Liquid Piston

ALEC SHKOLNIK: I'm Alex Skolnick, cofounder and CEO of Liquid Piston. So we founded Liquid Piston back in 2003. We had an idea-- my father and I-- about a new thermodynamic cycle. It's really, how do we improve today's combustion engines?

If you look at how engines operate today in cars, they only convert about 15% to 20% of the energy in the fuel into useful work. So my father is a physicist. That always just kind of bothered him. Why are today's engines so inefficient, and is there a better way to do that?

I was a student here at MIT. I was doing my PhD in robotics and computer science. I had a background in modeling and optimization. Took a few business classes here, and we ended up putting together a team that participated in the 2004 50k competition. So we got second place in that competition, and that's kind of what helped coalesce the company.

Our approach, as I mentioned, is rooted in physics. It starts with a new thermodynamic cycle, something that really hasn't changed over 100 years. So it really comes back to the fundamentals of how the engine operates.

When we rethink the thermodynamic cycle, we have to rethink basically everything that we know about the combustion engine. So we've patented all sorts of different types of piston engines and rotary engines. And we really honed in on rotary engines because they give you a lot of flexibility that piston engines just don't have.

What we ended up with is something that we call the X engine. It has a rotor, a shaft, and three lobes. It behaves kind of like a three-cylinder four-stroke engine.

Another way to think about our engine is like the old Wankel rotary engine turned inside out. So the old rotaries have always had problems with things like sealing, lubrication, cooling, emissions, durability, efficiency. Actually, almost everything you care about, they actually have problems with because of their implementation. They could just never fully catch up to where piston engines were.

Having said that, they're very simple engines-- just two moving parts. They're elegant. And there's almost a cult following for those engines from the engineering community. People really like them-- very low vibration, very powerful for their size.

By turning that engine inside out, we solve all of the challenges that they had, especially with sealing, and lubrication, durability. But we also give the engine a new thermodynamic cycle. So it's really optimized for efficiency. And so we kind of keep then the nice features of the rotary engine and solve the challenges that they used to have.

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ALEC SHKOLNIK: So we started the company in 2003. It took a while just for the idea to really coalesce and to get first funding. We got a small army SBAR contract in 2007, and that was successfully completed. And we attracted venture capital after that.

Since then, we've really been focused on military applications. So today, the US Department of Defense has an immediate need for lighter-weight and more efficient combustion engines. They use engines for much of what they do. They're actually the single largest consumer of oil on the planet, and it can take 100 gallons of fuel to deliver one gallon to the front line.

And that's not just expensive-- $400 a gallon at the front line-- but it's measured in soldiers' lives because that fuel has to be protected as it moves its way towards the front line. So if they are burning that fuel inefficiently, if they're not using that fuel to its maximum benefit, that's very wasteful.

So they have an immediate need for that, and we're working with the Army and with DARPA. We currently have $9 million in government contracts through those two agencies. We have two engines under development. One is a five-horsepower engine, which is being inserted into a two-kilowatt hybrid electric power supply for the M777 Howitzer. That's a program with the Army. And then, we have a 40-horsepower engine under development for DARPA. This is kind of a more general purpose engine. It's really optimized for fuel efficiency.

If we're successful in this, we're going to effectively double the fuel efficiency over today's engines and in a package that's 10 times lighter and smaller. So it's really game-changing for the military.

The military is just a starting point for us. An engine is an engine, and we can literally replace engines anywhere where they're used today. So it's a $400 billion market. For us, it's about crafting a strategy to get into the market in an entry point, and then we want to branch out from there.

And we are not really a high-volume manufacturing company. Our business model is to develop custom solutions, custom power solutions, for customers, and then to license the technology. There are a lot of companies out there that are really great at making engines, at supplying them-- working with the military, for example-- servicing them. We don't have to reinvent all of that from the beginning. We focus on the technology, so we're really a technology company that's supplying this technology to the manufacturers.

The ideal partner for us is one that has an immediate need for our product, somebody that's really looking for a lighter, more efficient, quieter power source. So first and foremost, we want to work with somebody that has that need, and what we're looking for is a sponsored program-- an NRE type of investment where the company would pay us to develop a custom power solution for their specific need. We typically will develop the first sets of prototypes, get them tested, and then help to transition that to a manufacturer.

So we have two engines under development. We have a small, 70-cc, spark-ignited, air-cooled engine. This is our more mature product. If you go to our website, you can actually see this engine running in a go-kart as a small vehicle demonstrator. So what's neat about our engines, they can be used for primary propulsion, directly powering the wheels of a vehicle.

