Revolutions

Revolutions

TDC

Kevin Cameron

IN THE COURSE OF A YEAR WE RECEIVE at least one and sometimes several invitations to see the “next revolution in engines.” Mostly this makes me a little sad, because many inventors fail to read the patent literature before they invest years of their lives in their ideas. Many, many ideas are therefore re-invented regularly.

For example, hundreds of variations on the “barrel,” or “swashplate,” engine exist in the literature. Such engines are wonderfully compact but somehow none of the creative folk who have built such machines have been able to exploit their potential sufficient to push aside the venerable crank-and-con-rod system. Of course, there is always the hope that some modem lubricant or material will give new life to a 1911 or 1935 concept.

At Lockheed’s famous “Skunk Works” development center, a major feature was / that designers, machinists and fabricators were housed in the same building.

If a junior engineer designed a part that could not be manufactured, he received a prompt earful from a crusty manufacturing specialist! But I have met inventors who have invested thousands of hours of thoughtful work into devices that pass all their power through a single fatigue-prone component-the ideas are clever but the implementation is not possible.

Another class of disappointments arises from the general state of the motor industry. In case you hadn’t noticed, there are quite a few car companies that aren’t making any money, just hanging on, hoping for gasoline to go back to $1.50 a gallon. Would you try to sell your revolutionary barrel engine or rotating-valve system to one of them, when they can’t even afford the conventional R&D that they already have scheduled?

Another set of problems besets those who seek to change the world with engines or other devices, production of which would require the complete re-tooling of entire industries. Commit to my revolutionary idea-oh, and scrap a billion dollars’ worth of production machinery.

Experienced inventors are an exception, but it seems many of these people fail to consider the problem of development. The conventional piston engine has received enormous development over 100 years, which reminds me of the famous quote from Lawrence Pomeroy: “The first instance of novel principle is invariably defeated by the developed example of established practice.”

In other words, Honda or Yamaha or Rotax don’t expect a new design to blow away the old the first time it is assembled and started. There are always problemscam drives give trouble, oil somehow fails to get to one out of nine crank bearings, pumping losses are triple the estimate.

And so there must be an intense pe nod of development, during which each of the problems is identified, studied and, if possible, trampled to death by a series of countermeasures. Volkswagen has over the past 20 years made steady incremen tal advances in the efficiency of its small automotive diesels, so that they are now wonderfully efficient. A new idea has to be pretty good to step into the ring with hundreds of millions of dollars of devel opment of this kind. A new idea is a new starting point, not a finished product.

One idea that did succeed was the gas turbine. All but declared impossible in 1935, it completely knocked out the large aircraft piston engine 10 years later. Men at research centers who had spent their careers with piston engine problems fell all over themselves to get into big-dollar, fast-moving jet programs in late 1945, leaving only the plodders still studying sparkplug reliability or piston scoring. In the process of putting this revolution over, inventor Frank Whittle nearly killed himself with overwork. Did he make big

money? No, because the British government told him, “We’ll take it from here, Frank. Thanks a bunch, but it was no more than your duty as a serving officer of the RAF to invent this. Goodbye.”

From that point, the jet engine was pushed forward by governments, with dozens of programs working around the clock. The jet engine was not a simple idea translated into a parts list that bolted together into a big success. At the begin ning, prototypes barely ran and flew to pieces often. Every single part required intense development. By 1949, after four years of intensive postwar work, one ma jor U.S. military jet engine was averag ingl7 hours before overhaul.

Even government backing can fail. To be widely adopted, electric cars had to solve problems for which there was no easier answer, sell j: at competitive prices-oh, and there had to be extra electricity available. California pushed, but the electric-car revolution failed to take place.

There’s no shortage of modest innovation and gradual revolution. Titanium valves were a big deal when Honda put them in its Superbikes in 1980, but now they are production parts in many models. Nickel aluminide was military technology in the 1980s but now MotoGP engines use valves, tappets and wristpins made of this spooky stuff, which is lighter than titanium. The other day I received a small package, and in it was what looked like an engine valve made of pale green plastic-very shiny. It is actually made from ultra-hard ceramic-silicon nitride and it weighs one-third less than titanium.

When it comes to “inventions,” let’s imagine that someone showed up 20 years ago with a 2006 model-year 600cc sportbike. It would have been faster and more powerful than the racebikes of that time-let alone streetbikes! It would have been lighter and, with its manufacturing processes, easier and cheaper to assemble. It would have been a miracle, a real revolution.

Why don’t revolutions like that ever happen? The answer is that, like a wilderness journey, 20 years of development have twists and turns, and you can’t see the end from the beginning. There are no “scheduled breakthroughs.” You just have to do the work, step by step, changing your plan to exploit the many things you learn along the way. □