April 21, 2009 - Scuderi Engine - SAE Convention, Detroit MI

New Engine Design Sparks Interest

Scuderi Group unveiled a prototype of its fuel-saving engine Monday in Detroit. Car makers including Honda and Daimler have shown interest.

Scuderi New Engine Design Sparks Interest

On Easter Sunday in 2001, Carmelo Scuderi called his family together in his home here and announced, essentially, that he had outsmarted the world's auto makers and their billion-dollar research departments.

Scuderi Group unveiled a prototype of its fuel-saving engine Monday in Detroit. Car makers including Honda and Daimler have shown interest.

The retired engineer and inventor told his children and grandchildren he had developed a dramatically more fuel-efficient design for the internal combustion engine, something car companies have been chasing for decades.

Eight years later, the late Mr. Scuderi's revelation no longer seems as far-fetched. His design -- which involves grouping an engine's cylinders in pairs, with each pair focusing on specific tasks -- is gaining attention in an auto industry that is now more open to fuel-saving innovations.

A half dozen or so car makers, including France's PSA Peugeot Citroën SA and Honda Motor Co. of Japan, have signed nondisclosure agreements with the Scuderi Group, the company founded by Mr. Scuderi's family, to be able to study the technology closely, said consultants who are working with the firm. Daimler AG of Germany and Fiat SpA of Italy also are looking at the Scuderi design, executives at those companies confirmed.

"We have looked at their simulations and their [research] papers and it is worth looking into further," said a Daimler scientist familiar with the matter. "There is realistic potential here."

Honda declined to comment.

Robert Bosch GmbH, a giant German auto supplier with expertise in engine components, is developing parts for the Scuderi prototype, with the hope the engine will someday make it into production.

Carmelo Scuderi developed the idea for his unusual engine design mainly through mathematical calculations related to heat, friction and the burning of fuel in a cylinder. His calculations, written in pencil, eventually filled several spiral notebooks and led him to conclude his "split-cycle" engine could dramatically reduce fuel consumption

On Monday in Detroit, the Scuderi Group, owned by Mr. Scuderi's wife, five sons and three daughters, unveiled a prototype engine, the next step toward proving that the design works.

The Scuderi engine still needs to pass many tests. Auto companies are bombarded with designs for new engines, and almost all never pan out. In fact, the basic design of the gasoline engine has remained largely unchanged for a century.

But the race to improve fuel economy has heated up because of volatile gasoline prices, increased interest in reducing oil imports and the phasing in of tougher fuel-economy and emissions standards.

Car makers worry it will cost billions of dollars to perfect new technologies, like electric cars and hybrids, to cut fuel consumption. They could eliminate much of that expense if they could improve the tried-and-true internal combustion engine.

One answer could be a technology called HCCI, which yields a gasoline engine that operates much like a diesel, requiring no spark plugs. Honda, General Motors Corp. and others have invested in HCCI. The Scuderi engine is another possibility.

Today's gasoline engines leave much room for improvement. Only about a third of the chemical energy contained in a gallon of gasoline is converted into mechanical energy that turns the wheels of the vehicle. The rest becomes heat or exits the tailpipe as unburned fuel.

Mr. Scuderi was an expert in thermodynamics, which examines the relationship between mechanical motion, friction and heat.

In a normal engine, a piston moves up and down in a cylinder in a four-stroke cycle -- down as a mixture of air and fuel enters the cylinder; up to compress the mixture; after a spark ignites the fuel, the piston is driven back down in the power stroke; and then up again, pushing out exhaust gases and starting the cycle over.

In the Scuderi design, pairs of cylinders work together. One cylinder does nothing but intake and compression. It is partnered with another that does only combustion and exhaust. A high-speed valve channels the pressurized fuel-air mix from the compression cylinder to the combustion cylinder.

Mr. Scuderi envisioned putting two sets of paired cylinders together to make a four-cylinder engine. According to his calculations, this setup should reduce resistance within the engine, result in greater compression of the fuel and air, and faster and more complete burning of the mixture.

Mr. Scuderi calculated that these and other changes could convert about 40% of the energy in gasoline into mechanical energy.

Mr. Scuderi suffered a heart attack and died in 2002. His children continued to refine the engine design, and now envision adding a tank to store highly compressed air that can be fed into the combustion cylinder to further improve efficiency.

The firm believes the Scuderi engine, equipped with the air tank and a turbocharger, could increase a vehicle's fuel economy by perhaps 50%.

Sivam Sabesan, an engine expert at consulting firm Frost & Sullivan who has examined the Scuderi design, said there are no obvious flaws that would suggest the engine won't work. "You just have to throw [engineering] resources at it and you can work it out," he said.

And since the design is a rethinking of the standard engine, makers wouldn't need new plants to produce it, an advantage over other future technologies like electric cars or hydrogen fuel cells.

Still, Mr. Sabesan cautioned that the engine needs at least two more years of development before it could be ready.

