Cyclone Power Technologies Inc. of Pompano Beach, Florida reports it has performed combustion acceptability tests of crude oil recovered from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico with its heat-regenerative external combustion engine. The Cyclone engine burns its fuel in an external combustion chamber, with heat from this process used to turn water into steam, that in turn powers the engine.
During the tests, Cyclone Power says it ignited a small amount of crude oil spilled from the Deepwater Horizon well through its combustion chamber fuel atomizers without any system modifications. The resulting heat (measured in BTUs) was sufficient to power Cyclone’s 100hp Mark V engine. The company says its engine can run on virtually any fuel or combination of fuels including new bio fuels, while emitting fewer pollutants than traditional gas or diesel powered internal combustion engines.
The Gulf oil combustion test was performed with Unified Fuels LLC of Foley, Alabama, a partner of Cyclone. Unified’s waste-to-fuel systems use a form of distillation to create diesel or gasoline from biomass feedstock. In this test, Unified was able to use the same process to separate crude oil recovered from a private beach in southern Alabama from sand, volatile organics and other non-organic impurities.
Cyclone is currently working on a DARPA-sponsored Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project with Robotic Technology Inc. to develop an unmanned robotic vehicle that can harvest and fuel itself from land-based vegetative biomass. According to Robert Finkelstein, president of Robotic Technology, the test results support the feasibility of an unmanned surface vehicle that searches for spilled oil on the open seas or along coastlines, “while getting its energy from skimmed oil so that it can continue its mission indefinitely.”
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