The history of the Achates Engine – as told by entrepreneur Dr. James Lemke

when someone says well that was obvious anyone could have done that what's your response they didn't well I'm the founder of the company founded about fourteen years ago I'm a theoretical physicist but also an inventor I have 114 pounds and I am chief scientist of the company now I'm really a serial entrepreneur although I took my PhD in theoretical physics I'm a very practical guy and I've always thought of ways to apply it so I started my first company here in San Diego called spin physics filling it up to about 650 people ran it for 15 years sold a piece from Kodak I started another company sold a 3m and I started another company I sold to Seagate and then I invented the engine the improvement on the engine that Hugo yonkers invented in 1890 this engine set a record in 1936 when they were running male flights from Germany Dessau Germany to South America 6,000 miles unrefueled it had an efficiency that exceeded any engine that had ever been made before during the war they did bombers hundreds of hours diesel-powered they did reconnaissance aircraft that went to 52,000 feet distel powered and then the end of the war the jet engine came along jet fuel was very cheap so there was no incentive to work out further so it lay fallow for 70 years when I discovered it I went on vacation in Mexico and took along a book on the theory and practice of internal combustion a little light reading and discovered the engine that set a record and 36 had never been broken but it was clear when I discovered this engine that it would be possible by using modern techniques like computational fluid dynamics to improve the performance of the engine well beyond what was possible when it was first developed so around 2001 I discovered the engine and at that time I had a very close friend John Walton but we met in through lying down in Mexico I landed at a remote airport somewhere on a dirt road and he was his airplane was there we became close friends and he wanted to invest him he offered to invest in the company and I told my don't invest with friends but after we get the risk out of it I'd be glad to talk to him and one day he called up and said I want to come down and convince you you should invest with me and he had a very compelling argument he said I don't care how good your intellectual property is this thing is so big you could be bled to death through litigation spurious lawsuits you need a deep pocket and he described a company he had where they had deep intellectual property they found a major European Japanese company was infringing their patents they brought it to the attention of the company and they said ok well we've got a 10 million dollar war chest how far would you like to take it he said maybe we better tell you who we are John had a net worth of about 20 billion at the time so it was a pretty compelling argument that so we formed this partnership and two days before we fired the engine for the first time he was killed in an aircraft accident I remember when I was a kid fuel used to be what 7 cents a gallon something like that it's ridiculous but with the the shortage of fuel we're going to have to pay attention to efficiency remember now this is about a 350 billion dollar a year engine industry and all of the big manufacturers certainly the truck manufacturers all have diesels and they're all four-stroke four-stroke engine has a valve train of valves valve seats camshafts 80% of the parts of the engine are associated with the valves while the opposed piston two-stroke engine has no valves no valve gear no valve train and no cylinder head so automatically it's higher efficiency it has twice the stroke-to-bore ratio without increased piston speed because they shared between two Pistons so it has all of the ingredients for making a more efficient engine it was a hangover of two-stroke horror stories that had prejudiced the knee-jerk reaction of many people to stroke now you can't can't make it clean you can't you can't make it efficient we found through computational fluid dynamics that when the two Pistons come close together by shaping the contour of each piston to complement each other we could create a combustion pseudo volume that would be very efficient in mixing air and fuel and that was part of the solution to increasing the efficiency many engines have a sweet spot where they get the maximum efficiency if you're off at the efficiency falls off very rapidly ours is a very flat plot that is efficient about the same efficiency everywhere any application of diesel at present time will benefit from this configuration two-stroke by better efficiency and cleaner performance as an example we know of one retail outlet that has 7,200 trucks their fuel bill last year just for those trucks was 350 million we can save them 70 to 100 million dollars a year just by converting to this engine but it not only it was efficiency important but we had to meet the emission standards and we have done that ours is the cleanest engine about 20 to 30 percent more efficient than any diesel ever made well there are many people who just will not accept without hard dynamometer evidence that that's possible it's foreign to their all of their experiences so what convinces people is really hard data from the dynamometer and they they come here and they see it and they say well we wouldn't have believed it a lot of people think of entrepreneurialism as high-risk and I take just the opposite view it's really the opportunity to do it your way if you're in a large corporation you don't have the freedom to do it your way so if you want to do it your way go out and do it yourself so it's freedom that's what not parallelism is about not risk-taking you

Channel: Achates Power

Views: 117,596

Rating: 4.8817058 out of 5

Keywords: Automotive Industry (Industry), Opposed-piston Engine (Piston Configuration), Dr. James Lemke, Achates Power, fuel efficancy, engine

Id: zf6OH4iVUkY

Length: 7min 42sec (462 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 29 2015