We can also do things like charging a battery very efficiently, and this is what gets me very excited personally is the electrification of vehicles. That's a big movement today. Everybody wants to go electric. The big challenge there is batteries. Batteries are big. They're heavy. Consider that you can displace 1,000 pounds of battery with just 20 pounds of fuel. That's where we are today. So even if batteries become twice as good as they are today, it's still a huge disparity between the energy content of fuel and the energy content of your best batteries.

What we envision is a hybrid solution. You take a very small, compact, and efficient generator. Charge a small battery. You can actually do that more efficiently than by plugging into the US power grid. You can lower the overall CO2 footprint because that power in the power grid comes from somewhere.

Today, it's not 100% renewable. We are burning fossil fuels, gas to generate most of our power in this country. So as long as we're doing that, we actually have a solution that's more efficient than that. It would lower the CO2 footprint and would allow you to reduce the complexity of your electric vehicles, reduce the weight and cost those vehicles.

We have a second engine that's under development for DARPA. This is a slightly larger engine. It's 750-cc compression-ignited engine. This one is air cooled. And the intent here working with DARPA is to really prove the efficiency of our thermodynamic cycle-- so do something that's more efficient than anything else out there. For the military, that can be used in UAVs and drones and also for mobile electric power. On the commercial side, that's the engine that could be directly used to power cars in a hybrid electric configuration.

So the piston engine has been around for over 150 years. If you look at the development curve of a technology, it's typically an S curve. Where piston engines are today, it's an extremely mature technology. So companies today are investing billions of dollars to make half a percent of improvement.

What we've done is we've started with a brand-new thermodynamic cycle. We've gone right back to the physics of how the engine operates. We have a new disruptive curve. We don't actually have to get all the way up that development curve to be competitive with what's out there today. We are already demonstrating efficiencies that are better than state-of-the-art engines. But as our technology matures, it's only going to get better as we converge to the theoretical limits that we can achieve.

ALEC SHKOLNIK: We have a new thermodynamic cycle that we call the "high-efficiency hybrid cycle." We call it the "hybrid cycle" because what we're doing is combining features of other existing cycles. We're sort of cherry-picking the best parts of all these cycles.

So if you look at a diesel engine, diesels are typically more efficient than gasoline engines in the field. The reason for that is simple-- because they have a higher compression ratio. And if you look at the system from a thermodynamic perspective, increasing the compression ratio increases the pressure, and you sort of expand the PV diagram, and you generate more energy conversion with that cycle.

The problem with the diesel engine-- when you compress the air, you add fuel, it takes a while for that air to be mixed with the fuel for it to burn. While you're burning your fuel, your piston is expanding. So your pressure is dropping while you're trying to build pressure from combustion.

This is problematic because in a PV diagram, you're chopping off the whole peak there and robbing the engine of its potential efficiency. What we do, just like a diesel, we compress to a high compression ratio, then we stop. And we don't allow the volume to change. We add our fuel, we do on our mixing and burning under constant-volume conditions. This gives you much higher pressures, a much higher thermal efficiency.

And then we continue expanding. And rather than compressing and expanding to the same point, there's a lot of energy left over in the exhaust. If you've ever heard a vehicle that has a leak in the muffler, it's extremely noisy. You're hearing the energy that's left over in the exhaust.

What we want to do is continue that expansion process beyond the initial compression process. So when you add those three features together-- high compression, constant volume combustion, and overexpansion-- it gives you a 75% thermodynamic efficiency, which is really a disruption in efficiency. That's a theoretical limit. The engine will never achieve that theoretical limit, but that theoretical limit is about 30% higher than today's engine's theoretical limits. So that's kind of a new starting point for our technology.

Today, we have about 20 people in the company. We're managing two projects-- one for the Army, one for DARPA. So we have these two engine programs under development. As we scale, we would add additional engineering teams to handle new projects with new customers.

We have a lot of interest right now in the 200-horsepower size range. And that can be for a variety of different applications. But we're developing an entire family of engines that can cover various applications. So we're going to customize these for individual customers, we'll assign project teams to these, and then license the technology as they're proven to be suitable for these customers.

This company was really born out of MIT. I was a grad student here back in 2003. I took a few classes in the business school and learned about the 50k competition.

We were working with Sloan students when we entered the competition. And really, that competition helped catalyze this company and launch this company. After that, we'd been a member of the Venture Mentoring Service at MIT, which had been very helpful for us. And then most recently, we've been inducted into the STEX25. And working closely in the STEX program, we've been able to develop relationships with partners that we haven't really been able to connect with before, so that's been very helpful for us.

