements in combustion
for the built in combustion models. That was shown to a lot of people, and it was accepted
that was viable and sensible, so we then moved into trying to develop some hardware. So we had,
basically the core element of the system is the hardware you see here; a turbo expand.
Combustion is surprisingly sensitive to just temperature regardless of the pressures so in
gasoline engines the other condition called atom detonation where as the temperature goes up in
the cylinder there's uncontrolled combustion and it's beginning to be the limitation of
both power and economy of engines, those engines are more and more highly tuned even in the OE
market never mind the performance market, that detonation control has become critical. So
we're offering a solution to that problem by reducing the charger temperature we can
expand what they call a detonation margin and optimize the engine improve the fuel economy.
The modeling did a lot of the talking for us we then moved on to building some demonstrator parts
which we put on a simple car originally, drove it, around measured, everything correlated back to
the model, proved in a door all worked fine. Then the difficult bit was to make the hardware work,
so the turbo expander originally it was very easy, we took it an existing turbocharger which
use hot exhaust gas in the turbine we use cold air in our turbine, we started with the turbo
charger we took off the hot turbine bits, we put on cold turbine parts which we've designed-
so we design everything you see on the cold side as it were of the turbocharger, and that turned
into a turbo expander, but we carried on using the other parts from existing turbochargers because
the parts are easy to find and they're infinite variety parts. And then the step after that is
probably what you see here where we deleted the oil cooling system of the turbocharger,
because turbo-chargers run with engine oil lubrication circuit they run very hot, it has
to be passed through the engine quickly, we don't have anything hot but we do have high speed so
we've switched to sealed ball bearings so that's a reasonable challenge this system, this device runs
at about a hundred thousand rpm so we're pushing towards the limits of sealed ceramic ball bearings
but we found, again with the help of the bearing manufacturers, we've analysed them and they are
certainly fit for purpose. So what you see here is our cold air turbine design, our housing with
the sealed bearings, but still using recognizable turbocharger parts for the compression side so
an OE compressor housing, and an aftermarket, and compressor wheel, and then as of today or a week ago,
we're now sourcing more of our own parts, so the next stage is this compressor housing which
is more to our design made for us and visibly smaller and lighter and therefore cheaper. So the
compressive wheels that goes with it will be our own design as well. That's where we are today.
I've known Chris for something over 40 years. I knew how good an engineer Chris was but I've been
pretty impressed by what we've done, what we've achieved, in a short space of time with you know
pretty limited resources, we don't have hundreds of people, we don't have millions of pounds worth
of debt, we've just got on and done it and that's mainly down to Chris and all the kit he's got
in terms of the software that enables us to do so much so quickly which has been brilliant, so
yes compared to a lot of other companies that we come across startups or sort of mid range, mid term
businesses, we're in a much better position and we are a lot faster moving and we've had small
success commercially but only on a limited scale so far. We don't actually employ anybody because
we use contractors and partners. We don't have an office other than what's in our residences,
we have a workshop where we now have our test rig, and an assembly line so it's very much
a low resource for a high intelligence way of going about stuff, and it means we're very
fast on our feet and so as a company we're very small but I think we punch well above our weight.
So we're very busy now tidying up some results of some demonstration testing we've done on a
high performance road car which we're aiming at the low performer, the low volume tuning market
and generating as much, you know, high quality data as possible to keep the OEs interested or to as
ever to keep supplying them with the extra bit of work they'd like us to do before they decide
to commit, which is how they work, so we're in reasonably good shape, we're pretty happy with
how it's going, we've got a full suite of designs, we've got obviously 3D modeling, we've got our
1D modeling using Simcenter Amesim, which has served us extremely well, that's taken us also into the control system,
this is a core of a system which has some coolers and control flow, control valves and so on, we've
designed that control system which is also being made for us by a low volume control system
manufacturer, but to the OE standard dim 26262 type standards, I'm not an expert in that and we've
used the 1D Simcenter Amesim modeling also to predict the transit response of the system and that's
been validated with the test data as well. So for modeling dominantly 1D but the combustion
3D model there when we need it, obviously is for 3D design we've built a test rig where
we can drive this under control conditions that measurement we've also modeled a test rig so he
designed the test rig using Simcenter Amesim and that was absolutely spot-on, so we're we're good to
go now. On the turbine side, an exhaust turbine of a turbocharged is about 60% efficient. This one,
a cold air turbine is running 85% efficiency, and measured and predicted, also using Simcenter Amesim,
that's is a very unique feature of Simcenter Amesim, we can do a 1D design of a turbine and generate a 3D
performance map, and we're very pleased with it, we can predict the performance in 1D within 2 or
3 percent of a full 3D CFD model of the turbine. So that's pretty extremely useful for us,
obviously gives us a rare moment of exclusivity as well and an IP around that, so we're showing
quite a significant evolution for the same flow and performance we managed to come down from this
modified aftermarket mainstream supply unit to our own low volume design and we're saving on size,
weight, whilst matching the performance original. This is all about credibility isn't it a lot of
it you know they get people knocking on the door all the time so it's as much proving that we're
capable people to do the work, that's almost as important as what the actual technology is. Our
track record, our experience, how we go about our projects. Simulation that they can both
believe in and actually use in-house of course. For example our turbine model we can encrypt that
as you know within Simcenter Amesim so we can give them a black box model they can run turbine simulations
then in-house so that's sort of the ability to plug share information and protect it as well
is really useful, but yeah it's recognized that we're working at the level they were
themselves if they're in-house. Siemens ingenuity for life.