Rotary engine comes full circle

Longer-range unmanned military aircraft.

More fuel-efficient hybrid electric vehicles.

Smaller and lighter car air conditioners.

A fledging Spokane-based company foresees a variety of potential applications for a next-generation engine technology it wants to license for use in machines worldwide – if it can demonstrate that its ideas work in their entirety.

Using patents and inventions dating to the late 1980s, REGI U.S. Inc. recently began developing and marketing its rotary-power technology for pumps, compressors and engines. The company boasts that its RadMax rotary engines – which would create power using a spinning rotor between two curved cams, rather than the pistons of a traditional engine – could run on a variety of fuels and offer more power for less weight than piston engines.

REGI U.S., which has a one-man office at the Spokane technology business incubator Sirti, submitted a proposal to the U.S. Navy for a low-horsepower, lightweight external combustion engine for use in unmanned aerial vehicles. Company leaders hope to find out this week whether they will be selected to submit a 60-page white paper, the next phase of the proposal .

The company has a $10 million line of credit from a New York investment banker, and the business magazine Forbes featured REGI U.S.’s take on rotary engines in a recent issue.

But REGI U.S. lacks a working engine prototype.

A functional version of its pump may be ready by the end of May, and an engine prototype might follow as early as next spring, if the company can overcome remaining technical hurdles, said Bob Grisar, vice president of engineering.

“2007 is really our year to bring this forward,” Lynn Petersen, vice president of marketing for REGI U.S., told the Sirti Board of Directors at a recent meeting. “This is the year that will make or break us.”

Until the company has a model that demonstrates sustained combustion, some industry insiders may remain skeptical.

“With the technology that’s been patented for 10 years and hasn’t run yet, I think that speaks for itself,” said Rex Reum, vice president and general manager of Jetseal Inc., a Spokane company that makes metal seals for the aerospace and automotive industries.

REGI U.S. designs are “a difficult thing to engineer,” he said.

A new type of engine

An Oregon corporation formed in the mid-1990s, REGI U.S. is the U.S. subsidiary Reg Technologies Inc., a Canadian company with the worldwide RadMax patent rights. REGI U.S., set up as a “virtual company” with geographically separated offices, employs nine, including Petersen.

Both companies are publicly traded. REGI U.S. shares closed at $1.45 on Monday.

Petersen, former head of marketing for Jetseal, set up his office at Sirti after leaving Jetseal in November for REGI U.S.

Radmax Technologies Inc., a Washington subsidiary, formed recently to avoid U.S. military restrictions on international companies involved with sensitive technology, Petersen told the board.

Many people associate rotary engines with the Wankel engine, which German engineer Felix Wankel designed in the 1950s. Found in Mazda’s RX-7, the Wankel uses a triangular rotor to compress and ignite gas inside an ovular chamber. It involves fewer moving parts than a traditional, four-stroke piston engines found in cars, and it can be more powerful than comparable piston engines.

The Wankel, however, had fuel-efficiency, exhaust and seal problems – issues REGI U.S. leaders said they learned from and improved upon.

“I think they have an incredible technology,” said John Overby, who counsels and coaches business as client services director for Sirti. “It is revolutionary. It’s not a Wankel engine. It’s got way more applications that a Wankel engine.”

The RadMax engine would be 50 percent lighter and two to three times more powerful than a Wankel, Petersen said.

It would have only two unique moving parts – vanes and the rotor – and would provide 24 combustion events or 48 pumping or compression events per revolution, according to REGI U.S.

It would deliver approximately one horsepower per pound of engine weight, Petersen said.

Engines could be configured to run on heavy fuels, such as diesel and jet fuel. If an ignition system is added, it would run fuels such as ethanol, natural gas and propane.

“It’s a very versatile engine,” Petersen said.

For the internal combustion engine, as many as 12 vanes would slide up and down through the rotor like horses on a carousel. Chambers of varying volumes would form between both sides of the rotor and the vanes and cams, allowing intake, compression, ignition and exhaust.

One preliminary engine prototype provides 42 horsepower and measures about six inches in diameter by six inches wide, according to REGI U.S.

The RadMax engine would reduce noise by eliminating pistons, valves and other piston-engine parts.

Royalties, not manufacturing

REGI U.S. wants to license its technology to manufacturers for a variety of uses, earning royalties.

“There are companies already all over the world that already make engines,” Petersen said. “To us, it’s a much safer model and much less expensive if we make them partners rather than competitors in making these devices.”

While unusual for companies to make large percentages of their revenue from licenses, “You can make money licensing if you have something that’s really revolutionary and patented properly,” Overby said.

With so many potential applications for RadMax technology, Overby said, REGI U.S.’s challenge will be going after “low-hanging fruit” – uses that will show the technology works. As an “early adopter” of technology, the military provides one such target.

“I would believe it would work today in pumps and probably in compressors,” but engines requires more experimentation, Overby said.

“They’ve got a sexy idea here,” Overby said. “If they wanted to just go out and raise money, I think the floodgates would open.”

Potential applications

The military wants a low-horsepower UAV engine, and the efficiency of RadMax engines decreases for smaller models. So the company is considering an external combustion engine that functions more like a jet engine.

“Unmanned aerial vehicles are a big part of our national defense now,” and smaller engines and more ability to hold fuel mean they can stay aloft longer, Petersen said.

Electric cars using RadMax could function as chargers, increasing fuel economy and reducing reliance on toxic batteries, Grisar said.

But RadMax engines won’t be showing up in everyday cars soon, Petersen said, because the company doesn’t want to take on giants like Honda, which have amortized billions of dollars of spending on development of traditional engines over decades.

“Wherever weight or size is at a premium, this has a niche market,” Grisar said.