So the company has 45 patents that are either issued or pending internationally. It's a very broad patent portfolio, but also very deep, so we have patents at the highest level on a new thermodynamic cycle. This is something that really hasn't changed in 150 years. So this is a very large breakthrough in patent. It doesn't matter what the engine looks like. If it operates on this new cycle, it would infringe on those patents.

Below that, we have what we call the "engine architecture." So imagine patenting a four-stroke piston engine. That's the level of that second layer of patent, where we patent our new kinds of rotary engine. And below that, we have our enabling features.

How do you cool it? How do you seal it? How do you lubricate it? How do you control it? It's all the little things that make it work. That's where most patents live today, and we have a lot of patents there as well. So it's very exciting to have such a thorough patent portfolio.

My father is the primary developer of this technology. He's a physicist by background. He worked as an engineer in value analysis for a while, and then he went off and started doing innovation and consulting.

And he's an expert in a field called TRIZ, which is a Russian acronym. It stands for Theory of Inventive Problem Solving in English. It's really a systematic way to solve problems.

So what he used to do-- he used to come into of Fortune 500 companies that were stuck on some kind of problem. And he would come in from the outside. He wasn't an expert on what they were working on, but by asking the right sorts of questions, you could eventually reformulate the problem that somebody is working on. And when you do that, when you really come down to the very core essence of a problem, new ideas, new solutions can stand out.

So he's kind of an expert in that. And we use that a lot at Liquid Piston. So we consider ourselves a very innovative company, but my father and I came from outside of the engine field. My background is in computer science, robotics, and neuroscience. His background is in physics.

We're not real quote unquote "engine people." And we around ourselves with a team of engineers that are engine people, but I think the hardcore innovation came from really pushing the envelope, from not knowing what's possible or not possible. We're constantly exploring that boundary and pushing the boundary of the box simply because we don't we don't know any better. So I think for us, that's been a critical component to our innovation.

So we have a very solid team. We have about 20 people right now, mostly engineers with engine-development backgrounds. We have a nice mix of folks with advanced degrees, including PhDs from some of the leading research institutes that study combustion engines today-- and master's degrees. So it's really a diverse team. We have some electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, folks that do testing and design. It's a very capable team.

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SPEAKER 1: Hi. I'm Alec Shkolnik, co-founder and CEO of Liquid Piston. It's a pleasure to be here today to tell you a little bit about what our company does.

So we develop innovative power solutions that are based on a new kind of rotary internal combustion engine. And this is really rooted in a new thermodynamic cycle. The problem is that today's engines are inefficient or big and heavy. Electric power is also taking over in some of these areas. But, you look at batteries, and batteries themselves are also extremely big and heavy. Consider that just 20 pounds of fuel can displace about 1,000 pounds of battery. So our approach is rooted in physics. We start with a new thermodynamic cycle, and we combine this with a brand new type of internal combustion engine. We had to basically rethink everything we know about the combustion engine. The result of doing this is an engine which is about two to three times more efficient than a gasoline engine, about 10 times lighter and smaller than a diesel engine, it's quiet, and has low vibration.

Now, you might be familiar with the old Wankel rotary engine. What we've done is we've taken the old Wankel and turned it inside out. In doing that, we solve the problems that the old rotaries have had with sealing, cooling, lubrication, durability, emissions, and efficiency. Basically, everything that people care about in engines.

Now, what gets us really excited about our engine technology here at Liquid Piston is vehicle electrification. It sounds a little bit ironic that, as an engine company, we're working on the electrification of vehicles, but if you look at today's solutions for electric cars, they use very big, heavy batteries. What we can do is combine a small, lightweight, efficient power generator with a small battery, which reduces the vehicle cost, allows people to refuel on the road, and, ultimately, is just a better solution by taking advantage of a fuel-based power system and an electric drive system.

Our business model is similar to that of Dolby Labs. So what we do is develop custom power solutions for a partner. We're not a volume engine manufacturer. We're looking to partner with folks that can bring this engine to the market. To manufacturer it in volume. So we develop power solutions and then license the technology.

Our first market is the US Department of Defense. They have an immediate need for lighter-weight, more efficient diesel engines. To that end, we currently have $9 million in government contracts. We're working with the Army to insert a small engine into the M777 howitzer as a hybrid electric power supply. And we're working with DARPA on a slightly larger 40 horsepower engine that can be used for UAVs or mobile power generation.

These two engines have immediate impact in defense, but can also be moved directly into commercial applications, as well. Anything from lawn and garden up to powering today's vehicles. So we're looking for partners. And that's the reason why we're very excited to be part of the STEX25 program. We're looking to partner with folks that have an immediate need for advanced power solutions. That need lightweight, more efficient engines. Thank you.

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