I actually can't talk about some of the projects that I've worked on recently or am working on because of NDAs and personal ethics concerning perceived company secrets whether they're actual "secrets" or not. I can talk about the very interesting partitioning project that I'm working on and am looking forward to writing an article about it. That will be a bit of a project itself.On the outside world, my Dad, Brother, and I are submitting the paper work to (hopefully) win a Phase III contract (final testing and implementation phase) with the U.S. Navy on "Moden Fuel". We have 3 different versions depending on the application. MF1, MF2, and MFX. I can't talk too much about the characteristics of the fuel because many of the characteristics are considered to be "classified", but I can tell you that it's a mono-propellant (burns in an anaerobic environment because it carries it's own oxygen in the fuel itself) and is so environmentally benign that if you water it down a bit, you can brush your teeth with it.It's designed to replace a really nasty fuel known as OTTO Fuel II which has a huge number of highly undesirable attributes including the release of a rather large quantity of a member of the Cyanide family during a single torpedo run. Not good stuff for littoral waters. Moden Fuel also costs about 5 times less than OTTO Fuel II. With "sequestering" going on in the government, that's a good thing. Moden Fuel also has several extreme tactical military advantages over OTTO Fuel II but I can't say more on that subject.No... Moden Fuel isn't something that you'd want to use in a car because oxygen is "free" in the air. There's no sense in chemically building oxygen into the fuel for such a thing.I also designed and built another prototype magnetic motor that was meant to run itself and a generator. As with the attempts of so many other folks, the attempt failed. Not giving up on that... Edison's team didn't come up with the light-bulb on the first hundred tries, either. 😀 And, finally, we've been looking for a commercially available motor to continue tests of Moden Fuel with. It has to be an external combustion motor and it's not as easy to find one as you think. The only motors that we've found that actually work are the same motors that OTTO Fuel uses in torpedo's. Those are damned expensive and they actually leak a lot. OTTO Fuel burns so dirty that it actually clogs up those leaks. Moden Fuel burns ultra clean and won't clog such leaks. We can't use COTS turbines for two reasons... the exhaust/workinng "fluid" of Moden Fuel is too "wet" for standard turbines and most turbines require too high a speed to operate efficiently which would also require a fairly hefty gear reduction system. The closest we've come so far is a 2 piston steam driven motor but they make the damned things too heavy. So, we've been looking at some really weird alternatives including a vane motor, a "flexible piston" motor, several different renditions of Stirling Engines (really disappointed in the state of the art there... way too expensive for something so simple if you can find one that actually works), and an odd invention by my favorite inventor of all time, the Tesla Turbine. I might just have to build one of those myself with a couple of modifications thrown in to make it a whole lot more torquey than the current SOA would have it.
Funnily enough, I read all about Otto fuel and those funny little waggle plate engines in Western torpedoes a few months ago so I could relate to this, four years after the fact (missed it first time around). I guess the question is, why don't we use rocket motors like the Russkies and have our torpedoes scoot beneath the waves at hundreds of k's per hour? Or perhaps we do now...