Without a working engine, it's hard to know how the design will perform at different speeds, and whether it will be durable. Problems could arise because of the difference in temperatures between the paired cylinders, with the combustion cylinder heating up much more than the compression one.

Original Story - Wall Street Journal

Additional Story - April 20, 2009

How the Scuderi Engine Came to Be

The unusual engine design unveiled on Monday by the Scuderi Group, a family-run start-up based in West Springfield, Mass., is the product of a uniquely American story--it came from a lone inventor, a first-generation American and a D-Day veteran, who struck on an unorthodox idea and was at first ignored.

Early on, the Scuderi Group had so little success in approaching auto engineers that it contacted Ford Motor Co. through a man who had been a prep-school advisor of William C. Ford, great-grandson of Henry Ford.

The engine was conceived by Carmelo Scuderi, the son of Italian immigrants. Born in 1925, he got a job on a farm during the Depression and learned to tinker with engines. In 1943, he joined the Navy, wore his uniform to his high school graduation, and was put in charge of the giant engines powering a ship designed to land tanks and trucks on a beach. In the days after the Normandy invasion, it became a hospital ship and he helped tend the many wounded brought aboard.

After the war, he married, started a family, studied engineering on the G.I. Bill and landed at a defense contractor. Later he started his own engineering firm and developed test equipment and military fire trucks.

At home he pushed his children. He once offered his oldest son, Steven, a dollar if he could learn to stand on his hands. Later he paid out more dollars when Steven and his siblings learned to walk up the stairs on their hands. Eventually Mr. Scuderi set up used gymnastics equipment in their tiny backyard. Steven, Salvatore and Cindy Scuderi--who all now work at the Scuderi Group–and another son, Angelo, all eventually went to college on gymnastics scholarships.

After Mr. Scuderi retired in 1994, he began spending hours in his office at home, sometimes working through the night, scribbling calculations in pencil in spiral notebooks. Most simply had to do with energy and heat. Some were accompanied by careful drawings of pistons and cylinders.

On Easter in 2001, he announced he was finally comfortable telling the family what he had been doing. "I've redesigned the internal combustion engine," Salvatore Scuderi recalled his father saying.

Mr. Scuderi's father then walked his son Steven through all his thermodynamics math, looking at pressures and temperatures and the pistons going up and down. By his calculations this split-cycle design he created allowed the fuel to be compressed to a much higher pressure and fostered faster and more complete burning of the fuel.

His children weren't immediately convinced. "I rolled my eyes and thought, 'What, are you kidding me?' " said Nick Scuderi, who is in charge of the company's marketing.

Nevertheless, Steven Scuderi helped his father patent the design. The Scuderi Group then joined with Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio to turn the concept into a real engine. In the fall of 2002, Mr. Scuderi had a car accident and checked into a hospital a few days later with seemingly minor pain in his arm. Days later he suffered a fatal heart attack.

His family decided to continue the work with Southwest to see if the design really had potential. One important simulation Southwest was doing looked at the flame speed in the design–a key determinant of an engine's efficiency. In 2002, Sal got a voice mail message while driving. It was from Steven with the results–the speed was far better than they had hoped. "I couldn't believe it," Sal Scuderi recalled. "I pulled over, and thought, 'The old man did it.'"

As Southwest ran more simulations and refined the design, the family firm started courting investors. In the first round, they raised about $500,000, mainly from friends and family members. They also started sending letters to auto makers, and collecting a stack of rejections.

Then, a family friend offered to use a contact of his at the Hotchkiss School who had served as an adviser to Bill Ford, the car maker's executive chairman. Through this channel they got a letter to Mr. Ford. A polite replay eventually came from the company, saying Ford didn't find a fuel-economy advantage to the design. "Good luck in your development of advanced engine technologies!" the letter concluded.

The first sign of interest came in 2006, when the Scuderi Group showed its engine at an automotive conference and some Honda engineers asked for more information.

In 2007, Daimler AG, wary of rising oil prices, was starting a research effort to identify future technologies that could improve fuel efficiency and asked the Scuderi group to make a visit to its offices in Stuttgart, Germany, people familiar with the matter said. In 2008, they went back for follow-up meetings, and Daimler asked for more detailed data on the engine, these people said.

Last summer, a group of Honda Motor Co. engineers from Japan traveled to Texas with meet with the Scuderis and Southwest Research, according to a consultant familiar with the meeting. At first the visitors appeared reserved, with jackets on, but by the afternoon the jackets were gone and they engineers were smiling and asking detailed questions as they examined the prototype engine parts the Scuderis had on hand, this person said.

A Honda spokesman declined to comment, saying the company doesn't discuss future projects.

Whether any of these auto makers ever license the engine design depends heavily on the prototype the Scuderi Group showed on Monday in Detroit. Next month the Scuderi Group and Southwest Research expect to fire up the prototype for the first time. That will enable them to get real-world data on how the design performs.

"There's a big difference between simulations and a working engine," a Daimler researcher familiar with the engine said. "It all seems interesting, if they can get it to work."

Original Story - Wall Street Journal