Upton Firm Peddles Engine Of The Future | Detroit has its eyes on Sanderson Engine Development
I’ve just finished reading stories in the New York Times and the Detroit Free Press about General Motors’ announcement that it will build a $370 million four cylinder engine manufacturing plant in Flint, Mich.
But executives at GM and every other automaker should know what their top engineers probably already know: The crankshaft engine as we know it will soon be rendered obsolete by a company run out of a rural Upton home.
In this column, I normally focus on companies inside industrial parks, but because Sanderson Engine Development in Upton is so fascinating and because their technology has such grant potential, I decided to make an exception.
Highly Disruptive
Sanderson Engine Development has applied for a $5 million grant from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative to help jumpstart the company’s efforts to commercialize its engine technology. Within its grant application is a stack of letters from the likes of the Ford Motor Co., Tata Motors, Hitachi, General Electric and others, supporting Sanderson’s technology.
The “disruptive” potential of Sanderson’s technology was recently honored in San Francisco with the 2008 North American Frost & Sullivan award for “Emerging Company of the Year”.
In automobiles, a Sanderson engine, with its odd number of cylinders, is smaller, lighter, simpler and far more fuel efficient than traditional crankshaft engines. The company has designed and built what it calls a hydraulic hybrid engine that requires no batteries, electric motors or generators and can get 120 miles per gallon of gasoline.
John Fox, the company’s president, said its multi-patented Sanderson Rocker Arm Mechanism is nearly ready to be licensed to any number of auto giants like those mentioned above. Also, any of those companies could buy Sanderson. If either of those scenarios fails to come to fruition, Sanderson is prepared to go public.
And it’s not just auto manufacturers that should be either afraid of or prepared to pony up for the Sanderson engine. The Sanderson design is so flexible and adaptable that it can be used in 14 unique applications in several different industries from industrial pressure washing to power-generating windmills.
Engineers at Ford are convinced that Sanderson is the future. They fitted an F-150 with a powerful Sanderson engine and their only complaint was that it looked too small in the engine bay.
The Sanderson engine’s compression ratio and displacement can be varied almost infinitely. The Sanderson Rocker Arm Mechanism, which works on a simple universal joint and rocker arm system, can convert linear power to rotary power, rotary power to linear power and linear power to linear power.
All this means is that a Sanderson engine used in a wind turbine can constantly adjust to wind speed in order to operate efficiently and make the most power with that wind speed. It also allows the motor to be placed at the bottom of a wind turbine, which would extend the somewhat short lifespan of today’s turbines.
Check out the video clips demonstrating the Sanderson Engine below:
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments