The Engineer's Notebook

Click here to visit Tom Kasmer's web site about the Hydristor. There, you can read about how his invention was featured in Business Week magazine, and won the EMHART/NASA Merit Award.

So why are you skeptical that this thing has 97% efficiency? And where does this number even come from? Seems like it got pulled out of thin air.

Welcome to CR4, Guest. I hope you'll take the time to register so that you can receive automatic notifications about additional comments to this discussion.

With regard to your question, I sat in on frankd20's interview with Tom Kasmer. Although Kasmer claims that he had a hydristor tested by an organization called Tecumseh, neither frankd20 nor I have seen any documents that constitute an official report. Moreover, Tom indicated that he does not have anything more than some engineering notes. These notes do not contain Tecumseh's official letterhead.

I'm hoping that Tom will join our discussion soon so that he can provide more details.

I applaud innovative Ideas and wish I could contribute.

I think your best proving ground will be retrofitting existing fleets of current vehicles like the UPS trials.

I look forward to developments with the Stirling engine approach.

All you need is more financial backing to get this off the ground.

Maybe try lobbying the Bill Gates foundation since GM & Ford are on the wrong tracks of corporate greed (short term gains. long term negative effects of global warming, too little, too late ).

I am finalizing a retrofit opportunity for schoolbuses in a southern state right now. I want to bring New York State into this as soon as a deal is in place. After all, I live there.

I know something about the UPS tests. They are using 2 variable swash plate axial piston pumps and a 75 gallon accumulator system at 5,000 psi. Their system is external and in the driveshaft line. This adds weight and complexity and the efficiency of a pair of axial pumps is about 85-88% at best. The Hydristor fits internally in the bell housing and eliminates the transmission internals for a weight lowering of several hundred pounds compared to between 5-800 pounds added with the external system. I will be adding a third Hydristor stage which is pneumatic and that has 660 times the energy storage capacity of straight hydraulic air over oil.

I have tried Bill, and many other such resource rich people. The layers of 'assistants' between me and the person is the problem. If there was a way to allow me to briefly reach such as Bill, the USA and the World would rapidly go forward. Instead, the layers of assistants, consultants and litigators prevent me from actually talking to anybody of means. I was contacted by John DeLorean but he initiated the contact after reading my patents front to back. I can send the memo if anybody is interested. If John had lived, the Hydristor would be powering the DM2. As it is, the DeLorean parts people in Texas want me to do a Hydristor for the DMC-12. Smoewhere there is financial backing that doesn't want to take over and control the Hydristor. I want the world to get it with some modest consideration for my long patient investors and donors. The Stirling will be financed by a group in Australia soon. Tom

My reservations about this concept are sealing around the band and rippling of the steel band which needs to smoothly operate the vanes when the displacement is altered.

The band does not ripple. This band technology was used in the high speed line printers by IBM and others. The stainless steel thin belt, usually .010 inch thick had typewelded to it and the endless belt was tightly drawn over a pair of crowned flat belt pulleys similar to the old fashioned farm tractor PTO belt. The stainless belt was driven a right angles to the paper direction and very high speed electromagnetic impact hammers would 'whack' the backside of the desired belt print selected and drive the printing at up to 2,000 lines a minute. The belts lasted 100,000 hours under this abuse. I am using the same belt technology. I have patented every case from 1 belt to many concentrically nested belts and the belt rotates an very near rotor and vane Rpm. The historical vane tip friction combined serves to rotate the underside of the belt. This belt also fully contains the centripital forces of all the vanes and will allow the Hydristor to rotate at substantially higher speeds than the historical Vickers pump. The spool ends I added are in thee JD200 in the crappy IFPE video. This eliminated the wearing of the stationary endplates originally caused in the first unit which was tested at Tecumseh Lab with 94.7 % efficiency overall. I didn't know it at the time, but there is a hydrodynamic float bearing established by the belt rotation and against the control piston curvature. This eliminates direct friction contact which explains the very high efficiency in the first tests. This also is a self replenishing and minimizing oil seal which prevents significant leakage from any pressure chamber into an adjacent suction chamber. I also took advantage of the 'spool ends' which eliminated the belt machining the stationary endplates. I came up wit a guide system which supports a vane on 3 edges with the fourth edge contacting the underside of the belt through an o-ring for a final wedge chamber seal. The only leakage path is over the edge diameter of the spool ends between the housing counterbore clearance. A conventional vane pump/motor has a bulging problem at both axial ends at high pressures but the spool construction turns the rotor and spool ends into a kind of rotating cylinder within the housing counterbore. The point is that it is much easier to add material to the outer housing to enable the Hydristor to swithstahd extraordinary pressures than it is to beef up the flat axial chamber ends. The flat end historical device is limited to 2-3,000 Psi. The Hydristor I am designing for the vehicle application will easily withstand 5,000 and can be strengthened to reach 10,000 Psi. If you consider the increase in operating speed and working pressure, the Hydristor raises the hydraulic power density by a factor of ten. The Hydristor is also fully and infinitely variable and can be configured for differential behavior acting as an analog hydraulic computer where steering input can be mathematically correlated with forward and reverse desired speed to specifically cause the outside wheels in a turn to the correct slower speed while speeding up the outside wheels; all controlled by the steering wheel input. It is like having a solid axle with different tire diameters. You get the same drawbar pull turning as straight ahead performance. There is no system in the world that can do this. Never mind the 'jim cracky' traction control and braking control electronic systems!. They are all inferior to this differential perfoarance. As if that wasn't enough, The Hydristor individual chambers can also be individually manipulated to do extra hydrostatically controlled jobs. For example, say you have an AWD industrial tractor driven by the Hydristor. Assume you are moving down an aisle in a lumber yard and have to raise the front loader to clear some lumber. You reach over and lift the 'raise' control lever and this opens a T-connection 3rd leg which goes to the lift cylinder. Assume the hydraulic wheel motor load was 500 Psi input, zero return and there are 2 such circuits, left and right sides. Hydristor chamber 'A' from 12 O'Clock to 3 O'Clock feeds the Tee and the right wheel motor input but the 500 psi which now reaches the lift cylinder wont raise the load. Raising the control lever more will additionally move the 12 O'Clock piston out which introduces more oil into chamber 'A'. The extra oil flows to the lift cylinder. Say the cylinder needs 1,200 Psi to raise the load. This gets applied directly to the right wheel motor input but the motor load is still 500 Psi. What happens is that the extra 700 Psi passes through the motor and shows up at Hydristor chamber 'B' but that chamber wont allow any more oil in for the given speed setting. So chamber 'B' dead haeds at 700 Psi in the suction port (B) and the tractor keeps on truckin! The extra oil needed to add to chamber 'A' is supplied by a one way check valve feeding oil from the reservoir into chamber 'D' just prior to 'A' in the cockwise rotation of the Hydristor. See US 6022201 for more details on this.

Bottom line; I have dilligently worked at eliminating any bypass leaks and I have minimized any of that. I expect eo see individual Hydristors reach 98-99% overall and a torque converter (2 units in hydraulic series where inefficiencies multiply) reach 97+%. I am also designing the 10,000 psi pneumatic Hydristor as an add on to the closed loop hydraulic Hydristor system. Air storage is 660 times as dense compared to hydraulic bladder accumulator systems and I plan to run the engine for awhile and shut it off; then driving normally for ? 50 miles! This will alla be a retrofit system. I have also been very careful to patent (pending desired so as to hide the secrets) and all I have said is fully covered in spades. Tom

Thanks for the explanation Tom,

I'm going to have to look up about your spool ends to get a full handle on that, I am having a few conceptualisation problems there.

I don't know where you are with extended running tests, if you have units that have clocked up say 10,000 to 15,000 trouble free hours in real applications, maybe hydrostatic fan drives or excavator travel drives etc., then people who actually use and understand hydrostatic drives will begin to take notice. The trouble with promoting designs for the mass automotive market (especially when claiming near unity efficiency) is that a lot of armchair experts get involved.

I've come across closed loop hydrostatic designs claiming induction motor efficiencies and when I specify cooling the suppliers wonder why. The historical problem with claims made regarding hydraulics is the units are usually designed and built by Snow Bunnies who can lose their imaginary losses into the cold climate. When the gear is sent to the tropics, the fun begins. Measuring real efficiency in terms of power in versus power out is extremely difficult in the operating environment and in cold conditions the waste heat just quietly slips away. Put the system into full sun on a 45 deg plus day and all of a sudden the oil in the main tank is at 115 deg and the system gets full of wear metal.

Having stated all that, your best proof of concept partners will be in the heavy duty industrial field. Plasser and Fairmont Tamper use hydrostatics extensively for track maintenance machinery, Unit Rig and one model or Komatsu off highway truck use hydrostatic fan drives. These applications quickly clock up proving hours and can provide a sound basis to argue the strengths of your design.

The combination of efficiency claims and differential capability puts your device in direct competition (when it gets a guernsey) with AC drive systems, good luck

Its interesting that you are in Queensland. I am a partner in a group forming down under in Queensland to develop and market the Hydristor heat pump generator. I can't give any information yet but this group will also market some of the other Hydristor variations like the recently developed scooter drive.

There are several ways to achieve a reliable product. One way is to rush a design into extensive testing and try to identify the short and long term problems. The other way is to spend extensive and introspective time on perfecting a design. The second method should include consideration of any related information that might reflect on the subject design. The fact that an original Vickers dual pressure balanced vane pump lasts 10,000 hours is a useful bit of information. The stainless steel belts used in the high speed line printers last 100,000 hours and the stress level is very much greater. This belt material in the Hydristor rotates in a full oil bath. It also does not ever see hydraulic pressure as the chambers are releaved around the edges of the belt in the spool end faces that confine the belt rotation to modest radial motions. The only forces the belt ever sees is the combined total of centripital forces generated by the vanes at the highest speed of rotation. The spool ends may be in the pending patent in which case you wont be able to access that. If thats the case, let me know. Keep in mind that I am doing all this as an individual with very limited financial resources and that is why I'm not further along. Most machine shops want cash and very few are into probono work, but I have found a few who have caught my dream.

I am ready to discuss any of this with you either in the forum or privately by e-mails or phone. I have worked through all this for 16 years full time (100 hour weeks) and I am my most meticulous critic. I have to be really convinced and things have to feel right. The devil is in the deyails and that is where the time goes. Tom 607-2068960 USA GMT-5 or Hydristor on Skype and I have video capability. I also have 6 IBM mainframes with several flavors of AIX (UNIX) and Catia V3 and V4. My Dell M60 has Autodesk Inventor 2008, Transmagic and BobCadCam. Soon I will add ProE. I just finished a design for Bobcat for skid steer machines and the 400Hp snowmobile drive is almost done. Thats all for now.

I want to elaborate on this comment:

"I'm going to have to look up about your spool ends to get a full handle on that, I am having a few conceptualisation problems there."

This question seems to have come up more than once.

In the original vane pump design, the rotor was a cylinder with vanes that slide in and out of it.

Now imagine that there are washers on either end of the cylinder that have a width that is the rotor width plus twice the radial extension of the vanes.

These washers also have radial grooves in them where the axial ends of the sliding vanes can slide in when extending out of the cylinder.

Because the radial outermost part of the chamber is made by a flexible belt, this is possible. The belt is the same width as the space between the two "washers" and can fit between them to shape the pumping chamber.

The "washers" are called "spool ends" by Tom because the entire rotor (washers and cylinder) resembles a spool that you would wrap wire on.

These ends can contain more pressure because the cylinder part of the rotor holds the inside of the spool ends together while the stator housing holds the rest together.

I agree that this would have a good place in the Auto industry. My only concern is noise.

There was also a question earlier about the band rippling. I think that this won't be a problem because there is always pressure inside the belt from fluid and centripetal force. The belt would tend to be round. It might tend towards a polygonal shape with corners where the vane tips are if the vanes are substantially more massive then the fluid.

I am a great fan of this design, but I am also somewhat skeptical about the efficiency. We'll have to wait and see when society adopts this.

Thanks for the explanation. I'm going to rate it good before it somehow gets rated off topic like one of Tom's replies did. His reply was detailed and completely relevant as well as an update of progress. I fail to see how it could be off topic.

Because it was off topic I didn't get to see it until your post. This isn't the only thread where this has happened, there seems to be some little glitch.

Emjay4119 and Guest,

Thanks for commenting on this thread. I've removed the "off topic" flags from Tom's posts. They should never have been marked as such. After all, Tom and his work are the very subject of this story. CR4 is grateful for the interview that Tom granted us some time ago, and would like to thank him again for his time.

If, in the future, you notice that a comment has been wrongly marked "off topic", please don't hesitate to notify CR4 Admin. On the thread in question, just click the Report button.

Tom's detractors have a right to their opinion, but they don't have a right to stifle the conversation.

Best,

Moose

Thanks and well done. I'll use the report button in future.

Hello Guest,

can you name anything that is above 95% efficiency (and proof)?

97%, that is very little losses.